Morisy.com

At work, one of the things I have to do is keep tabs on a number of our Twitter accounts. Nothing spectacular, but with 50-ish accounts to keep track of, it gets to be a lot of overhead. So I automated it!

The following Python script simply reads through a text file to find out the Twitter accounts you want to check, and then spits back those account names and how many followers each of those accounts has:

import csv, math, time
import twitter as twitterapi

#pwd='***'
#api = twitterapi.Api(username='fakeymcfakester', password=pwd)

listofnames = file('twitterusers.txt').readlines()
listofnames = [name.strip() for name in listofnames]

csvfile=open('twittercounts.csv','ab')
csvout=csv.writer(csvfile,dialect='excel')

for name in listofnames:
account = api.GetUser(name)
followers = account.followers_count
print name + ", " + str(followers)
csvout.writerow([name, followers])

csvfile.close()

Note that this script requires the Python Twitter wrapper, although it just barely taps into that wrapper's functionality (Note that the script doesn't even require a username or password to work!).

To run it, after installing the Python Twitter wrapper, put the script and a plain text file with the usernames you want to scan (one per line, no commas) into the same directory. Note that right now, there is no error checking, so if one of the usernames is mistyped, is deleted or changed, the script will probably crash. I plan on fixing this in the next release.

It's fairly trivial to expand the functionality to include the number of people that user is following, the latest updates, etc., and for that I highly recommend Amy Iris' tutorial on Twitter tracking in Python; I simply needed something a little more basic and that output into an Excel-compatible file.

Maybe I'm daft (ok, we all know I am daft), but what new features, really new features does Google Buzz bring to the table? For the end user, it really seems like something that could have been cobbled together with a clever Greasemonkey script, which is an unusually low bar for a Google product.

It just pulls Google Reader into GMail. Oh, sure, there's some location-aware nish-nosh and something about better thumbnails, but the conversations I see on Buzz are identical to the ones I was seeing on Reader. A while back, Reader even let you put up aimless updates, basically creating Buzz without the buzz.

With pre-Buzz Reader and some simple RSS magic, you could even pull in and share you Twitter feed, your Flickr photos, and whatever the hell else they're now trumpeting, and you already saw updates pre-selected by your friends and colleagues. Buzz just pulled together (quite nicely, I might add) a lot of elements that were already there for power users and forced them down the world's unsuspecting throat.

Still, it's not a bad move at all.

Twitter is a very, very small part of most stories that mention it, yet media outlets seem to be climbing over each other to promote it.

"On these issues, I will not be muzzled, I will speak up and speak loudly against this risky plan," Wilson said in a YouTube video released Thursday evening. "The supporters of the government takeover of health care and the liberals who want to give health care to illegals are using my opposition as an excuse to distract from the critical questions being raised about this poorly conceived plan."

The congressman disbursed the video via Twitter and asked his followers to "please watch and pass on."

Fortunately, Twitter (or rather, the url shrinking service Bit.ly) lets us see roughly how many people actually clicked that link, simply by adding a '+' sign to the URL in Wilson's tweet. That takes us here, where we see the link has received 3,402 clicks, slightly less than 3,000 from the original URL, as of the time of this writing.

Not bad, but nothing compared to the 50,847 views the actual YouTube video is registering, and it's nowhere near the top of the YouTube search for "Joe Wilson".

So Twitter is sending slightly less than 6% of the traffic towards Wilson's response video, but gets prime play. What about the e-mail blasts Wilson's surely sent out? The instant messaging networks that people have used to pass it along? The Google that the kids are using to by pass media filters and get information directly from primary actors, just like Wilson is doing?

Is Twitter useful, cool and indicative of the future of communication? Probably. But it has almost nothing to do with Wilson's response. It's a medium, and plugging it isn't much better than writing "the congressman disbursed the video via Outlook Express and Yahoo! Mail, and asked his supporters to AOL Instant Message it out to their AOL IM Buddy Lists."

Not hating, just asking to keep things in perspective.

</Rant>

Author's Note: This post is a work in progress. It is subject to revision, updates and possible deletion, so please, share your thoughts and help me better thing through it.-MM

After a night of Entourage and PBR, we got to talking about Anil Dash's Pushbutton Manifesto (my term, his ideas) which would basically have a Twitter-like server in every home, or at least every home that wanted one, with a distributed, RSS-like real-time status update network.

The essay and ideas fascinated me, and in something of a brainstorming session, I tried to come up with ways to make such a system useful. My first impulse, and the one that's stuck around all night, is a sort of Yahoo! Pipes for the real-time Web.

Both my friends are engineers, and both have Twitter accounts they almost never use. I spent the evening idly sketching out use cases. For example, parsing through:

• A user's current location (city or more specific), local Tweets, local event info and listings, friend's recent Tweets and locations

to get:

• An event recommendation

Then, I figured it would be relatively trivial to take take a CloudRSS OPML, for example, and parse that for popular URLs on a given subject or within a given community, kind of like an automagical niche Digg that is resistant to the dumbness of crowds.

For example, rather than wading through all of the tweets from people Jay Rosen's following (as he suggest in one podcast) to get a pulse of what's going on in the Journalism Twitterverse, you take his Twitter OPML (which doesn't exist currently), use a Pushbutton server to grab all the recent updates, pull out the URLs people are Tweeting, and discover what articles are the most talked about in these categories.

This creates a hand-curated social news feed that avoids the gaming and dumbing down that have hurt Digg as well as Reddit and Slashdot as the communities get more popular (I mean "hurt" quality and utility wise, as traffic has certainly gone up). Since it's a very controlled list of submitters (in this case, people who Jay Rosen thinks carry weight on journalism) I'm getting a very high signal-to-noise ratio. While a few people may post pictures of their cat, kids, or breakfast, few will retweet it so those posts won't make the news feed, and the signal will remain high (the number of RT's required to make the feed would be set in the Pipes-like application).

With this Pushbutton pipes, I could then take, for example, the OPML list of people Jay Rosen is following, people the Boston Globe is following, and people the Boston Herald is following, and then parse out, for example, all the people more than 50 miles away. Then, if I wanted, only allow through Tweets with the word or tag "Boston," to get a local, Boston view from season journalists and sources.

A couple more use cases:

Bargain hunting

User drags a OPML list of Twitter accounts like @BostonTweet or GroupOnBoston. Maybe the list is national.

The user then narrows down the location they interested in, say, within 5 miles of Cambridge. Then, the user sorts for hash tags like #drink or #food from these users. Tweets with other hashtags might even get demoted for being "off topic," then Tweets without tags in the middle, then Tweets with the most tags on top. At the very top, the Pushbutton Pipes setup might sort the output by most times Re-Tweeted.

Apartment hunting

Apartment hunting is a relatively inefficient, horrible process, so this is just a first iteration but there's plenty of potential here. First, perhaps do a local search for #apartmentsforrent metadata, in Tweets, yes, but also Waves, another, more extensive real-time data storage.

The user narrows it down to 4 choices that come up, some Tweets that lead to traditional Craigslist-style advertisements and other that are live, editable Waves. Since a certain amount of real-world relationships are shown, the renter sees he has several mutual connections with 2 of the landlords. He pings them, getting negative feedback on one landlord and positive on the other.

One of the apartments the renter wasn't able to get a reference has a Wave, and so the renter asks some qualifying questions not addressed yet: Are pets allowed? What about parking? The answers are given out in the open, on the Wave, so the community can all see the updated apartment info. The Wave is associated with a showing time, which users can sign up for right on that page.

The fourth apartment, with neither references nor a Wave to ask follow up questions, is left for later consideration if none of the earlier choices work out.

Make sense? Think of other useful cases for a Pushbutton Pipes set up?

Further Reading:

• Anil Dash on Pushbutton ecosystem

Bitly FishEvery Twitter user loves bit.ly. It's simple. It's pretty. It's quick. It makes it easy to jump right into getting click through metrics and see who's actually reading your posts. But is it accurate?

Particularly as compared to more "professional" tracking offerings out there, like Google Analytics or even a website's original logs, there have been concerns raised about how accurate those instantaneous numbers bit.ly gives out are. I've increasingly heard, for example, that bit.ly does a relatively poor job of parsing out bot traffic, which presumably just spiders through Twitter links looking for sites to spam.

I to test these services with an informal experiment: I would compare Bit.ly traffic against Google Analytics against my website's Drupal logs. I wasn't looking for the perfect solution, just to see how different the numbers these three reporting methods were giving.

The ground rules were simple: I would send out a bit.ly'd link to Twitter, explaining the test, and asking my followers to click if the wanted to. Polling would be closed at midnight, EST, but then I would look at the next few weeks to see if these alleged bots continued to inflate numbers.

The results were interesting, if not shocking, but some specific points about bit.ly, click tracking, and Twitter analytics should be noted:

• It's a rapidly emerging field. If there is a problem with bots or something else inflating numbers, bit.ly will probably correct it as quickly as a public fuss is raised about it.
• There's a lot of complicating factors that will leave Twitter click analytics a volatile field for a while. Already, I'm sure the rise of URL elongating services like Longify have given these services a huge headache.
• Even if Bit.ly isn't perfect, it's pretty damn good, and I think it's a reasonable question to ask if there is a "perfect" Twitter Analytics solution, or if there are just solutions better fit for your needs. Either way, I'm grateful they don't put obnoxious framing like Ow.ly does. And I don't mean to detract from Google Analytics, which is also a pretty powerful tool once you have it up and running.

But enough chit-chat, let's get to the meat: How did bit.ly stack up to Google Analytics and Drupal's own web logs? See for yourself:

Service	# of recording hits on June 19, 2009
Bit.ly	12
Drupal web logs	26
Google Analytics	5

So Bit.ly is more than two times higher than Google Analytics, but Drupal's logs (which I know for a fact are all too happy to count every last spam bot and betty) are twice that, and five times higher than Google Analytics.

A couple other things worth noting:

• The Drupal test page was exclusively promoted through Twitter. It wasn't linked to from any other site, except through my Friend Feed which automatically aggregates my Tweets.
• As a counter to the bot argument, after that first day of posting my Bit.ly link only registered one more click, and that was the next day, a completely reasonable time frame for a user to see the post.
• Google Analytics registered 0 clicks after the first day of posting.
• Drupal registered a handful (maybe 5) after the first few days.
• In each of these three services, I made sure to remove any click I might have accounted for.

So, what do you think? Is Bit.ly still a useful tool? This is obviously a fairly small sample, but I'll keep an eye on how these tools stack up against each other over the next months, and hopefully have more data to share.

Besides, even at its worst, Bit.ly has got to have Conan O'Brien's "Twitter Tracker" beat:

Further Reading:

• Bit.ly's excellent blog which tackles a lot of these issues.
• The original Twitter Tracker segment
• A FriendFeed discussion of Bit.ly count problems
• TechCrunch on Bit.ly's Grand Plans

Brian Morrissey, an editor at AdWeek and, since I joined the service, one of my favorite Twittering journalists (not to mention his homonymical last name to mine!), tackled shortcut-taking Twitter contests in a blog post of his own last week, and unsurprisingly he does a better job than yours truly, when I wrote about the ethics of Pay-per-Tweet and Twitter contests.

Morrissey pretty quickly outlines how much these somewhat tacky contests can save over traditional marketing campaigns, as well as the potential hidden costs (using as a case study the Squarespace iPhone "giveaway"):

Is this effective? I'm not sure. No matter what, it's pretty low cost -- the 30 phones will cost it under $10,000 with no media or creative costs to speak of. It's clear that Twitter will need to crack down on this kind of hashtag gaming (hello, #spymaster) for people to become trending topics. This kind of thing, to me, quickly becomes spam.

$10,000 for absurd amounts of reach, even if it's low-impact reach, is every advertiser's dream. Having worked at an advertising boutique for a few weeks one winter break, I can tell you those numbers blow billboards, radio, and almost all traditional creative out of the water by such a margin it's not even funny.

But how do you qualify the loss of brand equity associated with annoying customers with such a blatant attention grab? Already, one of Morrissey's readers has posted a Mea Culpa for responding to the hash tag scheme.

Follow Brian Morrissey on Twitter. While you're at it, follow me too; I'm much more letter efficient.

More on social marketing:

• The ethics of Pay-per-tweet, Twitter contests, and word-of-mouth marketing
• The Sinister Sibling of Paid Reviews
• Commercial alert on buzz marketing, another term for social marketing
• Marketers Demand Ad Audits
• BusinessWeek on MTVu's Y2M Acquisition

BostonTweet & @Sayagle are giving away 2 dozen Sweet Cupcakes (2 $36 gift cards)! RT to enter - drawing on 6/4 http://bit.ly/ibCHl

--BostonTweet

Seeing more and more sweepstakes offers on Facebook and MySpace lately, and almost all of these sweepstakes comes with the same "cost": Get a chance at a prize X if, and only if, you log yourself as a loyal follower, friend, or fan, virally spreading on the contest to your RealLife™ friends.

There's nothing wrong with these contests per se, unless you factor in how obnoxious and sort of slimy it is for your friends to try and capitalize on your friendship by begging you to sign up for offer X. I recently started receiving Facebook messages with just such a request, and couldn't help but feeling like ...

Read the whole entry here

To: Microsoft Xbox Team
From: Michael Morisy
Subject Line: Inclusion of Twitter on Xbox 360

Dear Microsoft XBox Team,

	Total Tweets	Tweets/Day
25% of users	0	0
Median	1	.01
75% of users	4	.11
Mean	26.71	.37

[Via Harvard Business' New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets]

Sincerely,

Michael Morisy

First off, welcome to my personal home page (in case you're looking, @Morisy's my Twitter account). This website does not represent the views of anyone but Michael Morisy, unless clearly attributed.

These days, I stay quite busy and don't update around here too much, particularly since the server is creaky right now, but a updated rundown is overdue. I run one of the web's largest professional IT communities, occasional contribute reporting and other work to the Nieman Lab, co-founded and run the critically acclaimed FOIA tool and news site MuckRock, am the web producer for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, am on the board of directors and am the web developer for the non-profit Spare Change News, help organize Boston Hacks/Hackers and can be frequently spotted running with my dog around Cambridge and Somerville.

Here be old stuff

I am currently the community editor at ITKnowledgeExchange.com, one of the web's largest question-and-answer resources for professional IT users. I write for ITKnowledgeExchange's community blog on general IT issues, as well as manage the 30 or so independent IT bloggers hosted there, plus help manage, troubleshoot and advise the 40-odd blogs written by TechTarget editors.

I also do some community management and outreach, and consider myself strictly a journalist, in case you were wondering, even as I stretch that definition to its limits.

Because all that still isn't enough online journalism for me, I volunteer at Spare Change News. Spare Change is a street newspaper; in other words, it is a newspaper run largely by and for the benefit of homeless and impoverished individuals. Spare Change vendors are primarily homeless individuals who keep 75 cents for each issue they sell, and the editorial focus is largely progressive/activist news about these and related under-served communities.

It's incredibly short staffed as far as IT goes, so cut me some slack on design and let me know if you'd like to get involved.

How @Morisy uses Twitter

My tweets are a blend of personal and professional related messages. This isn't a mix everybody enjoys, but I don't particularly want to share the travails of my every day life and few people care about the same so I hope I strike a good balance. If you don't follow me, I've long since moved past being offended and I realize that for some people, 5 tweets a day is excessive while for others less than 20 posts means you're not really using the service. I usually end up somewhere in between.

I also frequently use Twitter's search as a way to locate possible story sources, particularly when I want an unfiltered perspective that isn't pre-screened by PR types (no offense to my many PR followers, but that's just my methodology).

I use Notify.Me to update me to any @replies sent my way on IM (I highly recommend it, particularly to you on again, off again Twitter-ers), so even if I'm not using Twitter, it's not a bad way to grab my attention. I tend to be less responsive to direct messages, though I try to get back to people in due course.

As for clients, I like TweetDeck alright and highly recommend it as a starting place, getting used to managing and using searches for stuff you're interested in for example, but do yourself a favor: Use Firefox, install Greasemonkey, and then install @Troynt's Script. It's as if Twitter's developers started caring about the user experience and added neat features like threaded conversations, @reply buttons and embedding pictures and videos when people link to them. It's really the cat's meow.

Contacting me in general

I'm a relatively irregular Twitter user, although I've grown to be a fan. I read maybe 5% of my Twitter stream, so if you'd like something to come to my attention, your best bet is to e-mail me (see sidebar), instant message me (Just "morisy" on GChat, "MMorisy" on AOL instant messenger), or call 1-857-488-3081.

My preference is actually that order: E-mail for initial contact and so I have it as a reference, follow up via IM, and then, for something that's more complicated or urgent, phone. If we don't talk often by AIM, please identify yourself and I'll try to add you to my buddy list.

Back in the day

To strengthen that claim, I will mention I was formerly a news writer for TechTarget for the following sites:

• SearchUnifiedCommunications.com (My articles)
• SearchMobileComputing.com (My articles)
• SearchTelecom.com (My articles)
• SearchNetworking.com (My articles)
• SearchEnterpriseWAN.com (My articles)

A few of those sites also have associated blogs at which I posted with varying frequency:

• Telecom Timeout
• The Network Hub
• Unified Communications Nation

Before that, I freelanced for various spots like Cornell Alumni Magazine and Business 2.0, and a piece I wrote for the New York Daily News won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing as part of a 10-piece series, God's honest truth. But more on all that other stuff over here.

Coda

Thanks again for checking out my blog. Sorry if this was a bit dry, but it's semi-work related. The rest of this site, I promise, is not, and feel free to explore the somewhat varied postings on journalism, media, technology, and other odd bits that please me. Feedback is always welcome.

Revised: August 30, 2009

... why do so many people have different micro-blogging (Twitter, Tumblr, what have you) standards?

Further Reading:

• More on just this question at CNET, which reports that a McCain staffer was suspended for Twittering something ... inappropriate.