What’s a Follower Worth?

by | Jun 2, 2009 | Local Tech Notes, Social Media

Hello, my name is Bob, and I’m a Twitterholic.

Yes. It’s affecting my work life, my social life, my sex life. OK, maybe not that…yet. But I am taking steps to control it. Really. I am. I have lots of 3rd party Twitter apps that give me much more control than you get with your basic account. I know, I know, I should just quit altogether.  But I am fascinated by this thing. At least until the next thing comes along.

One of the things that confounds me though: Out of the 6 million?users on Twitter, how many of them are worth having as followers? I don’t use tricks to get followers, but as of this posting I have 615 followers.  But so what? That’s not a huge amount. I am consistently followed by people who have thousands of followers. For example, here’s a recent follower’s statistics: “7621 Following | 7932 Followers | Ratio: 1 | 8834 Updates – On Twitter Since April 17, 2009 (46 days ago)”. Huh? How could this person post nearly 9,000 tweets in 46 days? And why does he have so many followers in such a short period of time? I’ve been on Twitter for over a year. Maybe it’s because I don’t promise lots of riches for almost no effort. So, who cares if this person follows me? I’d much prefer, 100 followers who actually read my tweets and have something to share besides get rich quick schemes.

What’s a follower like that worth? Not much.

I would love a way to screen these folks out. Anyone know of such an app?

Google Spams Itself?

by | May 29, 2009 | Local Tech Notes

I love Google, don’t get me wrong. I use their services for all kinds of things and what they do in general is astounding. Have you seen Google Wave (video), yet? But WTF? I have some Google alerts and I wasn’t getting any on a specific term that I know had daily news. So I checked the Spam folder and sure enough, there they were. Google’s spam filter thought the email the Google alert system was sending out was SPAM!

As a web host that provides email services I am fully aware of how difficult it is to be one step ahead of the spammers, filtering out the bad, letting through the good. But I am always hearing how good Gmail is. But even they have problems.