Blog of Mr. Tweet

Update: More than 750 Retweets - THANKS for appreciating this story! 

This is a guest posting by Erica OGrady (@ericaogrady). She currently the Chief Experience Officer of Peanut Butter Media, and sits on the Advisory board for Knowbility.org, CreativeSpace, & Westwood College. See original post on Touchbase here

When J.R. Cohen, Operations Manager for CoffeeGroundz (@coffeegroundz) Cafe in Houston, Texas first heard about Twitter from one of his customers, he was puzzled but intrigued. Today, he credits Twitter with almost doubling his clientele and with opening his eyes to a whole new way to build Community.

If you’re reading this article, then chances are you’re already on Twitter, and you may even have experienced the power of Twitter for building your own personal or corporate brand. Recently, more and more companies have jumped on the Twitter bandwagon to help manage their online identities making it increasingly harder to stand out from the crowd.

But Cohen and CoffeeGroundz have found a way to do just that. Shortly after joining Twitter, Cohen started following members of the local Houston Twitterati and in no time had amassed over 1000 followers. Cohen is a naturally charismatic, giving, and friendly guy - traits that make him a natural on a network like Twitter.

On Becoming The Purple Cow

Nothing can build your brand faster than being or doing something remarkable. Seth Godin, author of the recently released Tribes calls this becoming “The Purple Cow”. Cohen didn’t set out to become a Purple Cow - but with one brief 140 character message - that’s exactly what he’s done.

On October 31st, 2008 Sean Stoner (@maslowbeer) was hungry. As a regular customer at CoffeeGroundz he sent the following Twitter to Cohen:

Cohen quickly replied and Sean went through the drive-thru at CoffeeGroundz to pick up his burrito.

This simple exchange got a lot of coverage on Twitter and was hailed as potentially the first time that Twitter had ever been used to place a To-Go Order. Seeing an opportunity, Cohen started taking to-go orders via direct message from any of his Twitter Clientele.

CoffeeGroundz offers free Wi-Fi, plenty of outlets, and they serve beer and wine - making it a cross between a Coffee House and a Lounge. Today, customers can order beverages and tasty bites from the comfort of their seat using Direct Messages to @coffeegroundz. How cool is that? You don’t even have to stop working to walk to the counter and order a coffee.

Building Community While Making a Profit

Recently, CoffeeGroundz was the venue for a Houston Tweetup that Cohen nicknamed “The Great Twitter Party”. Nearly 100 Houston Twitterites spent a lovely Sunday afternoon there at the largest Houston Tweetup to date. And did I mention that they bought lots of food and beverages? So the next time someone tells you that you can’t make money from Twitter, tell them to think again!

This post, by Erica originally ran on Pistachio Consulting’s TouchBase Blog, featuring what business people need to know about Twitter and microsharing for business. You can subscribe to TouchBase here or follow@touchbase on Twitter.

Are you a Twitter user? Mr Tweet regularly shows you good people you are missing out on, recommends you to others, and updates stats on your Twitter usage. Click here to see more!

*As usual, we will be sharing the results with everyone. Your comments in the last few blog postings are being turned into a really nice presentation!

One of the hottest debate in the social media landscape has been around whether Twitter will go mainstream. Given our diverse user base, we decided to put up our own poll to see what our users think! We believe that this is a case where real insights lies not in the heads of the few, but in the actual experiences and anecdotes of many. This belief is of course strengthened by the hundreds of substantial comments for our last few blog postings.

Poll is as below. Some notes: 

Your on-the-ground experiences and thoughts with talking about Twitter to friends and family is what is highly valuable here, so please share them!

We define mainstream as your average businessman or student starting to use the service, much like how Facebook hit mainstream a couple of years back.

We will be publishing the results with everyone, so either enter your email address below, or just check back at some point! =)

Are you a Twitter user? Mr Tweet regularly shows you good people you are missing out on, recommends you to others, and updates stats on your Twitter usage. Click here to see more!

Very happy to announce that we have fully implemented the most commonly requested item by our users: Regular updates of their MrTweet service!

Note: It has been running for a while now, but we wanted to wait until we were sure we could deliver on a good service before announcing it. Yup, we are different that way. =)

Why take so long to announce it?

1) Lots of scaling to accommodate new users: Thanks to enthusiastic word of mouth and press, we had a constant flood of new users coming through. We were at work stabilizing and making the service faster for everyone.

2) Time to listen to feedback: We listened and talked to many users about what they liked and not like, especially with regards to how well the suggestions worked for them. Not perfect by far, but we feel we moved several steps in the right direction.

3) Evaluated new data-sets: 1) To determine the most important factors when it comes to updates. 2) To come out a reasonable idea of when there is sufficient change to warrant an update.

 
Working hard behind the scenes to fix things up for you!

How will the updates look like? Do I need to learn anything new?

Nope, we designed updates such that the simplicity that you folks loved is still the same. =)

1) Receive a DM: When your update is ready for you (you will only get a DM for the first update, and not for subsequent ones)

 

2) See a dashboard: That looks very similar to your first dashboard, with the emphasis that the suggestions are based on your latest activities and changes in your network.

 

3) Get Refreshed Lists: Suggestions are ranked based on your most recent activity. Also, the indicators above the numbers on the list shows you whether this entry is new, promoted, or demoted.

Note: we are going to allow you to permanently allow you to remove people from your list 

We need your feedback to do better!

User needs (see this) are very diverse. This space of people discovery is very new space. As such, there is no 1 formula that works, and your feedback is the only way to improve. As such, please give us lots of it via comments on this blog post or our getsatisfaction forum.

What is next?

Besides working on more relevance and UI improvements, there will even more interesting items coming through. Stay tuned via subscribing to our blog via email subscription on the right!

This is a guest posting by Rohit Bhargava (@rohitbhargava), as part of our ongoing efforts to bring insightful content to users. Rohit wrote the award winning Personality Not Included. He’s a Senior Vice President at Ogilvy, and was a founding member of the pioneering 360 Digital Influence team. See original post here

Update: Thanks to great user comments, we have added one more stage to the original 5. Take a look!

Anyone who works with fast moving technology knows that there is always a new shiny tool that gets all the attention. It tends to change every few months and anytime you start to use a new tool, you do secretly wonder if it will be around all that long.

By any measure, Twitter has passed these boundaries. It has been around for several years. Every day more and more people discover it and it’s usefulness in their personal lives. New stories of the business potential of the tool are also coming out, such as Dell’s report that they have made more than $1 million dollars through their DellOutlet Twitter account. Small business superstars like Gary Vaynerchuck (@garyvee) declare it the #1 most useful promotional tool in their arsenal. Clearly, Twitter isn’t just the new shiny tool on the block anymore.

Yet many of the people who declare themselves "converted" and have opened Twitter accounts aren’t getting the best benefit. Until recently, I was one of them.

I started thinking about this after getting some feedback to my recent blog survey that people were not finding my Twitter feed (@rohitbhargava) very useful or interesting. Until that point, I had been using it as a place to write all the things that I didn’t consider important enough to blog about.

I hadn’t yet accepted it’s true influence. So now I’m trying to revise the way that I use the tool. I retweet other’s posts more often. I share links to things that I didn’t write, but found interesting. I have been experimenting with playful posts like a "word of the day" feature. All this is to try and find a better rhythm so that I am approaching what I would call a Level 5 stage of acceptance with Twitter.

Here’s a graphic I created to describe how I see those stages:

6: Collaboration
"Actual, meaningful relationships and collaborations have occurred out of my usage of Twitter"

Would love to know what you think are YOUR stages of acceptance.

Which stage are you at right now, how did you get to where you were, and how long did you take?

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Are you a Twitter user? Mr Tweet regularly shows you good people you are missing out on, recommends you to others, and updates stats on your Twitter usage. Click here to see what others say!

There is an current uproar happening these days over Twitter’s lack of security for it’s users. The phishing incident, selling of Twply within a week after launch (giving credentials to the unknown buyer), and the Twitterrank debacle earlier all foster a deep sense of doubt and lack of trust.

As one of the participant in this ecosystem, we want to share our thoughts with regards to this issue. We will touch on how this has impacted our product design, why we are in this for the long run, our plans, and why you cannot really blame Twitter.

1) We designed Mr.Tweet such that you do not need to provide your password

First and foremost, you do not need your password to use MrTweet. You just follow us like you would follow anyone else, so that we get DM you.

if you are a heavy user, you can follow easily in a single click. For users who perhaps intend to follow just a few, feel free to click on the name, and you will go to a new window with the user’s Twitter page.

  
No need to give us your password to use the service

  
Click on the name to follow directly from Twitter. Again, no password required.

Of course, we would love a world whereby everyone trusts us, but we highly advise all users to be careful about who they provide their credentials to, and that clearly includes us.

Honestly speaking, there are a few features we are looking at that we think would kick total ass, but would require password authentication.

2) We are in this for the long run. Your trust is paramount.

We have invested lots of effort in developing the discovery technology behind MrTweet, and we are extremely happy for the reception we have received and the value we have added so far. It will be dumb for us to break that.

The fact that we are in this for the long run is also the reason why we invest a lot of time in our sharing our thoughts in  blog postings, contributing back to the developer community, and communicating with users. We also share a lot of our internal beliefs in interviews, as per the recent one on Net@Night with Leo and Amber.

 
This is us on Twitter. Hit us up with some nice @(s) if you have any doubts about your privacy

All in all, we try to communicate as much as we can given all the constraints. We are not going to be perfect by any means, but we try!

3) We will support authentication methods the moment it is implemented

We know Twitter is working on implementing OAuth on their site, and we will support that the moment it becomes available. That way, users can choose to provide passwords, or just authenticate using OAuth.

That said, OAuth is NOT the perfect solution. The user experience for alternative security methods still require many steps (logout of gmail and try this), and carries with them their own hazards to the user, perhaps even much more than normal.

 
Alternative security methods comes with their own inconveniences and hazards. Read this article on why this encourages phishing

4) Convenience and Security are Tradeoffs, so do not blame Twitter (ok, you can, but just a bit)

When unpleasant incidents like these happen, there is an overwhelming tendency to blame Twitter for not implementing better security measures, especially for 3rd party apps. 

However, it is important to remember why you love Twitter - because of its simplicity and vast variety of wonderful applications.

Neither the simplicity nor ecosystem would not have been possible if Twitter had insisted on a high level of security right from the start. See, convenience and security are tradeoffs. I used to be in the military for a couple of years, and the first thing they taught us about security is to think of it as a door. You can leave the door unlocked, and that is the ultimate in convenience, but of course completely lacking in security.

The upside to this is that it does encourages lots of trust and convenience. When Twitter first got started, the neighborhood is a safe place, and the bad guys do not care, we loved this no lock policy. Now neighborhood is becoming richer, and the bad guys are starting to notice, so we must start locking our doors, we criticize Twitter for being haphazard about security.

In other words, please understand that Twitter’s main concern is not the engineering effort needed to implement tougher measures, it is the YOUR user experience they are most concerned about. 

Folks like @al3x and @ev are relentlessly focused on the user’s and developers’s experience, and I believe that focus is a bottleneck in implementing these!

 
A diagram showing the tradeoff between convenience and security in biometrics. Not like I know anything about biometrics, but it looks cool.

That said, I think Twitter can be A LOT more communicative to their users. Kris Colvin has a very well written rant here. Also see GetSatisfaction where there has been no response to this problem. I believe a well written blog posting would do wonders for its users where they communicate the difficulties involved.

5) Change your passwords right now

In the light of all these, we will end with one statement. To put your minds at ease, change your passwords now, and be careful about who to give your passwords to.

Alright peeps! That is all, and again, please hit us up if you have any questions about privacy and security. I am personally reachable at mingyeow@mrtweet.net / @mingyeow / facebook. See my blog for my cell phone numbers.

Take lots of care, and rock on for the new year!