Anyways, i signed up this morning for the account and found i had 8 Invites/Nominations.

I posted this on twitter, boy did i underestimate the demand for the invites. Within a few minutes i had a few 100 @replies, from people not even following me. So… who to send the invites to? I decided to be fair, and offer it to the first 7 people who Retweeted my last tweet. People already following me obviously had the advantage (since the last tweet was already on their timeline)

Aneways, most of the invites have been sent (Note: Google will not send out invites immediately, as and when they have capacity they will send out the invites, see above)

If you get an invite, play it forward and send others!

If you have a wave account and havent figured out how to invite people, just search for ‘Invite Others’ in your inbox window and the wave to invite people will come up.

If you are on wave, feel free to add me:
My email address:
Initial of my First Name+surname:
(i+my surname)(at)googlewave (dot) com

p.s I am out of invites, the 2 left have already been won by others see my tweets

Funny as hell, though it got me thinking. In this age when we broadcast our lives to the world… on Facebook, twitter, Friendfeed etc. what are the risks? Its very easy for an Ex or someone else to obsess. 14 Years ago, when i started on the net i never would have dreamed about giving my real name up. I always used handles on IRC/Forums/MSN etc. Actually i have only started using my real name in the last few years…. what are your thoughts? Is there a danger to it?

However, out of integrity i have to call out an issue i see with the service. Upon going to the site i was faced with the message below.

Apparently the site is only supported on Windows, and the only browser supported is Microsoft Internet Explorer 6!

I am not sure who is assisting Nokia with their social media strategy, but it clearly shows a misunderstanding of twitter and the community.

Why? Well worldwide Internet explorer has the most market share, but on my site StartupAfrica the most common browser is Firefox. I also wrote a post which clearly shows that early adopters favor Firefox. The same early adopters that are on twitter!

Lesson: If you are going to play where early adopters are, make sure your website and systems cater for them.

Previously, it recommended people from the local SA blogosphere, that i had been following on twitter.  This morning, it recommended me the twitter stream of Umair Hague who blogs at Harvard Business Online as a discussion leader. I already follow his tweets and it’s the first time i have seen a recommendation for a twitter stream. (See the screen shot below)

A few points:

• I subscribe to his blog at harvard business online
• I subscribe to his twitter stream (On twitter and not rss)

So the question is that, has Google figured out that the discussion leader blog, is written by the same person as the twitter account and since i am a subscriber to the feed it recommended to me the tweets as well?

Or

Is it that people with similar RSS feed’s as me, are also subscribing to the RSS feed for Umair’s twitter account?

Stii was kind enough to provide me with a dump of all blog posts that were tagged with ‘Xenophobia’. Though there is currently no way to link twitter usernames to the blog posts. Therefore i have uploaded the spreadsheet to Google docs, anyone can edit it as long as you have an account. Please add your twitter username to all your own blog posts or any others that you may recognize. the rest of the fields are optional. If you cannot edit the spreadsheet send me your blog url and i will capture it:

Email: (idhorat)-(@)-(gmail)dot(com)
Twitter: ismaild
———————
Invite to collaborate on the document:

I’ve shared a document with you called “xenophobia_blogs_google”:

Capture Directly onto the sheet (Use this to see if your blog post is included on the list):
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pTD3FWar02UT7peKMx1YXSg

Capture in the Form (Use this, it’s the easiest option)

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?key=pTD3FWar02USt49zxHtknJQ&email=true

It’s not an attachment — it’s stored online at Google Docs. To open this document, just click the link above.

Doing an analysis on effects of social media / twitter / blogs in a
crisis situation, I need to link up the blog posts to twitter
usernames. If you have blogged about the Xenophobia please claim it and
add your name under the column ‘Twitter username’
————

I would also appreciate if you could pass this on to any bloggers you know that have blogged about the situation.

When Google launched image based mobile ads. i briefly covered what google mobile ads were missing and why context (what is the person doing?) is important. Twitter offers that context, add a location to that and your pretty much have killer mobile advertising. Its contextual to what the person is doing and localized.

No one out there can offer advertising for mobile as relevant as that right now , not even Google. This is the reason Google was quick to snap up Jaiku, they realise that twitter is actually a threat to their mobile advertising business. Some people may have been confused about why i sent this tweet, it seems a far fetched but Twitter is actually a threat to Google mobile ads business, which according to reports could be a larger market then internet advertising.

Links to the original twitter updates: 1,2,3

Initially, i took it as the truth but twitter does not have a mass delete fuction(Why dont they?) and it did not seem to be affecting me. So i did not bother with message deletion.

Now an hour later, i get this in my timeline. Take note of the time difference.

This whole saga is extremely interesting. First Twitter was dragged through coals and then Grouptweet for being a security risk. Now i know in the world of marketing the customer is NEVER wrong, no matter what they do but lets take a look at the facts.

It’s a fact that neither Grouptweet nor twitter have a security issue. Grouptweet has a pretty simple principal, it takes any messages directed at a specific twitter account and retwits(no pun intended) it. Since some users have public timelines it uses direct messages to ensure privacy for the group.

Twitterholics which first covered grouptweet said

“The service at GroupTweet.com lets you send out private tweets to a group of people at once. To use GroupTweet, create a Twitter account for your group and register it at GroupTweet.”

The website also clearly states “Create a twitter account for your group” & “Tell all members to follow the GROUP account”

As you can see the instructions are pretty clear. Now, would you not expect the writer for a high ranking technology publisher to understand this simple concept?

Anyone who has been involved in any kind of technology industry realises that majority of the time issues are related to the user not understanding the application or the UI not being intuitive enough for the user. Anyone that has been involved in this field for a while would ask the following question anytime someone comes to them with a problem:

“Did you do anything different today?” / “Install any software?”

In this case it should have been:

“Were you playing with any new twitter Apps?”

While also verifying with other users if they were facing something similar, this far we have only had a report of one other user. Though someone posted in the comments of the article that the same thing had happened to them a week ago but they managed to figure it out.

Just these simple questions & common sense would have avoided this whole debacle. Also note in the twitter timeline all updates by 3rd party apps clearly state which application initiated the update. It takes only a few seconds to review this.

I see this kind of thing regularly from new hires, in an effort to impress they will discover a ‘new case’, but i ask them questions as it could be someones reputation/job on the line. Eventually they learn to ask the questions themselves. The motivation is recognition and not discovery.

In a rush to get the breaking story Michael Arrington did not bother to ask any questions, he wrote first asked questions later. Also take a look at the time the screenshot was taken on the original article. The article most likely started soon after the tweet went up without any questions asked.

Now they may argue thats the whole point of a blog, its the opinions that matter and not the questions but when you look at the article there were no opinions. It was a ‘ Breaking NEWS’ story, nothing more. They could also say that it was due to the article that the issue was figured out but that would be wrong as well. (See above for why it would have been a simple to figure out)

I believe the more popular and the higher your readership the HIGHER your responsibility should be to ask questions. As the repercussions are worse. Now would you not want to to feel safe in the knowledge that the high ranking technology publishing companies you rely on for news such as techcrunch ask those questions before they publish?

You astute readers may have noticed i avoided using the word blog, as the site no longer qualifies as a blog. It’s a publishing company pure and simple and even though they have been highly critical of mainstream media. The only difference between traditional media is a sensational headline gets more newspapers of the stands on the web it means more traffic. As long as the ’supposed’ mainstream ‘blogs’ dont ask simple questions and follow some standard journalistic practices mainstream media are here to stay.

Therein lies the the paradox, when you ‘Monetize’ it stops becoming about expressing yourself or making a change it’s about the traffic and revenue or taking down CNET(See techcrunch for that article).

I hope we have all learned a lesson, cry wolf too many times and people start to doubt your authenticity.

I personally just logged on to twitter this morning and as you can see i have been posting tweets regularly. However my internet is provided by Du and the post seems to refer areas covered by Etisalat.

Now, If it is in fact true, this is perhaps the silliest censorship i have ever seen due to the varied ways you can access twitter. As a last resort you could still use SMS. They would need to block sending SMS to the twitter number in the UK as well to achieve this, but i fail to understand WHY would they even want to?

If anyone has trouble accessing twitter let me know, i will be going out later and will test the site from one of Etisalats hotspots.