internet
TweepMe Data Extraction
Mar 17th
So i was intrigued after writing my last post about TweepMe just exactly what someone would be letting themselves in for if they did sign up to the service, what accounts they could expect to see updates from etc.
Well, curiosity got the better of me so I threw some code together to scrape their pages and cross reference that with the relevant twitter page for the user and wandered away while it did it’s job. When I returned it had spat out a file with just shy of 2,000 people (probably more signed up since then, that was just how many was showing at time of scrape). For each person listed on TweepMe I retrieved:
- Twitter account name
- Name
- Location
- Website
- Following Count
- Followers Count
- Update Count
- Bio
I’ve had a quick spy through this file, and as i suspected it is very heavy on the following:
Product / services accounts – radio stations etc – aka you’re going to be spammed.
Massive following – just wanted more followers, that simple.
SEO and “Social Media guru” etc.
~250 accounts with < 10 followers looking to beef their numbers.
And worryingly, the top 5 accounts alone are responsible for 128,000 tweets since their inception, thats some serious time line flooding!
Having a look for one of my interests, a quick scan for ‘photo’ turned up only 87 tweeps mentioning that in their data, not a high ratio at all for my liking.
If you want a spy through the data yourself, you can grab a copy here:
I’m keen to hear anything interesting that anyone might turn up, so please do comment if you find anything interesting about the data.
~Shepy
UPDATE: After a tweet from @AlohaArleen, who presumably has something to do with the site, I’d like to share a couple of tweets about this post, just to make sure there is no misunderstanding about this data:
AlohaArleen : @Shepy You can’t use data extraction on the TweepMe site. The pages do not show all the users! Not even an acculmanation! FAIL! #tweepme
Shepy: @AlohaArleen How is it a fail, i scraped what was available, i never said it’s exhaustive, infact i said it wasnt. Defensive much? #tweepme
Shepy: @AlohaArleen Those accounts are reg’d, and so the data does give an accurate display of some of the accounts expected to follow. #tweepme
Tweepme, actually, no dont!
Mar 17th
So there is a huge buzz going about at the moment regarding http://www.tweepme.com – and the premise is basically this:
You sign up on the page, using your twitter username and password. Your account auto follows every other TweepMe user over a period of time, as does theirs meaning that everyone ends up following everyone.
So basically, I only really see it being useful for people that actually care about the follow count and want to increase it, or people that want to try and spam out their stuff to a larger audience. Whilst I can understand and appreciate the latter, is blindly adding several thousand people to your timeline / updates really the best way to do that?
To get it kick started, they are offering “free lifetime memberships to the first 5,000 Tweeple who register.” so straight away you know this is going to turn into a paid for service later, which will bring its own problems.
For a start you’re going to have 5,000+ followers, think about how hectic your timeline gets now and how hard it can be to keep up and see what you want from certain people, that’s only going to get worse with huge numbers of followers. Most of those people who are following you will be people who care about high follow count, which often goes hand in hand with high post count, lets say 30 per day (which isn’t overly generous) and you’re already at 150,000 tweets a day from people you don’t know and potentially share no interests with. The people who are not there for a high user count are ones that want to reach a large audience, so you can be sure of a tweet or two a day from them about their services or site or whatever. And that’s just public feed…
If you are following them and likewise they are following you, be ready for the incoming spam DM. How long do you think it will take for spammers to realise they can *AUTOMATICALLY* get 5,000+ followers and be able to spam them? Not long at all, you can be sure of that!
Whilst I realise you can un-follow anyone who annoys you, or even the bulk of the auto adds, how quickly do you think you can go through and manually un-follow all the people it added and avoid those you want to keep / already had? The service doesn’t even offer the ability to auto delete them, instead making it out like a good thing that you keep the followers if you leave – “If at ANY point a member no longer wishes to participate, they can end their subscription and KEEP their followers!” – Yet no mention of the ability to remove entirely, and have the service un-follow all those that it followed.
And while I’m on about what isn’t mentioned on the site, how about these for glaring omissions:
- Privacy policy
- Spam policy
- Abuse policy
- Terms and conditions
You’re expected to put your twitter username and password in a site with none of these available, no mention of what else is done with your username and password etc. Certainly not for me.
Twitter is becoming bigger and bigger every day, and with all the current media attention that’s only going to escalate at a rate of knots, which means an influx of the ‘myspace users’ type of account. This is exactly the service they will gravitate towards, and therefore be followed by your account.
Personally I like to keep my timeline relatively clean, it consists of tweeple that I have a shared interest with, that tweet about things I like or perhaps even just share geography with. Whatever the reason, every person I’m following I’ve chosen to have in my feed because I’m interested in the things they have to say, and I would assume the same for those that follow me.
If this service was as opt-in as it claims to be, then it would simply send you a mail with the details of say 20 tweepme users a day, and you could select if you wanted to follow them or not, instead of just automatically adding them all, that would make it a much better service in my opinion.
If you want a good way to find people that are interested in the same things as you, then I would suggest you try the TweeterTags service I mentioned in my Top Ten Tools to Twitter post. There you can search for people that have tagged themselves as being interested in a certain topic, and if you tag yourself with all of the things that interest you then you will find that your follow count increases as others find you in the tags and follow you from there.
Likewise, if you want to find people who are geographically close to you (and can even sub filter by keyword) then take a look at NearbyTweets and take a look through those people who live nearby and see what they are tweeting about.
I find it interesting that the @tweepme account has been suspended, no doubt for triggering some limit on number of follows per day / per hour / whatever. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this happened to some of the users of the service as well. Remember, its your username and password being used, you give them authority to do whatever they wish with your account, and that includes adding so many people in such a short time as to get your account canned.
All comments and suggestions welcome in the comments below…
~Shepy
Top Ten Tools to Twitter
Mar 2nd
Twitter can be an extremely valuable and useful resource, and also very fun, but only if used to its full potential. If you are new to twitter, and only just starting to get to grips with the service then you might wonder what all the fuss is about, I know I did when I first signed up (in fact I held off signing up for so long for just that reason).
I think Twitter really comes in to its own though when you start using the various tools available to make Twitter work for you, in the way that you want it to. I had considered writing a bit of a post about what Twitter is and how it can be used but I think that is covered excellently by the page at Tweeternet so rather than go over that again, I have decided to collect together some of the tools that I use which make Twitter such a great service for me. Here is that list, in alphabetical order:
Dabr – http://www.dabr.co.uk
Described sometimes as “m.twitter.com on steroids” this little page is great for connecting with mobile devices such as phones or PDAs. It splits down your messages into the normal home feed, your replies and your direct messages, so it can make it easier to handle sources and method of reply etc. This is the homepage of the PDA I use for twittering when downstairs away from the computer.
Polldaddy – http://twitter.polldaddy.com/
One thing that Twitter is great for is asking questions, be that asking for help with something you need to know or are stuck with, or alternatively you might just want people’s opinion on something. If it’s the latter, then often a poll can be a great way to quickly and easily get those opinions from your followers, so something like Polldaddy makes that as quick and simple as possible.
Twe2 – http://www.twe2.com
Until recently Twitter used to offer the ability to receive SMS updates, but sadly this was ceased for most of Europe. Along came the nice people at Twe2 to provide this service again, still free of charge. Sign up to their service and you can get instant SMS updates to your phone when you get an @reply or direct message to your twitter account. SMS can be limited to XX per hour, and you can also limit the hours during which SMS will be sent so as not to disturb your sleep.
TweetDeck - http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/
Keeping the Twitter page open or remembering to check it periodically can become annoying very quick, so I recommend that you download and install a local desktop client to use Twitter through. Personally I like the layout and features of TweetDeck, splitting the messages, @replies and direct messages up into their own columns, much like the previously mentioned Dabr. It also has the ability to monitor Twitscoop so you can see subjects and topics that are trending on Twitter, a great way of keeping on top of the news as it happens, often even before it hits the major news sites. Add in simple, or often even automatic, URL shortening to make best use of those precious 140 characters and this really is an excellent client. Available for Windows or Mac via the Adobe Air Platform. [And Linux, thanks to Chris in the comments for letting me know!]
TweeterTags – http://www.tweetertags.com
Finding like minded people on Twitter can take a while, and can often prove fruitless without trawling through friends-of-friends to find people with similar interest. At least, that is how it used to be until Tweetertags came along. This excellent service lets you tag yourself with the subjects and topics that interest you, such as ‘photography’ or perhaps ‘rock’ and have people find you via those tags. You can browse through the tags other people have assigned themselves, and when looking in any particular tag you are able to see a list of everyone who has tagged themselves, and go to their profile to follow them if you decide to. There is simply no better way to find likeminded tweeple than TweeterTags.
Tweetie – http://www.atebits.com/software/tweetie/
Not being an iPhone user I have no idea about which app is best to use for iPhone, so I had to turn to the good people of Twitter and see what they recommended. The overwhelming response was that Tweetie is by far and away the best, and most fully featured app for using Twitter from an iPhone. Not being a user of it I can’t say much more than that, but due to the device’s market share I couldn’t really write a post about Twitter apps without including at least one iPhone client.
TweetLater – http://www.tweetlater.com
When I first saw this service, I really couldn’t see much point in it, but the more and more I used Twitter the more I have come to love this service. The ability to send out tweets at a pre-scheduled time can be great for things such as birthday reminders, scheduled blog posts you want to tweet out, keep a constant stream of tweets going while you are away from the computer or perhaps to just space out a bunch of tweets you need to send in order to avoid flooding your followers timelines.
Twhirl – http://www.twhirl.org
Some people are limited by the amount of desktop real estate they can or will give over to twitter, in which case a client such as TweetDeck might just be too much for them. If you are looking for a smaller client that is still very useable and offers most of the features of TweetDeck, then you should consider taking a look at Twhirl, which offers a smaller interface much like that of an instant messaging client. Like TweetDeck this runs on Adobe Air, so is available for both Windows and Mac. [And Linux, thanks to Chris in the comments for letting me know!]
Twibble – http://www.twibble.de/twibble-mobile/
One of the great things about twitter is being able to connect to masses of people at any time, from anywhere. To make that work properly when you are out and about (and to get a Twitter fix when you are addicted!) you are going to need a client on your mobile phone. Twibble is an excellent client for this, working on any Java enabled mobile phone, and with integrated Twitpic you can upload those pics as they happen straight from your mobile.
TwitPic – http://www.twitpic.com
If you have a photo you want to share on Twitter, then by far the best and most popular way is to use the TwitPic service. Simply upload your picture, either via the computer or even direct from your mobile phone and they will even send out the tweet for you to announce it to your followers.
I’ve added the links to all of these tools to the navigation bar of this site so you don’t have to find this post if you come back later in search of them. This list is by no means exhaustive, and I would love to hear about any other Twitter tools you find useful via the comments at the bottom of the article.
~Shepy
Firefox Extensions
Feb 25th
I’d class myself as a fairly heavy internet user (addict you say? psssht!), and as such i like to have my firefox seriously beefed up with various extensions to make everything run exactly how i want it, so i thought i would put a quick post together to share them with you.
- Adblock Plus – Ads were yesterday! This extension is great for stripping adverts from pages, either by manually adding your own rules, or by using packs such as Fanboy’s List
- All-in-One Gestures – This extension allows you to execute common commands using mouse gestures, rocker navigation, scroll wheel navigation and page scrolling.
- All-in-One Sidebar – Sidebar control with award-winning user experience! Grab your history, addons, bookmarks etc all together in one handy hideaway sidebar.
- AutoPager – AutoPager is an extension for auto loading the next page in the background. Rather than clicking the next at the bottom of pages on Flickr, Twitter or wherever you simply keep scrolling down as it loads the next page in sequence. Loads of sites already configured, or the ability to add your own through a wizard interface.
- ColorZilla – Advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodie. Ideal for people that often need to check the exact colour of an element, such as designers and photographers etc.
- Copy as HTML Link – Creates an HTML link to the current page using the selected text and copies it.
- Download Statusbar – View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbarat the bottom of the browser rather than in a dedicated window.
- DownThemAll! – The mass downloader for Firefox with multipart spliting and resume etc, much like the usual download managers, but native to firefox.
- dragdropupload – This extension helps you to upload filesby simply dragging them in to the relevant box on a page.
- Exif Viewer – Allows you to view the EXIF information for any image you may happen across on a site but a simple right click.
- Extended Copy Menu – Provides the option to copy selection as plain text or html.
- Extension List Dumper – Dumps a list of the installed extensions, exactly what i used to make this post.
- FEBE – Backup your Firefox data, profile, extensions and everything. This has a few good uses, such as backing up before a migration to a new release, the ability to revert to old settings if things go wrong, or simply to be able to take your profile to another machine.
- Find In Numbers – Displays the number of matched items when searching in web pages.
- Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer – Synchronizes your bookmarks across machines automatically, with the added option of doing the same for passwords also. Synchronised bookmarks are also available by the www.foxmarks.com site from any browser.
- Greasemonkey – A User Script Manager for Firefo, allowing you to add the many userscripts around the web for doing on the fly changes to websites to have them working exactly as you want.
- gTranslate – Translates the selected text via Google Translate.
- Image Viewer – A cool gadget that lets you wiew only the images of any page. And if it is a photo gallery, then you see the enlarged photos.
- Link Alert – Changes the cursor to indicate the target of a link. Images will show an image icon, links to new windows will show a popup icon, scripts will show a script icon, etc.
- Linkification – Converts text links into genuine, clickable links, automatically and on the fly.
Ive just uninstalled this, slows rendering of pages by a good 75% – dont use IMO.
- MeasureIt – Draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any elements on a webpage.
- Menu Editor – Customize application menus such as the right click context menu to keep them uncluttered and ordered how you like.
- Organize Status Bar – Organise your status bar icons. Really useful if you have a lot of extensions that put items in the status bar and you want to remove or relocate some of them.
- Paste Email (original) – Paste email addresses and more into text fields. Great for storing commonly used strings such as email address, commonly used code snippets or whatever, which can then be inserted at the click of a mouse into any text entry field.
- Platypus – Dynamically create GreaseMonkey scripts.
- ReloadEvery – Reloads webpages every so many seconds or minutes
- Resurrect Pages – Resurrect dead pages, by finding their ghosts by providing links to Google Cache, Archive.org and various other archive services.
- Secure Login – A login extension similar to Opera’s Wand login.
- Socialite – Vote on and submit stories to reddit social news sites.
- Speed Dial – Direct access to your most visited websites, similar to Opera’s speed dial.
- Stop-or-Reload Button – Turns the stop and reload buttons into a single one. When you can stop, you have a Stop button, otherwise you have a Reload button.
- StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon Toolba, quick access to stumbling sites, voting on stumbleupon etc.
- translator – Website translation extension, to give instant translation of pages.
- Tree Style Tab – Show tabs like a tree, vertically down the side of the browser instead of horizontally, which is a must if you often have a lot of tabs open imo.
- Undo Closed Tabs Button – Add a toolbar and/or tab bar button to undo closed tabs
- Update Notifier – Notifies you when updates are available for your extensions and themes.
- URL Fixer - Fixes common misspellings in URLs entered in the address bar.
- View CookiesView cookies of the current web page.
- Youtube Tooltip- View Youtube video information in a tooltip when hovering over Youtube link.
Hopefully you might have found one or two in there that you are interested in, but if there is one you cant live without that i have missed then please let me know in the comments below :)
~Shepy