So apparently Tim O’Reilly is cooking up a Twitter book together with Sarah Milstein.

I’ve embedded a sneak preview of the book below:

It seems to be packed with a lot of valuable information, what do you think about it?

When I wrote the last post, ‘To follow, or not to follow - That is the question‘, I was completely oblivious about the fact that Twitter actually has enforced a new policy regarding how many people you can follow per day. According to the new policy, you can follow a maximum of 1000 new people per day.

In relation to this new policy, the awesome marketing blog DoshDosh posted a blog post titled ‘Twitter Marketing: Why You Don’t Need to Mass Follow Users‘ that details a few very valid points about why you don’t have to mass follow users.

Another person who also got an opinion about this is Tim O’Reilly who says the following in the upcoming Twitter book:

If you want tons of followers on Twitter, you’re not alone. But here’s a secret: a small number of great followers is much more valuable than a herd of uninterested people.

Think about it this way: if you’re an accountant twittering about tax tips, what’s the point of having 1,000 followers if 999 of them are spam bots and war resistors who don’t file taxes? — Tim O’Reilly

When it all comes down to it, having great followers always beats having heaps of followers. There’s no question about it. But the question is how you should start out building this great network - you still have to find these great followers somehow.

I believe that automatically following a few hundred or even thousand people that match your interests (for example, searching http://search.twitter.com/ for a key word or hash tag) will get you started out fairly quickly. From there you can start narrowing down the people that are providing value in the network and find related interesting people. Hand picking all your followers will of course lead to a more targeted network, but it will also take a lot more time and energy on your part.

I’m not saying that you should go absolutely bonanza and follow 14,000ish people like I do, but doing a bit of key word based auto-following using for example Twollow will not hurt you. You can always unfollow people that aren’t providing value to you.

I was actually planning on posting this a few days ago, but I’ve been buzy with flying straight across Australia and exploring Perth.

Shortly after writing my last post, ‘I don’t give a damn about your affiliate offer or whatever you’re trying to sell to me on Twitter‘, I stumbled upon the following video:

For those who do not recognize this guy, it’s Ed Dale, a clever internet marketer and one of the master minds behind the free internet marketing course/challenge ‘Thirty Day Challenge‘.

Ed certainly presents a few valid points in the video and truth to be told - he’s dead on about the direct message spam. As I wrote in my earlier post, the direct message functionality is becoming less useful to me as I follow more people. If I wouldn’t follow 12,000+ people I wouldn’t have this problem. Neither would I have a hard time keeping up with what people are saying in the main timeline.

So why do I follow 12,000+ people?

First of all, I am by no means a celebrity or a media power house. I’m just a regular guy. Because of this, I do not have a fan base that will follow me on Twitter. So the only way for me to build a great network on Twitter is to be social (I guess that’s what “social” in “social media” stands for) and follow a lot of people. Usually people will follow back, I follow new people, rinse and repeat - and then the network will grow from here.

Having a fair bit of friends and followers (I do not really care about the actual number - even though the post ‘10,000+ followers in less than a month - Yeah, it’s possible!‘ might give a perception of that) is a way for me to build a great network and a forum to share my thoughts and ideas.

By having this great network available on Twitter, it will be possible for me to share my thoughts and ideas and get more feedback from a lot more people. Every time I post a new blog post on this blog it will automatically be posted on Twitter. Since I’ve got a few followers following my updates there’s a possibility that a certain percentage of these followers will click on the link and read the blog post. The more readers, the more awesome discussions, the more motivated I’ll be to update the blog = WIN! If you have a blog, you’ve probably experienced this as well, that the more readers you have, the more motivated you are to keep up with posting new and great content.

Twitter is really golden when it comes to traffic. Since I started this blog in February, roughly 48% of the few thousands of visitors I’ve had to this blog comes from Twitter. If you’re running a new blog or a site that’s still sandboxed by Google, Twitter is a great way to pull some initial traffic to your blog or site.

The bottom line of my rant is that if I didn’t follow a lot of people, I wouldn’t be able to have the network I have today. The case with Ed is that he’s quite famous in Internet Marketing-circles and that he’s already got a certain fan base that will follow him on Twitter. For me, I have to start the other way around and build a strong follower base on Twitter, provide value via my blog and eventually (if ever :D) build up a fan base.

As a matter of fact, from the time I signed up on Twitter to last month I actually did what Ed’s proposing - to not follow everyone that follows you or generally not follow a lot of people. I didn’t have a lot of conversations back then and I surely didn’t come in contact with a lot of awesome people.

Twitter, heaps of friends and followers and performance

Twitter wasn’t really initially built for having thousands of friends and followers, and yes, Ed certainly has got some valid points about how this could affect Twitter’s performance. If everyone would follow 10,000+ people I guess it’s a no brainer that Twitter’s performance will be negatively affected to some extent. Twitter has been performing a lot of upgrades to its backend the last year or so though, and except for the down time in the beginning of this month, there haven’t been a lot of controversy about the service’s up time lately.

I’m fairly certain that Twitter will be able to cope if people would start to follow a lot more people than they do right now - given that it wouldn’t happen at the exact same time.

Apparently, I might be considered to be a rock dweller

At the end of the video Ed talks about the apps that ‘hammers people’s Twitter profiles with follower requests’ and that people who are making these are ‘rock dwellers’. I can certainly get that hammering the same people with a bunch of follow requests a few hours apart is a really, really bad thing. I do not do this, and I wouldn’t write an application that would focus on doing this.

What I do consider to be okay though, is to semi-automate the procedure of finding like-minded and interesting people. If you for example perform a search for #SEO on Twitter and decide to follow a lot of people matching that search term - you’re seriously in for quite a few minutes or an hour of work to open up the user profiles from the search results and click the follow button for each person you’re interested in following. If you could do this in an automated fashion you’ll save some time and you’ll be able to have a few interesting discussions instead of spending your time opening up profiles and pressing the follow-button like a maniac.

What do you think?

Do you consider following a lot of people to be a bad thing? Should Twitter do something about it?

In my last post, ‘10,000+ followers in less than a month - Yeah, it’s possible!‘, I described the system I used to get over 10,000 followers in less than a month and how this has benefited me. What I didn’t talk about in that post is the actual downside of having a lot of followers friends on Twitter.

Sell, sell, sell - Spam, spam, spam

The number one downside with having a lot of friends on Twitter is that the direct message functionality more or less becomes useless. There’s actually a negative correlation between the amount of friends you have and the usefulness of the direct messaging-functionality - the more friends you have, the less useful the direct message-functionality becomes as you’ll receive more and more auto-direct spam messages.

What bothers me with this is that these spammers ruin the Twitter experience - and I’m far from the first one to feel this way. This has gotten to a point where I rarely ever read direct messages, and people that actually want to have a conversation ‘in private’ with me won’t get any response from me because I’m having a really hard time filtering out the real messages from the spammy ones. Right now I’ve got like 2,000 messages in my direct message-inbox and I swear that 90% are automatic ones trying to push some shitty product or service. Thank god for the possibility of turning off the option that tells Twitter to send you your direct messages to your e-mail.

I don’t know you and I haven’t asked you to send me that offer - so why should I buy the shit you’re trying to sell to me?

What I don’t really get is how obnoxious these spammers really are. I do not know you and the first thing you’re trying to do is to get me to buy some useless and utterly worthless junk.

Marketing is about trust and relationships - and here you are trying to sell me stuff when you haven’t even earned my trust or haven’t even tried to build a relationship with me in the first place. You are Internet Marketers - shouldn’t you know a thing or two about marketing?

For all you spammers insisting on trying to push your stuff via auto direct messages, please get a copy of Seth Godin’s excellent book ‘Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends And Friends Into Customers‘ (or read the blog post ‘Permission Marketing‘ on his blog). What Seth says (which I think is dead on) is that marketing and the way people respond to it has changed. Nowadays marketing is about having the permission to sell to a prospective customer - not interrupting him or her and try to shove your message down his or hers throat.

Permission is like dating. You don’t start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit.
— Seth Godin

Solution?

When you actually think about it - direct messages are e-mail all over again. When e-mail was new, anti-spam systems weren’t really that sophisticated and people got heaps and heaps of spam e-mails in their inboxes. Right now there’s no ’spam filter’ for your direct messages and you have no actual control of your direct message inbox.

As this whole direct message thing is becoming uncontrollable I’m going to enforce a new policy: until Twitter gets a direct message filtering system I’m not going to respond to direct messages from now on. Reply to me instead, or if you really want to discuss private stuff - shoot me an e-mail at me[at]sebastianjohnsson.com.

Your opinion

So what do you think about this whole direct message-mess? How should it be solved?

If you’ve been on Twitter for a while you’ve probably received the following spam-esque auto-direct message:

Want to know how to get 16,000 Followers in 90 days, and make money doing it? http://urlshortener.com/random-gibberish
— Random douchebag

If you follow the provided link you’ll end up at The Twitter Traffic Machine (my affiliate link - sponsor me with a cup of coffee if you’re going to get it anyway) which is an info product by @BillCrosby and some random dude about getting a lot of followers. After watching their video I just started asking myself why I didn’t do what they’re doing - If they can do it, so can I.

How I did it

Since I’m a pretty awesome programmer and since I’ve been keen on playing around with the Twitter API for a while I decided to hack something up myself rather than buy their product. So about 20 days ago I started to play around with the Twitter API to see what I could come up with.

After playing around with it for a day I managed to implement functionality to copy the followers from a specific user and follow these users, copy followers from search results and unfollow all those who didn’t reciprocate my follow. These functions are the core functions I use to improve my follower count.

What I usually do is to go to the article ‘Top 237 Twitter Users Who Will Follow You Back‘, find a user with similar interests and a lot of followers and copy his or hers followers. I’ll wait a few hours or even a day and then I unfollow all people who didn’t reciprocate my follow. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

The whole process actually started out kinda slow, adding about 10-30 followers per day. Then it climbed to a few hundred followers, and now recently I’ve had days where I could get like 1,000-2,000 new followers per day. See my awesome chart at TwitterCounter for more details.

Providing value (on auto-pilot)

Another crucial ingredient in the secret sauce is the auto-posting of tweets. If you follow me you’ll probably see that there will be posts from my account each and every hour (that is, as long as my app is running).

So what’s going on? I’ve programmed my little nifty app to fetch rss-feeds (pretty much like twitterfeed.com) and automatically post these items at certain times (usually every 15 or 30 minutes). I usually get my feeds from http://delicious.com/popular/insert-tag-here (for example: http://delicious.com/popular/seo) and my app will create a tweet using the title of the feed item (shortens it if necessary), a url shortened version of the feed item url and hash tags if available.

It also supports quotes and stuff - we all love those right? I also use Google Blog Search for other accounts I’m playing around with where there usually aren’t a lot of relevant information available via delicious.

And oh, if you’ve been following my account for a while I guess you occasionally have seen that I’ve posted the same piece of information twice (or even thrice) sometimes. My app keeps track of what it already has posted, but from time to time (I’m still experimenting and developing this Twitter app you know) I have to re-initialize my database and the posting history will be erased. The version of the app I’ll release (more on this later in this post) will accurately keep track of what’s been posted and not post duplicate content.

Why having a lot of followers is a good thing

Even though this might be obvious to some, I didn’t realize this until I did this little experiment. I’ve actually been a member of Twitter since the 12th of December 2007. From that point to the 24th of March this year I’ve had a maximum of 50-60 followers. I didn’t really care about Twitter then and if it wasn’t for all the hype about Twitter right now - I still wouldn’t care about Twitter.

Back then I could look at accounts with heaps and heaps of followers and wonder what the point with that was. How would they be able to interact with all those thousands of followers? But you know what, it’s way better to interact with someone rather than no one. Having a maximum of 50 followers didn’t lead to a lot of conversations, neither did it enable me to find interesting and valuable information other people would tweet about.

Since I started experimenting with this I’ve actually gotten a job offer via Twitter and I’ve also come in contact with a lot of interesting people whom, if they haven’t proven to be already, will prove to be beneficial to me in some point in time. Twitter’s a really fun tool for me right now (read: addictive) and it’s all because I decided to extend my network.

Ethics

Before you start - I know what I’ve been doing is a semi-relatively bad thing to do. There are a lot of sincere people on Twitter that want to build their network organically and who are really into building long-lasting relationships with their followers - and here I am auto-following and auto-unfollowing people from left to right just to make a point.

I really do try to engage people on Twitter (I’m actually a really nice guy) but sometimes it’s just hard to keep track of everything when you get like 100-200 new tweets every 5 seconds.

I initially also thought that auto-posting links and quotes was a bad thing to do because I didn’t do it “myself”. But if you look at it from a different perspective, I’m actually providing lots of value to people. According to Retweetrank and Retweetist a lot of people actually appreciate the content.

Tweet-o-matic - reproduce my results

Despite my little ethics rant above, I’m actually going to release my twitter app so that other people can reproduce my results. I feel that a lot of people could find this tool valuable and that it would enable them to establish a great network on Twitter.

Unfortunately, I can’t say when it’s going to be released (I have to rewrite the backend, build the web gui etc. - and I’ve already got loads of stuff to do) but what I can say is that it’s going to be released using a software-as-a-service freemium model. If that’s total mumbo-jumbo to you, it means that there will be one free basic version (with a limited feature set) and several versions that you have to pay for to use (the more you pay - the more features you’ll have access to).

I’ll be posting my progress with Tweet-o-matic here on my blog, so be sure to subscribe to my rss-feed if you’re interested in this app.

If you liked this piece, I would really appreciate if you would share it with your friends using the ShareThis-button below. Thanks!

All rightie, guess I should have posted this earlier - but I’m lazy.

I spent the last weekend celebrating Easter with a friend and her family and it was without any hesitation one of the most fun Easters ever.

So without further ado, here’s the lowdown on the Aussie Easter:

1. Rent a house somewhere on the south coast.
2. Add people.
3. Add meat.
4. Barbecue.
5. Add beer/vodka/whatever.
6. Get drunk.
7. Hit the beach.
8. All in all, have a friggin’ awesome time.

Oh, and there’s also something called ‘Good Friday‘ which I’ve never heard of. Apparently you shouldn’t eat meat, drink alcohol etc. on this day and a majority of all shops are closed as well. Weird!

And yeah, Borat’s my best mate. High fiiive!

So I guess I haven’t really jotted down my general thoughts of my experience in Australia - so here we go. A bit of a warning though, this might turn into some deep stuff.

I’ve been here almost two months now and I can’t seriously remember the last time I felt so happy and excited about life. Doing this journey and traveling by myself is hands down the best learning experience I’ve had in my life so far.

What I’ve realized is that by traveling by yourself you’re automatically forced to be outgoing, sociable and keen on meeting new people. Since I came here I’ve become a lot more social and a lot more confident compared to what I used to be.

Basically, this little journey has forced me to take care of a lot of shit I didn’t like about myself, stuff I needed to improve upon in order to become a better person.

For those thinking about going by themselves somewhere, just do it. It’s the best possible way to learn a new language (or improve an existing one), get to experience a new culture and meet a lot of awesome people. And yeah, you’ll also be able to get to know yourself in a way you won’t normally be able to.

And regarding Sydney… all I can say is it’s abso-fucking-lutely fantastic. Yeah sure, you can see pictures of the place and get a hint of what it’s like but Sydney is as much about atmosphere as it’s about awesome scenery. There’s always something going on, always people on the go. One minute you can run around in the central business district and be surrounded by high rises and a few minutes later you can chill with the fruit bats (by the way, they’re kinda ugly) in the Botanical Gardens.

Well yeah, going from a town with a population of 40,000 to a city with a population of 4,5 million people can also be a part of why I’m so fascinated. But just slightly though :).

To all of those I’ve met here, thanks for making my stay here extremely awesome. I really appreciate it.