Don't be shy! blog@ohtwitter.com - @dacort - @MarinaMartin
Please send this to anyone in areas affected by Gustav who is NOT familiar with “social media.” PLEASE DON’T JUST BLOG ABOUT IT! Many people have already left their Internet connections. Try to SMS a summary of this information to them, or call them.
If you have (or want to make) any media contacts, please spread the word so they can pass it along to local residents, shelters, etc.
All messages received at the “gustavhelp” or “gustavsafe” Twitter accounts will be re-posted for public viewing at http://gustavtracker.appspot.com.
PLEASE follow this public page if you are in a position to help. Notices may also be posted manually through this site.
SMS JOIN GUSTAVHELP to 40404 (you only need to do this once)
Send as many messages as you need to, but you must start each message with d gustavhelp
Include as much information as you can (how to find/reach you), but remember these messages are public. Do not hesitate to ask for any kind of help if you need it!
EXAMPLE: d gustavhelp Mary Smith on roof 1322 Magnolia St New Orleans help
EXAMPLE: d gustavhelp Joe Biffen 555-555-5555 need a place for my horse near 123 Anywhere St New Orleans
SMS JOIN GUSTAVSAFE to 40404 (you only need to do this once)
Send as many messages as you need to, but you must start each message with d gustavsafe
Include as much information as you can, but remember these messages are public.
EXAMPLE: d gustavsafe John Deveraux and family are safe (cats too!) in Kentucky
Dear Twitter,
I was one of your earliest adopters and have been one of your top supporters for a long time now. When others complained during your (endless) downtime, I was there with tweets of encouragement, determined to withstand the hard times with you.
No more.
Twitter has given me a lot: a job, a wonderful boyfriend, and an amazing community, to name a few. I want to give back. But these days, I feel like I’m enabling a drug addict. (A Summize search for “abusive + Twitter” yields multiple pages likening you to an abusive partner.) You need someone to give it to you straight, so here it is.
We don’t need you.
We’re sticking around and eating out of your fridge while we wait for one of your competitors to iron out enough kinks to make for a stable jump. Relative to our relationship with you, the bar is pretty darn low.
Your attempts at “communicating” with your audience have been met with some praise. The people giving that praise are “nice” people. You don’t want to listen to them, because they’ll tell you what you want to hear so you’ll like them back. Me, I am not nice, and I’ll tell you that the more you open your mouths, the worse you make it for yourselves. I’ve been silent up until now, but the day I lost faith in your team was the day I watched your Scoble video interview and it hit me that you have NO IDEA what you are doing.
Ev, specifically: I’ve heard stories of you sleeping under your desk and not knowing where your next meal was coming from during the last dot-com bust. These stories made me respect you, because you knew how hard things could be, and this experience must make you a stronger, wiser person. I don’t know you personally, but I have a gut feeling that you are better than this. Speak up! DO SOMETHING! Or, acknowledge what’s happened and walk away now.
As far as I’m concerned, Twitter, you basically spit in my face and are laughing about it. If my company was in crisis, I’d be living at the office until things turned around. All your Twitter streams seem to tell me is that you’re doing anything but working. The fact that you openly tweet about your not-work pretty much boggles my mind.
So, you’re a free service, and you don’t owe us anything. Fair enough. But you have to monetize somehow, and you’re obviously building your user base to the size where you can profit via advertising to the masses. If you screw us over before you even START monetizing the site, we are all going to leave before you make a penny in profit. Any Business 101 text would suggest this is poor business practice.
Fucking over your developers - and I believe you’ve screwed over every single last one of them, at this point - only makes this worse. Why should they come back to you? How can they trust you will not pull the API out from under their feet again, whenever you damn well feel like it?
Not only that, but you have limited access to OUR OWN DATA by not letting me go back more than 20 pages. Knowing you, you probably deleted it by accident and neglected to ever make a backup. That’s not acceptable, just like Plaxo can’t take away 95% of your address book and expect us to be OK with it. Your endless sidebar - “We’re working to restore IM services to all users. Thanks for your patience!” - just makes me angry now, because if you were really working on it, it would have been done. Months ago. You seem to think you live in a magic world that no one else can possibly understand. You are wrong. You are not the first company to need to scale.
I’m still staying on Twitter, for now, because that’s where my friends are, and I would put up with a lot for my friends. But have no fantasies that I’m not poised to jump the very second a ship comes along. And then I will sing that new ship’s praises from the highest mountain.
You still have a chance, Twitter. The new boat hasn’t come yet (but it’s close). Get your act together. Make some promises, and do not allow yourselves to break them under ANY circumstances. Unless you do this reallyreally soon, I will not be maintaining a pro-Twitter blog (notice our recent silence? It was not because we were too busy.) and I won’t be telling everyone I meet about you, like I used to. Building trust will take time, but if you act right now, you might be able to save yourself.
Good luck.
Marina
For everyone who complains that Twitter is a waste of time, here’s a video of Justin Wickett who uses it to control his house lights, saving on his electric bill and potentially scaring off would-be robbers.
Control Lights with Twitter from Justin Wickett on Vimeo.
Sure, you don’t need Twitter to do this … there are plenty of existing non-Twitter options, like Indigo, xPL Monkey, Smarthome, or Automated Home.
Of course, why stop at automating your lights?
(Hat tip to Engadget commenters for suggesting the automation options.)
Chris Brogan shares a humorous Twitter discovery.
Chris Hudson considers some revenue-generating models for Twitter.
My response:
I think there’s a lot of potential for a freemium model, actually. For one, a paid account could have access to keyword tracking, while free accounts would not. (Or maybe would be limited to tracking just a couple terms.) Tracking is a huge bonus for me, as it’s great for everything from finding neighbors to clients to blog readers to people with common interests.
I would happily pay a monthly fee to use Twitter, and many other people have expressed a similar willingness. Overall adoption would decrease, of course, but on the flipside, they’d actually be generating revenue sans advertising.
Speaking of advertising, there’s always the good ol’ “ad-free paid version.”
If Twitter was your company, how would you turn a profit? Share in the comments!
@Phil801 learned yesterday that his baby daughter Serenity has leukemia. He has been live-blogging and Twittering the experience as it unfolds.
This kind of leukemia can be successfully treated 80% of the time, but Serenity is in for a 2.5 year battle. We know she’ll make it through with flying colors, and here’s how you can help:
Thanks to Jesse Stay for creating the widget
Twitter’s been having some growing pains this week, as I’m sure we’ve all noticed.
Yes, it’s frustrating.
But let’s have a little perspective: we pay nothing for Twitter. Speaking for myself, I’ve gotten a lot out of that $0 investment, including an amazing boyfriend, a new home, a wonderful tech community in Seattle, and a wealth of fabulous people that I genuinely consider to be my friends.
Twitter’s run by a few human beings, without whom we would have no Twitter at all. I’m sure you’ve had your own bad week, yes?
Let’s be good sports and cut out the endless “Death of Twitter” blog posts. Complaining isn’t going to do anything to change the situation.
Here are some things you can do to help Twitter:
Think you have the best explanation for what Twitter is? Prove it — submit a video clip of 140 seconds or less to the What Is Twitter video contest.
Prizes include an 8GB iPhone, 1GB Shuffle, and t-shirts from StartupWear.com, with more to be announced soon.
For contest rules and deadlines, head to What Is Twitter.
As best friends in elementary school, Andy Rice and Avi Solomon dreamed of one day chasing tornadoes. Fast forward to today, and they’re living that dream — and taking the Twitterverse along for the ride.
Follow @stormchase to get live updates as the duo chases storms around the country. Also be sure to check out the live webcam on their website.
Heard about a great new place in town to hang out with friends? Did the latest Yelp newsletter make you want to head out the door?
Add your local hotspots to the Tweetspots wiki. (Wiki password is twitter.)
Don’t wait for someone else to organize the next local Twitter event — organize it yourself! You just may be surprised by how many new friends show up.