Tag Archives: Twitter

Twit Cleaner closes: we lose

TwitcleanerNew Zealand-developed Twit Cleaner has closed its doors. The online service made weeding Twitter contacts simple and quick.

When I reviewed it last year I described Twit Cleaner as seriously useful. That’s because it sorts potentially bad Twitter accounts into categories making decisions easier.

Developer Si Dawson explains why he closed Twit Cleaner in a goodbye blog post. It boils down to running out of the number of API calls his service can make to Twitter at any moment.

Sadly Dawson also blogs about the upgrades he would have made if the project continued. They sound great.

I first learnt about Twit Cleaner’s demise from Making Hay.

The Twit Cleaner – Twitter? It’s Not Fun Anymore.

 

Now Twitter is the newsroom

There’s an interesting story from Sacha Vukic at PostPrint on how Twitter can act as an entire newsroom for reporters on the move: Twitter more than a newswire, it’s a newsroom.

I particularly like the idea of using Twitter as a fact-checking tool. I sometimes do this myself when I stumble over ‘facts’ I’m not certain about.

She asks if social media news desks might appear at newspapers and online news organisations to deal with breaking news reporting.

In some ways this is already happening, journalists everywhere are pulling in leads and sources from social media. I just don’t think anyone has formalised the process yet. If you know otherwise, please get in touch.

10 best Twitter practices for Twitter for journalists

Writing at Reportr.net Alfred Hermida says most journalists approach Web 2.0 services like Twitter with a 1.0 mindset. He’s right, my personal bugbear is that many media organisations insist their reporters use Twitter as a broadcast media and not for dialogue.

Hermida, a journalism professor, looks at a list of best practices guidelines for journalists using Twitter. Top of the list are two I consider the most important:

  • Have a voice that is credible and reliable, but also personal and human
  • Be generous in retweets and credit others

Too often media tweeters come across as cold and impersonal. In some cases the Twitter accounts feel robotic, because that’s exactly what they are.

And media outlets are often the least generous when it comes to crediting sources. Perhaps they fear they’ll lose readers if they point them elsewhere. Of course, they will lose some traffic that way, but they’ll gain more in terms of credibility by being more open and generous.

Reportr.net » 10 best practices for Twitter for journalists.

Twit Cleaner: Made in NZ, seriously useful

Not every person you follow on Twitter is worth your attention. Some flakes are easy to spot: the egg-shaped avatar; the auto-bot reply when you follow someone, the dodgy spam-like tweets.

The trouble is, once your follow list grows beyond a few hundred, sorting the wheat from chaff becomes harder. Twit Cleaner is a New Zealand-developed application which automates the process.

Using the service is as simple as opening the web site and entering your Twitter address. A few minutes later you’ll get a Twitter direct message with a link to a page showing people you might want to unfollow.

Clearing out the junk

When I first tried Twit Cleaner I was following more than 1000 Twitter accounts. A message at the top of the Twit Cleaner screen told me I around 170 of those accounts were potentially garbage. I didn’t agree with all the named individuals, but quickly culled the 30 or so most annoying accounts. More will follow.

Twit Cleaner divides the potentially bad accounts into seven categories:

Potentially dodgy behaviour are accounts which mainly post links. You might want to keep some of these if they are news feeds, but individual accounts like this are often worth unfollowing.

Posting the same tweet too many times.

App spam means messages mainly come from those annoying services like 4square which tell you someone is now mayor of simpleton.

Other dodgy behaviour, now absent applies to accounts where people have been a bit silly but have stopped tweeting.

No activity in over a month is self-explanatory. In some cases these are people just taking a breather. I deleted anyone who hadn’t tweeted for 90 days.

Not much interaction is when people just pump out a feed and don’t chat or otherwise engage. Often robots run these accounts.

Hardly follows anyone is people who follow back fewer than 10% of the people following them. In other words, they not very giving with their Twitter activity.

All talk, all the time are accounts which are possibly too noisy.

Little original content applies to people who mainly retweet others.

Not so interesting are self-obsessed Twitter users who mainly tweet about themselves.

Relatively unpopular applies to Twitter users who hardly anyone follows back. I suspect some of these are just not trying hard.  

I’d like to see something similar to Twit Cleaner for Linkedin and Facebook. Any suggestions?

Incorrect tweets trump corrections

In the first of his eight simple rules for accurate journalism at the Columbia Journalism Review Craig SIlverman writes: “Initial, mistaken information will be retweeted more than any subsequent correction”.

He calls this the Law of Incorrect Tweets.

Silverman says people are more likely to retweet or like a false news report than pay attention to corrections.

Journalists make mistakes

Mistakes are inevitable with news at the best of time. Pressure to get stories out fast make it hard to confirm facts and properly double-check sources. This is especially true with today’s depopulated newsrooms.

Twitter makes it harder again. There’s even more pressure on journalists to be first with a report and the nature of tweeting doesn’t lend itself to reflective self-editing.

There’s a modern news culture of quickly pushing half-baked stories out to beat competitors.

Speed isn’t of the essence, accuracy is

Later in his piece Silverman makes the point: readers will forget who was first with a story, they will remember who got it wrong. He’s right.

Much as it goes against the grain to say this, scoops are not everything in news reporting. Being the most credible, reliable source for readers is a far better goal.

Why you shouldn’t tweet exclamation marks

In A five-point guide to getting your tweets retweeted The New Scientist reports on, well, a scientific approach to successful tweeting.

Researchers at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Germany studied more than 60 million tweets and around 4.5 million users to find what helps people decide to retweet.

The answers boil down to five tips:

  1. Punctuation matters. Tweets with exclamation marks were unlikely to be retweeted, but question marks help getting messages retweeted.
  2. Accentuate the positive. Positive and negative words such as “great” or “suck” are likely to retweeted, but positive terms work better.
  3. But not with emoticons. On the other hand tweets with positive emoticons are less likely to be retweeted than those with negative ones.
  4. Relevant messages. People are more likely to retweet news or real information. Those “what I had for breakfast” messages are rarely relayed.
  5. Bad news travels faster than good. As every journalist knows, bad news sells. This is just as true on Twitter. People are much more likely to retweet bad news that good news.

As the comments on the New Scientist story point out, reaching the maximum audience of strangers isn’t a goal for most Twitter users.