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Twitter Down – Denial of Service – Update

Aug 6

Posted by Kieran Daly in Technology, Twitter | No Comments

Update:

According to Wired magazine the reason Twitter is down is due to denial of service attack.  This is malicious attack to try and bring the servers down at Twitter.  Looks like it is working. Twitter has become more than a fun tool over the past 12-18 months as more businesses use it as an information retrieval and distribution tool and a useful medium to interact with tehir customers.  So for the moment no Tweets out there!

Screams throughout the micro blogging world while Twitter was down today Thursday August 6th.  There is a short announcement on their status blog but other than a short message no detail as to the reason.

In the early days of Twitter there was a lot of downtime as they experienced the massive growth that has continued unabated since it first got mainstream popularity outside the technical geek world.

An interesting impact of this was the fact that a lot of people automatically moved to Facebook as their microblogging platform creating a similar slowdown on this system.  If you are getting Twitter issues here are some 5 things that you can do

  • Write a full length blog post on your niche fine tune it instead of staring at Tweets
  • Call someone on the phone and have a long chat with them
  • Look at some of the other social tools out there like Linkedin, Facebook, Stumbleupon and Friendfeed.  Learn about them and how they  can add to your social network toolset.
  • Take a break for 24 hours from Twitter – it wont hurt believe me

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10 Twitter Tips for Beginners

May 5

Posted by Kieran Daly in Twitter | No Comments

10 things you should do with Twitter and tips that you should have in your toolbox.

  1. Make sure your bio information is interesting and relevant to the Twitter traffic you want.  Write it off line till it reads right and then review it occasionally as you do more tweeting.
  2. Make sure you have an avatar.  Your own photo or a variation is ideal but have some form of an avatar.  Google for them there are tons of free ones.
  3. Silence is golden.  Don’t tweet all the time in fact for a start tweet for no more than 10 minutes in the AM and evening.
  4. RT other peoples tweets – make sure of course that you read the links and don’t just to it blindly.
  5. Be nice and don’t curse – lots of people think it is cool.  They are usually 12 years of age. 
  6. Don’t follow blindly.  Follow people you are interested in.  Read what they tweet.  If it isn’t interesting then unfollow them.
  7. You don’t have to tweet 140 characters.  Its not a goal just a limit.  Short punchy tweets are a nice change.
  8. You don’t always have to follow people to read interesting Tweets.  Set up and save a search on Twitter on the web and read this Twitter stream.  Follow if you see interesting tweets.
  9. Use one of the many tools out there for Twitter (Tweetdeck is my favourite) they make tweeting so much more easier.
  10. No tip number 10 but you gotta have 10!!

Falling Over Twitter Followers

Apr 17

Posted by Kieran Daly in Twitter | No Comments

twitter2I am now following over 6000 people and have over 6000 followers as well on Twitter and you may wonder how I follow all these people.  I ask Oprah and she helps me perhaps!! The short answer is I don’t know

Well not completely Twitter is not like e-mail where you have to at least process ever mail you receive and make a decision on whether you delete, forward, act or process.  Twitter is an information stream that you can jump on or off as it suits you.

This is where Tweetdeck helps me process the stream much more effectively.  Here is how I approach it

Groups

I have several groups to bucket the people on my Twitter stream.  Here are some of the groups that I have set up outside the standard Replies,Direct Message and Favorites groups that come with Tweetdeck.

  • People I Interact With – If I have replied to you AND you have replied back it shows someone who is willing to interact and chat on Twitter.  I straight away add you to this group and see you in this group straight away. I call it Interact as it is a two way conversation.  I have gotten some great information from friends on twitter and hopefully it will grow as my follower choice grows.  I have a bout 30 people in this group and they are all really interesting people.
  • Sports and News Feeds - I subscribe to a lot of these from CNN to baseball to Spanish news to local RTE.  They tend to dump news in multiple Tweets at once and I don’t always have the time to scan them.  So I have a group where I keep this information.
  • Social Media Gurus - There are a few people who are either real or self proclaimed social media gurus.  I keep a group for them and find it useful to mine their pearls of wisdom.
  • Famous People - I admit it I do follow a few famous people and I like to see what they are doing.  Doubt if they care what I am doing but maybe one day sigh

FILTER
I think the best Tweets can often (not always) be those that are RTed by others or have a link in them.  This is where I often use the filter tool with Tweetdeck and this allows me to filter by any Tweet that contains http or RT.

So with Groups and Filters on Tweetdedk using Twitter you can become can possibly keep your sanity with Twitter.  The important thing is to follow people that you think are giving you valuable, interesting and often for me funny information.

IGNORE

Yes I tend to ignore the rest of them but occasionally something does catch my eye and I remember why I followed this person in the first place.

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Building an Online Brand

Apr 15

Posted by Kieran Daly in Grange Web Design, Technology, Twitter | No Comments

I have been reading tonight about building an online brand a new term in social media.  At the moment I accept that I am present on-line but do not have a distinctive on-line brand.  However besides the linked article above there are some steps that I have taken to build my brand.

Twitter Presence

i work hard on Twitter to build my presence, share with other people what interests me and forward information that I find interesting.  I am a big fan of Twitter and think that it is a very powerful tool in social media.

Blog Regularly

I  keep this blog up to date regularly with information that I am passionate about and that I think people will find interesting.  I put solid work into this and make sure that the information is crisp and up to date.  A blog is really a personal perspective on the topics that are close to your heart.  It is great if people come visit, learn, add to their RSS feed but ultimately it will not change the focus of the content that you produce. Comments are useful however and in my recent PowerPoint post I did get some useful feedback that I plan to include in an update soon.

Build a Solid Business Proposition Web Site

I recently updated my web design site so that it can provide the best information about my products and offerings.  I work on it most days and hope that is also a valuable resource.  Even if you were not interested in using me to build your site I think it would be a good starting point in answering the basics on what is required for starting a web site and on-line presence.

Other Social Media Tools

I am still peering from a distance at tools like Stumbleupon, Friendfeed, Facebook, and Linkedin as  I do not want to enter this apce without think about where I want to end up.  I will probably dedicate a week or so to each of these tools over the coming months, enjoy what htey give me and in the process continue to build an on-line presence.