Darian Shimy » twitter

New Twitter Account

Darian Shimy — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:53:22 +0000

So as I mentioned earlier, I no longer show up in Twitter results. I tried to get it fixed, but it’s not worth my time anymore. I created another Twitter account with the same username. The old account was renamed. So if you were remotely interested in the minutia of what I was doing, you will need to re-follow me.

http://twitter.com/dshimy

I am still not in the results, but I heard it might take a while for new accounts to find their way.

Update: I’ve made it to search!

I’m Banned from Twitter Search

Darian Shimy — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 07:22:45 +0000

Being in the Social Media Monitoring space, I often need to test certain functionality with Twitter Search. For my account, this is very difficult. For some reason, none of my tweets ever show up in Twitter Search. Have I been blacklisted? I know twitter search doesn’t access all tweets, but I figured it would have seen one of mine.

Well, I am not alone. Twitter has a help desk article on the subject here. I tried to create a ticket, but it looks like they were hiding the link. No worries, Rails apps have easy to guess URLS, http://help.twitter.com/requests/new.

Submitted a ticket, we’ll see if anything comes from it.

4 Ways Companies Use Twitter for Business

Darian Shimy — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:11:00 +0000

I just read Gartner’s report on using micro-blogging (Twitter) in the enterprise and I can’t imagine the authors of the report have much experience with Twitter. The statement, “it is not imperative for every corporation to be actively participating at an official level,” couldn’t be farther from the truth. Companies need to be using social media to engage their constituents in every the available medium. If they aren’t officially engaged, their competition will be. Monitoring and engagement with twitter needs to be on the forefront of their social media strategy.

There are various products available to help engage the Twitter community. Biz360′s product, Community Inisights, is the industry leader in social media measurement, monitoring, and engagement. If you’ve been waiting to enter the world of Twitter, now is the time.

Disclosure: I am the VP of Technology for Biz360

Twitter as a Platform

Darian Shimy — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 05:49:00 +0000

I recently noticed a few companies using Twitter as a platform instead of a messaging system. For example, Alaska Airlines was experimenting with giving users the ability to get flight information when they tweeted their flight number. IM systems have been used to do similar activities, but have not gathered much following over the years. With Twitter looking for ways to make money, I wonder if expanding ‘Twitter the Platform’ is in their future?

How to get Twitter followers fast

Darian Shimy — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:55:00 +0000

Once or twice a day I find a spammer that started to follow me. After a few hours Twitter finds them and their account is terminated. You can generally identify these users with a low number of updates, and a 4:1 ratio of following to followers. The people following the spammer are generally the ones with an auto-follow tool enabled (or they really don’t care who they follow).

You can quickly increase your followers on Twitter by following the followers of a spammer. Sounds strange, but it works.

You can follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/dshimy

Twitter Followers

Darian Shimy — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:48:00 +0000

I understand the twittequette where if you follow me, I’ll follow you. Is there any other requirement for following someone? Does everyone need to get something out of a follow relationship?

I wonder what denversnowdude’s 839 followers are getting out of this. My guess is the same thing I am.

The Lemmings of Twitter

Darian Shimy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:14:00 +0000

I do not use auto-followers for Twitter. I look at each one and decide if I will follow the twiticate policy of following people that follow you. I will generally follow anyone that follows me except if they are spammers. I can generally tell if they are spammers if they have a very low number of updates, a high number of people they are following, and a low number of followers. What surprises me time and time again, is that 1/4 of the people will follow a spammer. If a spammer is following 2,000 people, 500 people are following the guy with one update on how to get rich quick.

In the animal kingdom, a lemming is a rodent known for periodic mass migrations that occasionally end in drowning.

How I update my status

Darian Shimy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:59:00 +0000

I have long said, Twitter is not a product, it’s a feature. (Although the general population is not listening to me.) Since several sites now support some type of status, I wanted an easy way to update them at once. A while ago I started using ping.fm. Being the CLI guy that I am, I wrote a script to post my updates via Ping.fm to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. A few have asked, so here you go:

#!/usr/bin/ruby
 
require 'rubygems'
require 'xmpp4r-simple'
 
jabber = Jabber::Simple.new('username@example.com', 'private')
jabber.deliver('pingdotfm@gmail.com', ARGV.join(' ').to_s)
sleep (5)

Tweet, tweet

Darian Shimy — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:43:00 +0000

If I tweet online, will it make a sound if no one is there to hear it?

Probably not. I finally got on the bandwagon and created a Twitter account. I have a shell script to update my status from the command line and I have access from my iPhone. You can follow me here. This should give you even more useless information about me.

Yes, I know this has been around for a while, but I can say, I am consistent with being late to the social networking scene.