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What is SSO?
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My Next Adventure
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Waking up from the Dream of the 90s
PIN is a Four Letter Word
Mundane Travels in an Amazing World by Michael Bissell
Keep Portland, Portland
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How the TARDIS Travels in Time And Relative Dimensions In Space
Logging in with Facebook (and Google and Twitter and...)
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Why I {heart} APIs
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The Thing about Vegas
Middle Earth: Post-Apocalyptic Hell Hole
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False Engagement (or "My bank isn't really my bank...")
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The Internet's Memory is Fuzzy
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My Cat Thinks He's a Great Manager
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Warning: Do Not Operate Heavy Equipment while Thinking
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Visiting My Mother in the Hospital
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It's not Facebook, You May Already be an Idiot
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Everyone is Special
Redberry vs Blackberry
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My Private Life is Public, my Public Life is Private
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Mr. Monopoly sells gas
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My Brain is Full
Pandora becomes more like Radio
Tony Chachere vs Big Easy Foods
Upgraded to Death
Now THIS is a collectable figure -- Darth Vader 'Star Knight'
Netflix Is Watching
Session vs. Red Stripe... Mmmm... Beer...
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Pepsi Steals Christmas
Shanzhai -- The Ancient Chinese Art of Brand Identity Theft
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They Know Where You Are: Privacy and Google Maps
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The Season for Ignoring the Season
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Losing millions... insiders cashing out... Surprise! GroupOn delays IPO
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Your iPhone is like Your Bifocals
Death of a Salesman's Store
Living in dots and vibrations
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Facebook Hates Your Link and other stories from arts meets geeks
Apple's Innovation of One Control Freak
Hashtags on TV
GroupOn -- Good for Meth Dealers, bad for Fishing Guides
This Video Is Not Available on Mobile
'Join The Conversation' Yeah... Corporations are sexy
"Did you mean?" -- Google's chiding nanny of search results
The Next Fad: Adword Optimization
The double standard of Mobile Web vs Mobile Apps
Branded Technology
Sharingspree.com -- Stealing more than GroupOn's Idea
The Internet Isn't Entertaining Enough
The Bullfighters EULA
Global Chit-Chat and the Norwegian Isolationist
It's not your bank... It's Apple's and Amazon's
Violated by Madison Avenue
Goodbye Murphy
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'Narcissism' by Michael R. Bissell -- Reading myself...
Facebook Reinvents the Meta Tag. Evolution? Or just weird mutant?
Dude, you were looking at web stats and laughing
If real life was like the world we see in commercials
"We need to..." Internet Marketing Myths
Facebook's deal with the Devil
My cool new phone is a little too cool.
You are never alone
Aw, Snap!
Promotion vs. Distribution... You'd think they'd know that one...
Miracles and Meetings
Facebook Causes Depression
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Countries less valuable than Groupon
Politics and instantaneous communication
Live by your wits, until you get the flu
Who owns your friends?
Agonies of Programming for Facebook
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Facebook did not topple Egypt
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The Internet and our Sedentary Society -- maybe some hope?
News from the Twitter Follow Campaign Trail
The Death of... Well, everything...
The art of Indiscriminate Twitter Following
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My Emotional Repsonse to iAnything
Alien Technology and Government Conspiracies
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A Short Rant about Los Angeles
Time for a New Reality
The Great Popularity Contest of the 21st Century
The Death of Email
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Farewell to Doug -- the Dali Lama has moved on
Amazon Shouldn't Have Shut Down WikiLeaks
Google isn't the bad guy... this time
Thankless Jobs
Making Money -- Or Money Making You
Kids In Charge
It's Okay that Roger Sterling's Book Sucks
Sex, Seduction and Manipulation
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Big Brother is Finally Here
Time for New Ideas
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Custom Tailored Crap
The Great Technical Disconnect
New for the Sake of New
A Retail Store Built Like the Web
A Quick Rant -- The New Twitter and Real People
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When did Google Start Policing the Internet?
Getting back to HTML basics, thanks to Apple
Inspecting my Navel Base
Quantum Entanglement and the Death of Radio
A shoebox vs. an online backup
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Dressing for Work
The team that hates itself -- Visionaries, Managers and Technicians
iBooks -- Creative Epicenter or Gatekeeper?
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The Economy is Going to Get Worse, but that's okay
Time lost on Twitter
Common Sense of the New Economy
Twitter's back alleys and dark places
Social Media is NOT Advertising
On censorship
Microsoft Courier
Form (designers) versus Function (geeks)
Bad Restroom Health Sign
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China and Apple -- Different organizations, same management
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Who needs an URL anyhow?
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That magical little tablet
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A Primer on Internet Fame -- dancing babies, hamsters, numa numa, and more...
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Another Random Night of Arts in Portland
Rules are made to be broken -- in a reasoned, systematic way
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Who really uses Twitter? 60% of Twitter's traffic isn't on Twitter
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Portland Bike Plan: Too Expensive or Playing with numbers?
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The Twit Cleaner
Perfect Secretary's pitch for @Adbroad (and the Youtube API)
The Emotions of Text
The Shorty Awards Scandal -- Manual Spam is still Spam
Google Analytics, the cloud and missing numbers #fail
Helen Klein Ross & Michael Bissell Interview at Adweek's Social Media Strategies Conference
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You can't buy social media
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The Internet is Gooder than Books
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Intelligent life is out there (but it's bugger all down here on earth)
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The Twit Cleaner
2010-01-30 09:28:02Shortcut URL: http://t.conquent.com/O800
I seem to talk a lot about filtering the noise of all the yammering online. I also talk about how silly most of the applications names are, but I figured this one was worth mentioning as it really helps you understand your Twitter followers.
The Twit Cleaner (which is not a cheap prostitute for the Upper Class Twit of the Year) will run the most detailed analysis of who you're following that I've seen so far.
If you're not someone who uses twitter a lot you may ask, "why do I need to look at who I'm following? Shouldn't I know these people?" The answer is, yes, you SHOULD know these people, but following people on Twitter is often a lot like exchanging business cards at a mixer. You think you understand who that person is, and you want to return the favor because they gave you their card, but now they have direct access to you.
I'm mainly concerned with people who don't follow me back -- I follow people to have a conversation, or at least to have some mutual exchange of ideas. But there are accounts like the @MarsPhoenix or @stephenfry whom I 'm interested in, but I don't honestly expect them to be interested in me -- I don't want to use a tool that just automatically unfollows everyone who isn't following me, but I need a way to categorize the activity of the people I'm following.
The Twit Cleaner has three main categories which they then break down into subsections. It takes a few minutes to run, and they actually send you a message when it's done rather than waiting on your browser like friendorfollow.com. I assume if you're one of those twitterers following 50,000 people that it would take much more than a few minutes. But the report you get back is pretty interesting.
For completeness, here's the list I got back when I ran my report (knowing they're Aussies explains the terms and spelling).
Dodgy Behaviour
- Try To Sell You Crap
Uses common spam phrases - Nothing but Links
Posts nothing but links - Tweeting the same links all the time
Duplicates the same link more than 25% of the time - Tweeting Identical Tweets All The Time
Posts the same tweet too many times - Other Dodgy Behaviour, Now Absent
Any dodgy behaviour, plus haven't posted in ages
No Activity in Over a Month
- No Activity In Over A Month
No tweets in a very long time
Accounts that Ignore You
- Not Active Yet (Fewer Than 10 Tweets)
Fewer than 10 tweets - Don't Interact With Anyone
Never interacts with any of their followers - Hardly Follow Anyone
People that follow back less than 10% of the people who follow them - Not Following You
Have no followers at all
The page made it pretty easy to find out what accounts I wanted to toss immediately, and then take my time as I get through less and less critical categories. It also offers a tool to let you unfollow everyone on the list, with the option to exclude the accounts you want to keep (like the Mars rover and Sir Stephen Fry for example).
I did a quick paranoia test on myself by running the Twit Cleaner from the Conquent account (which is just a company placeholder and just follows @bissell) and I was happy to see that my daily Twitter account didn't show up in any of the garbage categories.
But, at the end of the day, while the automatic filters are getting better, I still think there's nothing like a little human oversight on these sorts of things...
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Be sure to see my blog over at Cloudenity. This week's topic: Identity Isn't Just for Users Anymore