So the website I run, TravelGator, finally gave Twitter a try this week. I’d been holding off doing anything on Twitter as I honestly didn’t get the attraction (plus I had been lazy). So I finally decided, given the ridiculous amount of buzz about this company, to give it a try.

As a sort of an experiment (and again because I was lazy) I didn’t really do any research on the “right” way to use Twitter and just barreled in to give it a shot. I quickly learned that it can be really addictive when you get into it. I didn’t get much from the people out there who were updating me on the type of breakfast cereal they had in the morning but the ones who were posting links to really interesting travel information they had found online were very much appreciated. Most of this information I found very interesting myself and I never would have found it on my own.

In this way, I was using Twitter as a sort of personal search engine for a specific topic area - as most of the people I was following were in the travel business in some way or otherwise interested in travel as a topic.

The other thing I did was I started to contribute my own interesting links, some to content on TravelGator content but also to a whole range of blogs and other sites out there that cover travel. I also “re-tweeted” links that others sent out that I found interesting.

So…all good right?

Apparently I made a bunch of newbie mistakes according to the powers at Twitter.

1. I followed too many people right off the bat - even though everyone I followed looked really interesting based on their past tweets and I wanted as rich an update stream as I could get. Apparently you are only allowed to follow 2000 people before you need to also have the number of people following you rise to a similar level. I got cut off from following new people around 1200 or so.
2. I posted too many links and not enough personal updates. This one I find weird…isn’t blogging all about links to other things (i.e. the hyperlinking thing that started the web in the first place). If so, shouldn’t we expect microblogging to be based on the same basic premise? I really didn’t care about the hypothetical breakfast cereal choice but the links everyone were sending out were gold.
3. I did something else that they didn’t like although I have no idea what.

Anyway…after three days of posting (about 200 posts) and following other people (about 1200) and having people follow us (about 400 and rising rapidly) the account got suspended.

I’ve posted to their help forum and sent them a pleading email but my hopes are not high that they will rectify this situation. Based on other chatter out there on blogs by people who have had the same thing happen to them I expect Twitter’s spam algorithms are pretty poor so they suspend a lot of valid accounts and hence customer service is way overwhelmed. We shall see though. If not, I’ll create another account in a few days and try again.

They did send us this nice email:

This is an automated response to share reasons why Twitter suspends accounts for investigation. If you’re contesting suspension, please reply to this email and include the information requested at bottom if you haven’t already.

Twitter primarily suspends accounts for Terms of Service violations or spam investigation. (Please visit your own profile page to make sure you’re actually suspended and not viewing someone else’s suspended profile page.) If you are suspended, it’s most likely for one or more of these reasons::

User Abuse
* a large number of people block the profile or write in with spam complaints
* aggressive following
* imbalanced ratio: the number of followers is small compared to number of people following
* misuse of the reply feature
* updates consist of duplicate links and/or text
* updates consist mainly of links and not personal updates
* updates consist of updates poached from others’ timelines, passed off as one’s own

Technical Abuse
* updates consist of links pointing to phishing sites, malware, or other harmful material
* a large number of accounts is created in a short amount of time
* an account is identified as belonging to a spam cluster

When this happens, we suspend the account for investigation and hide the contents from the public view in order to remove the cause of complaint. Unless we’ve advised you otherwise, your account may be suspended for a minimum of 30 days while we investigate. Accounts in violation of the Twitter Rules or Terms will be permanently suspended.

It’s important to us that the Twitter community receives only the content they’d like to receive. While we do welcome feed-based accounts, we discourage aggressive following and other tactics that will alarm people.

If you feel you’ve been suspended in error, please reply to this email with a short explanation if you haven’t already, and don’t forget to include your user name. We will do our best to get back to you within 30 days.

Thanks,

Twitter Support

The New Zealand police recently used Facebook to get out the message, or specifically the pictures, of a would-be safe cracker they captured on a security camera.

“The Queenstown police are calling it their first Facebook arrest. The police department created its online presence on the site just two months ago, said Constable Sean Drader.”

It is really interesting to see law enforcement embrace Web 2.0 to improve their ability to catch criminals. I wonder when the first police department will go up on Twitter? It would be the Internet version of the police scanner.

I generally feel that I’m hooked into the buzz out there as I spend a good hour or so each day reading blogs, commenting and trying to keep up with the massive amount of change that happens online and off each day.

Then ReadWriteWeb comes out with their list of 10 mobile social networks to check out and I haven’t heard of even a single ONE of them! Who has time for all this? I barely even manage to keep my Facebook status even remotely accurate.

Facebook is getting ready to open source its year old application platform. What this means is that other social networks will be able to host the same applications that are all the rage on Facebook without building their own application platforms.

I honestly can’t decide whether this is a momentus occurrence or a non-event. I guess we’ll have to see whether all the applications that have been written for Facebook migrate onto other social networking sites and what the resulting network effect is. My gut is that some of the popular ones will migrate to some of the other major social networks but most will not.

I’m voting for “non-event”. I understand why the applications drive a lot of traffic and page views on the site, but don’t see the value to Facebook to allowing other social networks to leverage this resource. Perhaps they have a strategy I haven’t figure out yet or maybe it is a knee-jerk reaction to OpenSocial. This will be worth watching.

Thanks to Techcrunch for the heads up.

I was recently invited via an email from Omni Hotels to check out their new, sorta-social networking portal which they have called “Live Like a Local”. The intent is to allow anyone to upload tips on cities around the world where Omni has a hotel.

Ignoring the fact that the execution in this example is really poor (basically no content, poor SEO page optimization, etc.) I think the bigger question is whether an individual hotel brand such as Omni can hope to compete for traffic with the likes of Virtual Tourist, IGoYouGo, Trip Advisor and of course, my site TravelGator who already have thousands of attractions for hundreds of cities around the globe.

I’m guessing the folks over at Neighborhood America, the company hosting the Omni site think so as they’ve built a business based on the assumption but I’m not so sure. For specific categories I think it might be possible to get some level of audience participation in a brand, but in other areas - travel being one - where there are very established players the major brands would be better of partnering as opposed to going their own.

I’m thinking this is an experiment by Omni Hotels that is going to go nowhere.

I stumbled upon an interesting article written by Robert Cringely at PBS in January of last year. It is a decent presentation of the argument about why Google will eventually power most of the Internet based on an analysis of the dark fiber that they have under contract.

I read the article, thought for a moment and concluded that the argument was plausible if a little 1984. Google is pretty dominate in a lot of areas, although they’ve failed pretty miserably in others like social networking. They have also bought a lot of their capability (e.g. YouTube) when their own efforts came up short. In other words, they are acting a lot like a well run large company - spin out something cool every so often from internal R&D and buy the rest using the cash flow from their mainstream operations. Microsoft is the same, as are most large, growth oriented corporations.

So maybe we will all be running our lives on Google infrastructure a decade from now. I wouldn’t bet on it though. Big growth companies have a habit of turning into… big slow growth companies. And big companies have a hard time attracting innovative, risk takers who start new trends. Google is no different.

Engage, a social network for dating by letting your friends get into the mix recently launched. TechCrunch did a better job of reviewing it than I’m likely to but I wanted to highlight the comments that are being posted as they are great. This might be one sector that social networking cannot crack.

A few months back I was brainstorming Internet startup ideas in a bar in midtown, New York City (great bar by the way) and one of the ideas that we came up with was sort of a social network for data. The concept was a centralized database infrastructure where anyone who wanted could upload data sets that they had created to share, trade or sell. We never got far with the idea but at the time it sounded pretty cool - subject to the effects of three glasses of single malt of course.

Of course like all good ideas, there are many others out there who are thinking along the same lines. Bret Taylor, formerly of Google expressed the same desire in his blog and Read Write Web published a list of current sites that allow you to share data sets in some way.

I’ve played with a few of these sites and while they are interesting, the thing I keep coming back to is that they need to be much easier to use. I think the problem here is that most of the existing sites are built for techies by techies and as a result aren’t very user centric. It should be as easy for a university researcher with a huge, complicated data set to share it, as Joe Smith down the block who has a passion for coin collecting and has documented (with pictures) every US penny minted from 1850 to today and wants to share what he’s built.

The site that always comes to mind when I think about this topic is Geni.com. They have made a complicated data issue – geological research – really really easy. I put my direct family into the tool about six months ago on a whim and at last count my relatives have added 2000+ people to the tree with pictures, email addresses, birthdays and all sorts of data. If my aunt who can barely turn on her computer can do it then the tool has met the usability test. The other tool that comes to mind is FileMaker – creating data sets in it was brain dead simple.

What is necessary in this particular space is to make it really easy to model complex data elements. The startup that manages to do it will win and should be huge. If they also allow people to connect data sets together and pull them off to their blogs, websites, and so on then they will really win. Combine the business with either the Amazon or Google cloud computing databases and things get really interesting.

I hope someone solves this soon. I’ll be a user…I love data.

I’ve been a bit delinquent in putting up new posts lately as I’ve been distracted with some other projects but more important I’ve just not found anything that I wanted to write about. There is certainly a lot going on out there as is clear from the latest TechCrunch postings from the Next Web Conference in Amsterdam but so far I’m not seeing much in the way of new trends.

That being said, there are a couple of things that I’ve written about previously that seem to be gaining steam.

Widgets are in general, picking up steam. It seems like daily (hourly?) you hear of yet another Facebook widget or iGoogle widget that is going to change your life. No some of these are pretty cool, don’t get me wrong, but I’m beginning to wonder whether we are seeing a fundamental break between a self contained, fully functional site like WebMD that solves a specific problem and a world in which everything is a collection of much more specialized widgets that you access from lots of different channels - and ideally follow you around from channel to channel.

This is worth more thought (and postings!) in the future. I’m also waitig for a widget search engine to launch - finding all these things is a major pain today.

The other rumor I thought was particularly interesting was the one about Google launching a cloud database solution that would compete with the one started awhile back by Amazon. As I’ve written before, the key with these services is to get true generic, scalability without sacrificing the real power of the database. As every developer knows, often you need to do some funky stuff to get a database to perform which is why I’m really curious as to whether the cloud computing approach will work for the majority of web sites out there - which are the obvious target for these sort of services.

The other really challenge here is not so much getting the database up and running (and scaling), but actually designing and loading it with data. That might be the value add that really gets these services off the ground. Imagine a situation in which you could just grab a set of database components from a central library (say a list of the cities of the world) for use on your web page and someone else would keep them up to date. Now there is a service that would be worth paying for. Oh yeah, and what about loading those feeds.

More to come on this trend I predict.

Beneath the surface of Facebook’s $15 billion valuation and the slew of niche social networks cropping up in its shadow like mushrooms, is a big assumption - wherever audiences congregate, advertisers will follow. After all, the hardest part of marketing is finding the people you’re trying to reach and getting them engaged with your brand. If social networks are where they’re hanging out, why wouldn’t marketers pay to be there with them?

This was the thinking during the Internet bubble, when every business plan said “ad-supported” and it was a given that you’d monetize whatever users you attracted. Early adopters among advertisers were paying $50 CPMs for banner ads, and the future looked rosy. But users were ignoring static banners, the recession hit, and CPMs plunged. It wasn’t until several years later that ad spending finally took off, thanks to a combination of PPC text ads, rich media banners, targeting technologies and reporting analytics.

 Lonely ads, looking for clicks Social networks are in the same place content-driven web sites were in 2000. People are starting to question their revenue potential now that there are indications that the ads being placed in them aren’t performing as well as expected. Click-throughs are abysmally low, and members are rebelling against efforts to monetize their activity.The big question is whether this is just a temporary dip just like the web in 2001. Will someone figure out the right way to link advertisers to social networks, and allow the dollars to come gushing in? Some media just aren’t suited for ads, the movie and music industries still rely mainly on consumers and not advertisers for their revenues.Monetization of audiences is far from a given - a lot of work needs to go into developing the right techniques, and the solutions are usually unique to the medium. What worked for TV didn’t work for the Web, and what worked on Web sites won’t work in social networks. Will anyone figure it out? And if so, will it be Google or someone we’ve never heard of?