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Digging Deeper
How 'Follower Spam' Infiltrated Twitter -- and How to Stop It
When using the micro-blogging service Twitter, by default you get email notices whenever anyone signs up to "follow" you (when you follow someone on Twitter, their Twitter posts, or "tweets," display on your main Twitter page, along with Tweets from everyone else you follow). A few weeks back, I noticed that I was getting inundated with new followers with names...
more »Digging Deeper
NYU Professor Stifles Blogging, Twittering by Journalism Student
After New York University journalism student Alana Taylor wrote her first embed report for MediaShift on September 5, it didn't take long for her scathing criticism of NYU to spread around the web and stir conversations. Taylor thought that her professor, Mary Quigley, was not up to speed on social media and podcasting -- even though the class she...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Twitter Helps with Reporting, Filtering the News
Last May on MediaShift, we wrote a series of articles about a new microblogging tool called Twitter, which was just beginning to gain visibility among the digerati. At that time, many bloggers were still on the fence as to how useful the service really was. Many thought it was a waste of time. Others just didn't understand if it...
more »Jennifer Woodard Maderazo
Doing More Than Just Twittering Our Lives Away
When I first signed up for micro-blogging service Twitter last September, I remember reading that day that Evan Willliams, one of Twitter's founders, was in a horse drawn carriage winding through the streets of Marrakech. I found that fascinating. That day, I wrote one update ("I'm blogging...") and didn't sign in again until April of this year. Why? Because...
more »Digging Deeper
Twitter Founders Thrive on Micro-Blogging Constraints
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and co-founder Biz Stone have taken executive transparency to new heights, not only using their own Twitter micro-blogging service frequently to share details of their personal lives, but also publishing their own phone numbers and business address on Twitter's Contact page. So it was easy for me to get in touch with them to set...
more »Guides
Your Guide to Micro-Blogging and Twitter
Micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. The most popular service is called "Twitter", which was developed last year and became popular among techno-gurus at the 2007 South by Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas. Part of the magic of Twitter is that it limits you to 140 characters per post, forcing you to make pithy statements on the fly.
more »Your Take
"Twitter is like an RSS feed to every boring aspect of your friend's lives. And your friends are boring. How could they not be?" So writes Helen A.S. Popkin on MSNBC in one of many scathing reviews of the micro-blogging tool Twitter. Twitter lets you update other friends in your social network about your whereabouts on a micro-level from your...
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