Category Archives: Twitter

Twitter

Twitter #SQLHelp Hash Tag Dos and Don’ts

Written on May 12, 2011 by in SQL Server, Twitter

If you’d like to get quick SQL Server help, the #SQLHelp hash tag is a fun way to get it.  My original “How to Use the #SQLHelp Hash Tag” post hit a couple of years ago, and it’s time for a followup.  Read that post first, and then come back here for some basic guidelines.

Don’t use #SQLHelp to promote your blog. Congratulations on writing an informative post, and we’re sure it’s got some useful information in it, but the #SQLHelp hash tag is for people who are asking questions.  Unless your blog post was written to answer a question currently live on #SQLHelp, please refrain from tweeting about your blog.

Do answer a #SQLHelp question with a product if that’s the solution. Vendors build products to solve pain points, and sometimes those pain points surface as #SQLHelp questions.  If the answer is a product – whether it’s a free one or a paid one – then feel free to mention it and provide a link.  If you’ve got personal experience with the product, that’s even better.  If you’re a vendor, you might wanna disclose that in your tweet.

Don’t demo #SQLHelp at conferences by saying, “Say hello, #SQLHelp!” Immediately, dozens of users around the world will reply to you, and the #SQLHelp hash tag will become unusable for half an hour or more.  Rather than saying Hello World, ask the audience to give you a question, and then post that question on #SQLHelp.

Do suggest that long discussions move to a Q&A web site. Sometimes questions need a lot more detail than we can get in 140 characters.  If you notice a discussion turning into a long back-and-forth conversation, helpfully suggest that the questioner read my tips on writing a good question and then create a post on whatever site you prefer.

Don’t post jobs to #SQLHelp. Use the #SQLJobs hash tag instead.

Do thank people who give you #SQLHelp. This is a group of volunteers who love to lend a helping hand.  It’s like getting consulting help for free around the clock.  High five ‘em if they helped you get through your day easier.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Stop Using Twifficiency, You Bozos

Written on August 17, 2010 by in Twitter

Every few minutes, I see somebody tweet something about their Twifficiency score.  Now, I don’t have a problem with shallow people who want to compare their metrics with others – okay, maybe I do – but let’s take a step back for a second and look at what’s happening when you use that tool.

When you first visit Twifficiency.com, notice the warning at the bottom of the page:

Twifficiency Warning

Twifficiency Warning

The warning states, “Twifficiency will tweet your score on your behalf. Do not use this app if you do not consent to this.”

They’re not going to give you another warning – they are going to tweet for you.  This will piss off your followers because the rest of us truly don’t care about your Twifficiency score.  We may not even care that much about you, and posting vain metrics is a surefire way to get us to care less about you.

Next up, when you click that “Calculate my Twifficiency” button, read the warning Twitter gives you:

Twitter Warning

Twitter Warning

This gives Twifficiency.com the right to do things with your account, like post messages, follow people, change your profile, you name it.

Are you really comfortable letting a complete stranger do absolutely anything to your Twitter account just to get a meaningless metric?

Because if so, I’d like you to send me your Twitter login info, and I’ll be happy to give you a really cool random number.

When I see a Twifficiency tweet from someone, my first thought is, “They don’t take their own data seriously – there’s no way I’d hire them and let them touch my company’s data.”

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Why I Hate TweetRandomizer

Written on May 15, 2010 by in Twitter

You’re following cool people, and you want to tell the world just how cool they are.  TweetRandomizer.com is a site that will pick a random one of your friends once per day and announce to everyone:

Random Tweet

Random Tweet

You think you’re promoting people, but here’s the reality:

  • Random data is useless. I don’t know WHY you’re following this user.  It could be your wife, your doctor, your favorite TV personality, or one of your coworkers that guilted you into following them because they followed you first.
  • Some people follow everybody. They just autofollow everybody back automatically, so they end up following Viagra dealers.  I don’t want to take the time to figure out if you’re one of those wackos.
  • There’s too many people using it. I’m starting to get a dozen messages per morning that are essentially random noise.

Bottom line: if you didn’t write it yourself, I don’t want to read it.

So I’m unfollowing anybody who uses this tool, or a tool like it to automatically send out random data.  When you’re ready to write all your tweets yourself, let me know, and I’ll follow you again.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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I wrote another book. Already.

Written on April 7, 2010 by in Twitter

When I got done writing just two chapters in Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting, I swore I’d never write another book again. No way. I tweeted that the authoring process was like punching yourself in the junk as hard as you could while editors stood behind you asking you to punch harder and faster.

The Simple Twitter Book

The Simple Twitter Book

But whaddya know….

This book is completely different, though, and v1 is more of a booklet than a book.  While I was on a week-long Caribbean cruise with my mom, I decided to bang out a short ebook covering as much as I could about Twitter. My Twitter articles get tens of thousands of hits per month, and I figured these kinds of people would love to read an ebook all about getting started with Twitter.  When I walked off the plane after the cruise, I would call the book Version 1.0 and be done with it.  I’d publish it online, give it away for free, and see how it goes.

The result is The Simple Twitter Book, a free 24-page PDF that covers:

  • Why your location and description really matters
  • Why you shouldn’t change your photo willy-nilly
  • How to build a more-information page and a better background
  • Where to find cool people to follow
  • Why you shouldn’t follow everybody who follows you
  • How to reply, retweet, and send direct messages
  • The best tools to share links, photos, and music
  • How companies can get started with Twitter
  • How to get more followers

You, dear reader, already know everything in it, but if you agree with what’s in it, the best thing you can do for me is get the word out.  Send the link to your friends, tweet about it, or email a copy to somebody who’s trying to learn Twitter.  You can download it now.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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How to Use the #SQLHelp Hash Tag on Twitter

Written on December 18, 2009 by in SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication, Twitter

You’ve got questions, we’ve got answers.

No, not Radio Shack – Twitter.  Right now, no matter when you’re reading this, there are people on Twitter who can answer quick questions for you.  Thanks to an excellent idea by Aaron Nelson (Blog – @SQLVariant), it’s even easier now.  In this post, I’ll show how to ask questions and how to answer them.

How to Ask #SQLHelp Questions

Sign up for a Twitter account.  You don’t have to follow anyone, but if you want to, I’d suggest following my SQL Server Twitter list instead of individual people.  I’ve got a post on how to use Twitter lists, but in a nutshell, they let you keep in touch with a lot of people who focus on a particular topic.  The cool part is that their tweets don’t clutter up your main Twitter page, which is important because there’s several hundred SQL Server folks on Twitter as of this writing.

When you need help, write a tweet and include #SQLHelp in the tweet, like this:

Asking a #SQLHelp Question

Asking a #SQLHelp Question

If your question involves more than 140 characters, you’ve got a few options:

  • Post a question to StackOverflow if it’s a programming question, to ServerFault if it’s an infrastructure question, or DBA.StackExchange.com if it’s a SQL question.  Tweet the link to your question.
  • Upload screenshots to TwitPic.  It’s a free service that tweets the images you upload.  When you write the description, make sure to include #SQLHelp so that the smart folks see it.
  • Upload files to FileDropper.com and tweet the link to the file.  Remember that anything you upload is public – don’t upload your databases.  It’s a great way to show query execution plans though.

After you click Update to post your question, click on the @YourName link on the right side of your Twitter home page.  For me, it says @BrentO, because that’s my Twitter name.  This page is your replies page – it shows anyone who’s mentioned your name.  Then sit tight – as people reply to you, you’ll see the new tweets on this page.

When you reply back to users, the default Twitter action is to put their @Name at the beginning of the tweet.  Edit the tweet first and put a period and a space before their name, like this:

Public Replies on Twitter

Public Replies on Twitter

This is because if you just start the tweet with @Mike_Walsh, then the only people who will see it are the folks who follow both you and Mike.  If you start the tweet with anything other than an @ sign, then anyone who follows you will see your reply – regardless of whether or not they’re following Mike.

Don’t include the #SQLHelp tag in the reply, either.  That just helps keep the #SQLHelp search cleaner.

When you get your final answer, post it a thank-you back to #SQLHelp, like this:

Got My #SQLHelp Answer

Got My #SQLHelp Answer

That way people know when your question is answered.  If your question hasn’t been answered within an hour, you can repeat it again, but please don’t repeat it in less than an hour.

How to Answer #SQLHelp Questions

Set up a search in your Twitter client for #SQLHelp, or use one of these alternate methods:

As you’re interacting with the questioner, remember that they’re probably new to Twitter, and that you’re probably not the only one working with them.  I open up two web pages – Search.Twitter.com with a search for the questioner’s username (so I can see who’s replying to them) and the questioner’s Twitter page (so I can see everything they respond back).  That way you can keep duplicate interactions to a minimum.

Thanks again to Aaron Nelson (Blog – @SQLVariant) for suggesting this!  I think it’s a great way for the community to get even more involved in real time.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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Twitter historical database of my tweeps

Written on December 3, 2009 by in SQL Server, SQLServerPedia Syndication, Twitter

In my never-ending attempts to distract you from doing real work, I give you something you have absolutely no use for: a SQL Server database backup with about 100k tweets from people I’ve followed over the last couple of months.

I use Tweet-SQL to cache and analyze a lot of things from Twitter.  This database isn’t the actual one I use, but it’s just an export of a subset of tables:

  • Users – the tweeps.  The “id” field is Twitter’s internal number for you, not my own – comes from their API.  The cached_* and subscription_* fields are my own, not Twitter’s.
  • UsersHistory – whenever I fetch results from the Twitter API and someone’s information has changed, I store the old version of their profile in this table.  Typically, the field that’s changing is their followers_count.  The “id” field is my own identity number, not from Twitter’s API.
  • Statuses – the tweets (and yes, Twitter calls them Statuses).  The “id” field is from Twitter’s API.

Sample Queries

This will give you the most loudmouthed tweeps:

SELECT s.user_id, u.screen_name, COUNT(*) AS tweets
FROM dbo.Statuses s
INNER JOIN dbo.Users u ON s.user_id = u.id
GROUP BY s.user_id, u.screen_name
ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC

Resulting in:

Top 10 Loudmouths

Top 10 Loudmouths

And this query gives you the hours when people tweet the most (in Central time):

SELECT DATEPART(hh, created_at) AS TweetHour, COUNT(*) AS RECS
FROM dbo.Statuses
GROUP BY DATEPART(hh, created_at)
ORDER BY COUNT(*) DESC

Resulting in:

Lively Times of Day

Lively Times of Day

Things to Know About the Data

There’s some holes in the data when my server bombed or the Twitter API didn’t return data correctly, and unfortunately, a lot of those holes are around the PASS Summit.  I wanted to refetch that data before giving you this database, but I’m running out of time and I’ve got other things on my plate, so I figured I’d just let this loose as is.

The database doesn’t include people with protected tweets, and it only includes things I’d see on my home page.  If someone mentioned me but I’m not following them, you won’t see it in this database export.

You can download the SQL Server database backup and restore it onto a SQL 2005 (or newer) server.  If you find anything interesting in the backup, post it here in the comments.  I’d love to see what you find!  And of course, I’d highly recommend Tweet-SQL – it’s a fun little tool if you’d like to analyze Twitter data like who’s following who, who gets retweeted the most, or what you’re missing when you’re gone.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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How to Use Twitter Lists

Written on October 30, 2009 by in Twitter
The Simple Twitter Book

Download My Free Twitter Book

Twitter’s newest feature, Twitter Lists, let you do two things:

  • Follow people without really “following” them
  • Follow topics, not individual people

For example, I do a lot of database work, so I’ve built a SQL Server Twitter list.  It’s got over 300 people who are active in the SQL Server community, but I don’t need to hear their every tweet.  I just want to be able to stick my head in the SQL Server world every now and then and see what’s going on.

When I go to my home page, I see a list of Lists on the right hand side.  I can click on these lists and see what the group of people is up to – but I don’t actually have to be following those people.

The first question you probably want to ask is, “So Brent, how do I make a list?”  Well, hold up – lemme show you something else slick first, because you might not want to make your own.

How to Follow Someone’s List

Lists on My Twitter Home Page
Lists on My Twitter Home Page

Go to http://twitter.com/BrentO/lists and you can see my lists.  Click on any list, and you’ll see the current activity in that list.  Click the Follow button, and the list will be added to your home page.

Here’s the best part – you’re not actually following the people on that list.  It doesn’t clutter up your home page, and you don’t have to keep on track of new group members or keep it clean from spam.  Somebody else is doing the work for you!

Here’s my lists:

How to Find More Lists

Listorious is a Twitter list directory with a list of their Top 100 Lists, plus some fun ones like:

How to Create and Manage Twitter Lists

Twitter Lists button

Twitter Lists button

Even with the abundance of great lists out there, you’re still going to want to create your own family, friends, and coworkers lists.  When you’re viewing anyone’s Twitter profile as shown here, click on the Lists button.  You can add them to any of your existing lists (only the ones you manage, not the ones other people started) or create a new list at the bottom.

The best part is that you don’t have to follow someone in order to add them to a list!  I’ve got dozens of people in my SQL Server list that I’m not actually following day-to-day.

A faster way to add multiple people is to go to your friends page, and click on the Lists icon next to each person – but of course this only works for the folks you’re following.

This is still painful, but good news is coming.  Twitter clients like TweetDeck are already hard at work converting their group features into lists instead, because lists are accessible via the Twitter API.  In the near future, you’ll be able to manage your Twitter lists from inside TweetDeck without bailing out to the clunky Twitter web user interface.

If used right, this will help you stay in touch with more people without cluttering up your Twitter stream.  For example, I can see myself following more Microsoft employees, more Chicago area news sites, or folks from my hometown – without actually having to follow their every word.  If you see someone unfollow you, it might not be personal – they might just be following you through a list instead.

Wonder Who’s Got You In a List?

Lists You Show Up In

Lists You Show Up In

On your Twitter home page in the right side, under Lists, click View All.  After the page loads, click the Lists Following You tab.  You’ll see the lists of lists you appear in.

I find this hilarious, because I can see what kinds of lists other people are building, and how they name ‘em.  At the moment, I’m in lists like “engaging” and “all-things-geek.”  Can’t argue with that.  You can also see the number of people following that particular list, and how many people you’re matched up with.  It’s a neat way to find friends you might not have otherwise stumbled across.

More of My Twitter Articles

Want More Blogging & Twitter Tips? Follow me on Twitter. I tweet whenever I post a new blog entry, so you’ll always know when I’ve got new stuff. See you online!

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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PASS Session Preview: Practical Social Networking for IT People

Written on October 12, 2009 by in Twitter

If you groan when you read the words “social networking,” you’re in the right place.

I’m a practical guy.  If a tool doesn’t help me get my job done better/faster/cheaper, I’m not interested in screwing around with it.  Today, I’m going to explain how some social media tools help me, and why I don’t bother screwing around with others.  Jason Massie (Blog – Twitter) and I are going to be talking about variations of this at the PASS Summit in Seattle in a couple of weeks.

Twitter: My Virtual Peer Group

IT people often work in isolation.  Database administrators don’t have other DBAs to use as a sounding board.  BI architects don’t travel in packs either.  The higher up you go on the IT ladder, the less peers you have at a company.

Right now, there are dozens – maybe hundreds – of people with your exact job on Twitter.  If you follow them, you’ll have a virtual peer group available around the clock.  I follow interesting database administrators, architects, and people at Microsoft, and as a result, my Twitter feed is intensely interesting to me.

As a blogger, I like Twitter because my readers can give me fast feedback.  Some people will catch your blog post when it hits Twitter, read it immediately, and ask questions over Twitter.  It’s a fast forum for questions and answers that feels more lively than leaving comments.

If I followed people that I thought were boring, then I’d find Twitter boring.  If you find yourself in that situation, start unfollowing everybody who doesn’t make you smile, and only follow people that really, really, REALLY interest you.  Just because someone follows you doesn’t mean you have to follow them back – at the moment, I’m following around 500 people, but over 2,500 are following me.  I’m sure the other 2,000 people are really interesting, but if I followed them all, Twitter would be a firehose that I could no longer consume.

Ping.fm Broadcasts Stuff Everywhere Else

I have a lot of friends on a lot of different social networks.  Some people prefer Facebook, some like Myspace, some love Twitter.  When I post a status update on Ping.fm, it posts that same update across all of the sites I’m going to describe next.  Ping makes it easy for me to be everywhere at once.

When I start work in the morning, or when I have a significant event that I wanna tell everybody, I’ll post it on Ping.  It’s not a tool to carry on conversations – it’s just for broadcasts.  I highly recommend using the plugin PingPressFM on your WordPress blog: it automatically sends a ping whenever you publish a new blog entry.

Additionally, when I want to post a photo of somewhere I’m visiting (or more often, something I’m eating), I’ll email it from my iPhone to my Ping.fm address.  Ping takes the photo attachment and uploads it to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Brightkite, and all the other sites I’m on.  It doesn’t handle video (yet), unfortunately, so for video, I use 12Seconds.  12Seconds does the same thing as Ping, but only for videos.  I can email videos from my iPhone to 12Seconds, which then posts it to Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc. (As soon as Ping handles videos, I’ll abandon 12Seconds.)

If it wasn’t for Ping.fm, I wouldn’t bother using most of the rest of these sites, frankly, especially starting with Facebook.

Facebook Helps Me Avoid Friends and Family

Yep, I said it.

Before Facebook, I used my blog to stay in touch with friends and family.  I posted what I was up to, and they read my blog to stay informed.  Now, they’re all on Facebook, so I can just post my status to Facebook (via Ping.fm) and they can keep tabs on me.  Even better, because it’s so easy to just dump notes in there via Ping, I’m able to stay in sync with even more people – high school classmates, college buddies, former coworkers, you name it.

I gotta be honest – I dump content into Facebook, but I almost never go to the site.  I don’t play web games, I don’t tag my friends in personal-top-10-lists, and I don’t care who’s dating who.  I do like Facebook because it’s real-name-based (as opposed to Twitter, MySpace, etc) but I don’t spend much time reading it.  For a while, I tried consuming Facebook news updates via an RSS feed, but even that got too time-consuming.

Yammer Connects Me To New Coworkers

Yammer is just like Twitter except that only people at your company will see your updates.  Account signups are done via email – when you sign up for a Yammer account, you’ll see updates from people at the same domain name as you.  Since I’ve got a Quest.com account, I see other Quest employees.

I use Ping to post my updates to Yammer, and Yammer emails me whenever anybody else posts.  That way, I don’t have to run yet another desktop client or go to yet another web page.  Yay!

Yammer is a chicken-and-egg problem: if you’re the first person at your company on Yammer, you might be posting there for quite a while before you’ve got company.  I think I posted on Yammer for maybe six months before anybody joined me, and now it’s gathering momentum.  The cool part is that I get a window into other parts of the company that I might not ordinarily get the chance to see.  Product managers for other divisions post notes about what they’re up to, and we get to share opinions and ideas on cool technologies.

Flickr Stores My Photos and Videos

Facebook does a decent job of photos, and I like Facebook’s ability to “tag” people in photos.  I can mark several peoples’ faces in a Facebook photo, and they instantly get notified that new pictures of them are online.  However, I don’t like anything else about how Facebook handles photos, so I use Flickr instead.

Flickr makes it easier to organize photos with:

  • Tags – a photo can be tagged with any words or phrases, making it easier to search for photos.  Plus, strangers can tag your photo.
  • Notes – you (or anyone else) can draw boxes on your photo and add notes talking about what’s in that area of the photo.
  • Sets & Collections – I’ve got collections for Travel, Places I’ve Lived, Family, and so on, and then each collection has sets for the city, the family member, and so on.
  • Comments – the fun of photos is the sharing and the discussion.

I email my iPhone photos to Ping.fm, which posts ‘em into Flickr.  When I take photos with my camera, I upload them to Flickr when I get back home, but I’m ordering an EyeFi Geo card.  It’s an SD card with built-in geotagging and WiFi; when you take pictures, the GPS location is added to the photo’s metadata, and then the photo is uploaded via WiFi whenever you’re in range.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about spicing blog posts up with images, I also rely on Flickr’s Creative Commons image search.  I try to return the favor by licensing all of my photos with Creative Commons as well.  If somebody wants to use one of my images to illustrate a point, more power to ‘em!

Delicious Stores My Bookmarks

Whenever I add a bookmark in my web browser, the Delicious plugin automatically sends that bookmark to Delicious.com.  It asks me if I want to add a description or any tags for easier discovery later.

I can also see who else added that same bookmark before I did.  People who found that page interesting probably found other things I’d like to read, too, so I can dive into their bookmarks and even sift through them by tag.  It’s an interesting way to meet interesting people who read interesting things.

Other people can subscribe to my bookmark feeds and get instant notifications whenever I add a new bookmark.  It also crossposts to Facebook, so even people who don’t use Delicious can watch what I find helpful.

Social Media Services I’m Not Wild About

A few services out there seem vaguely promising, but not enough for me to devote time to ‘em.  I have profiles on some of these, but I’m not an active user:

  • Blip.fm and Last.fm – music sites that track every single song you listen to.  In real time.  Let’s say I’ve got 500 friends, and maybe 50 of them are listening to music at any given time.  If each of them listens to one song per five minutes, that means I’d be getting notifications like “Joe is listening to Guns & Roses” every six seconds.  This is why I almost always unfollow anybody on Twitter who posts their music tracks – it’s just too much information, and frankly, I don’t care what you’re listening to.
  • BrightKite – BrightKite is location-based social networking.  When you check in at a physical location (a restaurant, a tourist site, an airport) you can see everyone else who’s been there recently.  This can be a neat way to meet people who like the same things you like, but there isn’t a big user base yet.  Even in cities like New York City and Chicago, I often find that I’m the first person to check in at a location or that no one’s checked in there for months.
  • FriendFeed – FriendFeed sucks in all of your activity from all of your sites and puts it in one place.  Then, when people subscribe to you, they don’t have to know what sites you’re active on – they just see all of your activity from everywhere in a ginormous firehose.  When one of my FriendFeed friends adds a bookmark, takes a picture, posts a status update, or picks their nose, I know about it in nearly real time.  TMI.  I keep trying to get into FriendFeed, but it’s an absolute avalanche of information.  Some people go so far as to hook up their Blip.fm feed in FriendFeed, for example.
  • LinkedIn – I think this is a great tool when you need a job, but the rest of the site (user groups, forums, questions, etc) aren’t intuitive for me.  If I want to ask questions, I’ll usually post them at places like ServerFault or StackOverflow.

That’s the state of the union for social media/networking tools as of right now.  The scene changes fast, though, so I’ll revisit this topic every year or so to talk about what’s changed.

Are there any social networking tools you rely on that I didn’t cover here?

More of My Articles & Posts About Social Networking

Here’s a few more posts you might like:

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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New Twitter home page means search is king

Written on July 28, 2009 by in Twitter

Tonight, Twitter changed their public page – the one you see before you log in – to focus on something completely different:

New Twitter Home Page

New Twitter Home Page

Now the home page revolves around search by saying, “See what people are saying about…”, offering a big prominent search box, and showing the trending topics at the bottom of the page.

This is the culmination of Twitter’s purchase of Summize, a Twitter search engine.  Just one year ago, Twitter didn’t even have a search engine of its own, and now search has proven to be so important that it’s the first thing you see when you go to Twitter.com.

When you want to find out knowledge on the internet, now there are two places to go: go to Google (or Bing or whatever) when you want long-term knowledge, and to Twitter when you want current events.  Innnnteresting.

Any bets on how long it’ll be before ads turn up on the search result pages?

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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How to Get More Twitter Followers

Written on June 24, 2009 by in Twitter

Yesterday, Kevin Kline ran across the WeFollow list of top twitterers for the SQL tag and remarked:

How to Climb a Mountain

How to Climb a Mountain

I hear that same question privately every now and then, and it’s not that hard.  I’ve got the simple answers to get yourself to the top of the popularity list!

Set Up Searches for Key Phrases

If you’re interested in SQL Server, there are tools you can use like RSS feeds from Search.Twitter.com that will alert you whenever someone mentions SQL Server.  That way you can jump right into their conversation and interrupt help them.  They will surely be impressed by your knowledge and your willingness to help, and they’ll follow you for your insight.

The drawback, though, is that there’s a lot of conversations happening on Twitter at any given time.  It’s seriously hard work to keep up with all of them.  You could devote your time to Twitter searches, or maybe hire a savvy assistant to proactively run your Twitter profile, but sometimes even a human being isn’t enough.  At that point, you’ll want to bring in the machines.

Set Up Robots to AutoRespond For You

Clippy

Clippy

Twitter has a cool set of APIs that you can use to build a robot.  Whenever someone mentions a topic, like say SQL Server, you can build an automatic response that says something like:

“I see you’re trying to build a database.  Would you like some help?  I’ll be your best friend.”

If you’re really good with your autoresponses, people will never guess that your witty responses are coming from an automated, heartless piece of software.  Bonus points if they try to carry on a conversation with you, and you have another autoresponse for that.  They’ll line up to follow your Twitter account in no time.  To see an example of a bot in action, check out @joe_kl.

Follow Everybody You Can Find

Go crazy with the Follow button.  Follow anybody and everybody regardless of what they’re talking about.  They might follow you back just out of sheer politeness.

There’s a catch, though: Twitter will yank your account if you follow too many people too fast.  Every few days, go into your Friends page in Twitter, which lists the people you’re following.  You can identify the ones who are following you back because there’s a “Direct Message” link – you can only send DM’s to people who are following you.  Unfollow anybody who doesn’t have a “Direct Message” link next to their name, and presto, it’ll keep your list shorter and let you follow more people.

When you unfollow people, they may get alerted about this if they’re using a service like NutshellMail.  At that point, they’re going to know you’re a bit of a spammer, because they’re going to guess that you followed them just to try to bait them into following you back.  This isn’t a problem at first, but if you try that same trick repeatedly, it pisses off users because they know you’re just an absolute slimeball.  (Doing it even once makes you a slimeball, though.)

Give Stuff Away to People Who Follow You

Announce that once a month, you’re going to pick a random follower and give them something juicy like a gift certificate or a free iPhone.  People will do almost anything for a Klondike bar, I hear.

Once you start, though, it’s like a drug addiction.  If you don’t keep giving things away, people will stop following you, and worse, they’ll start UNfollowing you.  Of course, if you’re in the business of professional marketing, you should have no problem justifying giving away portable hard drives or Macbooks in order to get your spam message out to a larger audience.  Heck, even just the Twitter population as a whole may not be enough, and you may want to…

Send Spam Emails Asking People to Follow You

The Simple Twitter Book

Download My Free Twitter Book

The majority of humanity isn’t on Twitter yet, so when these measures aren’t enough, it’s time to kick it up a notch.  Send out a broadcast spam email to everyone you can find asking them to join Twitter and follow you.

I’ve been watching the Twitter follower counts of one particular publication who chose to spam me with an invite like this.  I was curious to see if it worked – I had this vision of people saying, “Wow, this is awesome!  I don’t get enough spam through my email client, and it takes so darned long to get it.  I’ll go sign up right now and follow them for up-to-the-minute spam in 140 character chunks!”  Not surprisingly, it doesn’t appear to be working.

Or, Uh, Maybe Just Be Yourself

Maybe I’m old school, but I like to get my followers the old-fashioned way: I earn them.

Don’t follow people just to game the metrics. Unless you’re Ashton Kutcher, nobody really gives a rip how many followers you have.  Twitter is about relationships.  It’s about caring, not calculations.  If you’re out to prove you’ve got the biggest numbers, cut straight to the chase and start giving away free pr0n.

Be yourself, not your company. I follow some company accounts because they have truly kick-ass products.  I want to hear every single bit of news about the cool new stuff they produce.  I work for a company too, but I don’t use my Twitter account as a pimp platform.  If you ask me questions about our products, I’ll be glad to talk with you about it, but not in public on Twitter.  Nobody wants to listen to somebody else buying a used car on Twitter, for example.

Join the conversation. Don’t just spew garbage out automatically – listen, help, and engage.  When you jump into a stranger’s conversation and start blathering about yourself, your opinions or your product, people see through your act.  In meatspace, you can identify the failure of your technique by watching the panicked horror in their facial expression, but on Twitter it’s not so clear.  If the technique doesn’t work in meatspace, it won’t work here either.

Remember that kid in middle school whose mom always sent him in with a bag of cookies trying to make friends?  The one who kept running into you and your buddies and just standing around until he could inject himself into the conversation?  The one that everybody said was trying too hard?  Don’t be That Guy.

Brent Ozar

Brent specializes in performance tuning for SQL Server, VMware, and storage. He's one of the very few Microsoft Certified Masters of SQL Server, a published author, and a Microsoft MVP. He likes travel, Jeeps, Apple gear, jokes, and writing about himself in the third person. Read more and contact Brent.

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