We still have a long way to go. Those who said Facebook was a fad are now on FaceBook with the rest of their family and friends and use it fairly often. What’s more disturbing is how often I over hear people on FaceBook or in passing that scream how much Twitter is a useless fad……I guess we just need to give them a few years in which I suspect that they will be bashing yet another new technology, but will do it using Twitter.

Even the most basic and useful forums of social media get bashed to this day, often purely for cultural reasons in which technology in many peoples eyes equal sub par information and practicality. I don’t know how many times I’ve over heard intelligent people bashing any information found on Wikipedia. Although not perfect it’s easy to for get that Webster and Britannica were all originally missions of one man traveling the globe. One man one perspective asking strangers and alike what they knew to be knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants. Accuracy is subjective and in this case a multitude of subjective persons might be more powerful and “true” then a single man is the final say.

Let’s try harder to find use in things that catch on or connect us all, that increase our perspective across greater bounds whether it be 100% accurate or not. If we are brought together and information is shared more readily then we are only following a path set thousands of years before us first with smoke signals, then to written stone, bibles, printed news, telegraphs and phones, radio and TV, internet and social media. Let us allow ourselves to find the good, as we have so reluctant at each point of our past, in connecting with one another and decipher the positive gains in mediums that do just that.

bit.ly

There are many apis that offer shortening of urls tinyurl.com, tinyurl.cc, bit.ly and many others which have all been useful over the years as services that take a URL like this:  http://www.seanshadmand.com/2009/07/18/give-a-hoot-track-your-tweets/ and convert it to a url like this: http://tinyurl.com/len47k. Once the tiny url is clicked a user is quickly redirected to the true url of the site.

HootSuite

Now, with the advent of the Facebook status and more recently Twitter tweets, fitting text based information into a very small space is ever more important and shortening URL’s has become big business and an interesting space to be in for startups these days. (check out some techcrunch articles here at http://bit.ly/jytKD and http://ow.ly/hWSV).

I have recently been turned on to yet another player in the field found at http://ow.ly. This url shortner is provided by a comapny called HootSuite and not only provides shortened urls but aggregates all of your twitter feeds in to one place and allows you to quickly convert all urls within a tweet into shortened ow.ly based urls. The cool thing is those shortened url’s also provide tracking analysis so you can see how many people clicked your link in a line graph inline with all of your posts. Pretty cool, if you twitter at all or can find it usefull to track a urls number of clicks beit through an email or web site give ow.ly or hootsuite a try.

HootSuite Stats

Question

In this first week of my entering into the blog/twitter posting arena I figured I would ask anyone out there a basic question on etiquette. How many twitter posts should one post a day that respects the balance between informative and just too damn noisy.

If  you think you have a list of what makes a good tweet vs. a bad one let me know, I am curious whether “ughhhhh my steak is burnt” is allowable and at what rate people will let it through without un-following.

Here are some posts of what others have had to say:

http://realestatezebra.com/5-rules-for-using-twitter

http://odeo.com/episodes/24599142-Spy-On-Me-or-5-Rules-of-Twitter-by-HotForWords

http://sbinfocanada.about.com/od/socialmedia/a/twitterpromo.htm

http://mashable.com/2008/12/08/how-to-quiet-the-twitter-noise/