Structured Thought . ORG

TinyChat is a great little tool that allows you to create and manage text and video chat rooms, all using an easy-to manage interface. The basic operations are free, but they limit some of the control and capabilities to paid membership. Subscribing gives you the options of creating persistent chatrooms, password-protecting those rooms, recording your video, and retrieving that video for later use.

Earlier this summer, I was looking for an all-in-one solution for video-conferencing and broadcasting. There were plenty of tools that allow you to do one or the other, but none that really do both well. Along comes TinyChat with the option to do both. I gave it a test, it worked like a charm, and I was instantly sold. I subscribed, and didn’t look back to my former tools.

Fast-forward to August: I created a recording, went to the download page, and was unable to find it. I e-mailed support, and go no response for a few days. Then, when I did get the response, it was simply “Well, that seems to happen sometimes, sorry about that.” While this might work well for the average regular user, that’s not the response a paying customer should receive. I pressed a little, and was told that sometimes, if there is corruption in the incoming stream (which they believed there was), recordings will fail. This response, while not really fixing my issue, at least let me know that someone had looked into it, and I could do a few checks at my end before starting a recording to help keep the process stable.

Fast-forward again to last week: My subscription payment goes through on 9/2 just like it should. To verify, I go to my TinyChat members page, only to find that my subscription is not active. I immediately contact TinyChat’s support with the details. After a few hours of waiting, I tested the waters and tried to send a Twitter DM. Since TinyChat is not following me back, I’m not able to do that. I give it a day and try again.

On 9/3, I get an @reply asking what the problem is, as the message may have gotten lost. I reiterate what I can in 140 characters, and they ask for the e-mail I have attached to the account. I reply, asking for them to DM me a contact e-mail. They reply with a request to send an e-mail, ATTN: Support, which I send on the morning of 9/4.

That afternoon, I got a response, again asking for the e-mail address the account is registered to, explaining that sometimes the PayPal response can get messed up going into their system. I replied immediately with the details.

That was the last e-mail response I got from them. Over the entire weekend, I sent e-mails and twitter messages attempting to get any kind of response. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, I send in a request for 3 things: Access to my account so I can download previous recordings, cancellation of my subscription, and a refund of the payment that was taken on 9/2. Since it was a holiday weekend, I didn’t hold out much hope for a response.

After zero contact by yesterday, I sent out another Twitter message, hoping to get some type of response. This morning, I receive a response from @harknesslabs: “I am going to take care of it today and hook you up with a free lifetime account. Will email you after its done.”

Finally, a real response. I check out the Twitter account, @harknesslabs belongs to Daniel Blake, the CEO of TinyChat itself. Later today, I also see the following message: Hired someone to handle support for @tinychat today. So it seems that Dan has known for a while that they have needed someone to handle support duties, this looks like a good sign.

As of this writing, my account has been re-activated, and I’ve been able to access my rooms and recordings. I haven’t gotten the e-mail from Dan yet with the notice that everything’s done, but at this point, it doesn’t really matter. I appreciate the gesture, and I will definitely use TinyChat for certain things, but not for anything that has any real critical bearing, at least not for a while. For my broadcast needs, I managed to put together an Adobe Flash Media Server instance that I can fire up and take down at will via Amazon EC2 (I’m going to detail the steps for this at a later time), which I will use when I need something to work just right.

I hope that TinyChat can get these issues resolved and, in the end, turn out a great product that people will line up to pay for. I’ll be keeping an eye on their future development, and will be sure to let anyone know how things are going if they have an interest.

Thanks, Dan. I hope you don’t have to do this type of thing much more/at all.

It truly is amazing, the speed at which information moves in this day and age. I had heard a lot in the past about how quickly news spreads via Social Networking media like Twitter. Many times, Twitter will be talking about something several hours before the major networks have anything published. This is not always a good thing, however.

Today gave us an example of both the speed at which the information travels, and how quickly a rumor can turn to fact.

At approximately 11:15 am EDT today, the @BreakingNews Twitter account sent the following tweet:

Florida-based radio station KissFM reports that Patrick Swayze has reportedly died. BNO News is working to get more information.

At the time of this writing, at least 1,000 (a conservative estimate, I’m sure) tweets were sent pertaining to the subject. What was interesting was the ‘Telephone Game Effect’ that took hold almost instantly. The first tweet, relatively innocuous in the vein of ‘Hey, we heard this, we’re checking it out. Back to you soon’. Within minutes, however, poor Mr. Swayze was 3/4 buried.

Now, the kicker: He’s not dead. About 15 minutes ago, Mr. Swayze’s publicist stated that he is, in fact, alive. More information is coming in that he’s not doing well, and has possibly been hospitalized, but the fact remains: He’s not dead.

So, over the space of an hour, an unconfirmed report turned into absolute fact. Patrick’s Wikipedia entry was updated, corrected, updated again, and re-corrected, CNN had hastily posted and (just as quickly) taken down an article/obituary, and many people were led to believe this to be true.

So, kids, what can we learn from all of this?

News Organizations and outlets: Be very careful about what gets published. Today, people are more in tune to what’s happening in the world than they ever have before. News spreads in an instant, and it’s nearly impossible to put the genie back in the bottle. Once a false story gets out, the only thing that can be done is damage control. However, retractions and corrections can only get one so far. Credibility is a news org’s stock in trade, and any hits to the public’s perception can be deadly. Balancing the need to get out first with information with ensuring that the data is correct is an artform that very few, if any, have mastered.

Public: Be careful about what you read. Don’t always take the first source of reporting as fact. Many times, the first report that gets out either has some piece, or possibly the entire story incorrect. Take the time to verify and validate sources before coming to your conclusions. The ReTweet has become a great tool for helping to spread information. But, if the information being spread is incorrect, the signal-to-noise ratio (which is already pitifully weak) takes a major hit and makes it difficult for everyone else to be properly informed.

I’ve mentioned before that Twitter, the popular Micro-Blogging platform, is a beast, and the only way to keep it going is to feed it. I think that now, at this point, Twitter has reached a critical stage in its development. Usage is almost off the charts, celebrities of all types are using it daily, and the company has positioned itself as such that just about any revenue model they decide on will be wildly successful. Mainstream media (though, in many cases, they are doing so incorrectly) are talking about Twitter all the time. People like @garyvee and @leolaporte are continuously growing the public’s awareness of the service. The @reply has become almost ubiquitous even outside of Twitter itself.

It is at this point that I have decided to attempt a small Social Media experiment, utilizing all of the Social Media resources at my disposal. My goal is simple: Drive traffic to a bar in Los Angeles which just happens to be where my brother, an actor looking for his break, works. Specifically, if I can get people to go to Timmy Nolan’s in Toluca Lake on a Monday night and tell Steve the bartender “Alex sent me.” (my Twitter ID is AlexDeGruven. It’s a long story that I won’t get into right now), then I’ll consider my experiment a success. An extra bonus if any of these people are public figures of any type (Timmy Nolan’s is known to host quite a few celebrities from time to time due to its close approximation to the studios).

Why am I doing this? The answer is really quite simple, and twofold:

1. I love my brother, and I want him to succeed. I figure that any type of direct contact he can make in and around the industry will help him to get noticed, and if I’m in a position to help, why not?
2. I love Social Media, and any way to get people to understand how it works can only serve to help it.

So, keep your eyes planted here, as the experiment progresses, I’ll be sure to update.

Today, I saw a tweet by @kevinrose that he was getting ready to start the hundred pushups challenge.

This is a 6 week program that guides you through building the strength and endurance it takes in order to accomplish the goal: 100 consecutive pushups, without a break.

In my (much) younger days, I used to be rather fit. I was on the track team in High School, and did pretty well. Since then, I haven’t exactly been working to maintain my previous level of fitness, so I think that doing this will really give me a push to get back into better shape (better than ’round’, at least).

So, I’ll be posting my progress here if anyone’s interested in following it.

Wish me luck.

I have seen this question come up quite a bit in Twitter discussions, so I thought I’d detail what’s happening, and why spammers have decided to attempt to use Twitter to forward their mission.

Background:

Anyone who knows me knows my opinion on spammers, scammers, and other generally nefarious characters. I find it the lowest of the low to make one’s living at the expense of the innocence, trust, or ignorance of others. I have gone on record saying that the world would be a better place without these individuals, and I’m really not opposed to any methods that might bring about their removal from the planet.

Anyway, spammers will attach themselves to any form of media that they believe MIGHT give them the slightest edge, and possibly bring them a couple of bucks. What spammers don’t realize (partly because they’re just plain greedy, and partly because they’re just dumb), is that abusing the systems that they latch on to (much like lampreys onto sharks), will only stay afloat as long as the system is usable (just like any other parasite). Too much abuse of the system makes it unusable, and therefore unfit for spamming. Because of this, any time a new service, even one that people think might be un-spammable, like Twitter, spammers flock to new services in droves, all looking for that one click that might increase the CPM for their ‘customer’.

How the Spammers are Using Twitter:

As I said above, spammers are not abusing Twitter because they make money off of it. Why or how, then, you ask, do spammers use Twitter? Well, that’s why we’re here, isn’t it?

Indexing is the Key:

The largest search engine on the Internet is Google. Google uses webcrawling robots both to build its database, and help with developing rankings for pages. The best way to have your page increase its page rank is to get it linked from a lot of different places. Each time the Google crawler comes across a link to your page, one part of your page rank increases. As the page rank goes up, the higher your page shows up in search results of topics related to your content.

Spammers Abuse Indexing, Not Twitter:

So, Google’s webcrawler comes across someone’s Twitter page. I’ll link mine, for an example. When it arrives on the page, it takes a catalog of every link it sees. Next, it follows each of those links to see where they go, adding to the database every step of the way. Here’s the key: Every person’s Twitter page has a link to their list of followers. When the crawler hits that link, it sees a list of every person following that user, even those that the user doesn’t follow back. The crawler then goes and hits each of those Twitter pages, following every link, and indexing everything on those pages as well.

This is the key. If a spammer is following 12,000 people, Google’s crawler will eventually hit their Twitter page 12,000 times, artificially inflating that Twitter page’s popularity. Consequently, the spam pages that the Twitter page links to also has its popularity artificially inflated, temporarily raising that page’s position in search results. Since a spammer’s ultimate goal is to have its ‘clients’ pages show up in the organic search results, these artificial bursts of popularity are a quick and easy way to make a buck.

I hope this has helped shed some light on the seemingly useless abuse of Twitter by spammers. It’s not just people that post undesirable content, it’s people abusing a useful tool at the expense of legitimate users. The very small idealistic side of me believes that some day, the Internet will be a good place again, where people can share ideas freely, without the threat of useless wastes of flesh that try to make a few bucks at the expense of others.

I’m not sure what’s going on in the Twitterverse, but I’ve been getting a lot of followers without notification lately. I can only imagine two possibilities:

1. Twitter’s email notification is not working at 100%, and messages are being dropped (they’re not showing up in my spam box, either) or not sent at all.
2. Spammers have found a way to game the system by following people without them being notified.

I hope it’s number 1, but I’m pretty sure it’s number 2. Every stealth follower I’ve had, with the exception of 2 or 3 has been a spam account. I have also gotten notification messages from legitemate followers in between getting followed by spammers, which leads me to lean more toward the first.

I’m posting this here, because I don’t want to send it to just @ev and @biz.

Please, Twitter, investigate this. I’m betting I’m not nearly the only person seeing this, and many people just may not be noticing. Keeping the spammers away from this system is the only way to continue to keep it a viable service.