Terry Pearson’s Blog

Twitter Pollution

Excessive targeted marketing using a social network’s status updates.

Most people have at least heard of Twitter by now. The mini social network seemed like a great idea when it was born out of Odeo (a podcasting company). It can be highly addictive, and can even save you money on your text messaging bill.

Twitter does have a major problem. The biggest of these is money. As of this writing, Twitter still has not found a way to generate income. If Twitter does find a way to generate advertising revenue, will it’s users continue to embrace the service?

But an even bigger problem looms for the messaging site. Twitter has opened the floodgates of a very open protocal. Marketing companies, universities, and even politicians are utilizing the networking site to flood users with advertising. As twitter grows more popular, more companies and organizations will get on board.

Unless something drastically changes, Twitter will likely see it’s peak within one to two years. Afterwards, it is quite possible that user-ship will decrease as as rapidly as advertising (from inside and outside) increases.

The biggest problem with advertisements on Twitter is that there are no “banners”. Banners were designed to take a portion of the message on a website and turn it into revenue.

With only 140 characters per message, there is no way to insert advertising into these messages. Therefore, advertisers are forced to send separate messages for advertisements. This is the equivilent of a website sending popup messages throughout the day because you accessed the website at some point. Nobody would agree to such a proposition.

This advertising can be seen as “Twitter Pollution.” Unfortunately, Twitter itself may be the final casualty of Twitter pollution.

I am on a broadband connection this week, but it is nothing like my connection at home. So I decided to look for some ways to speed up my web browser. Fortunately, I use Firefox, so it is highly customizable.

I found a great article on Free Republic, that really speeds up my web browsing experience. I have included it below for your use.

1.Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:

network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests

Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.

2. Alter the entries as follows:

Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”

Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30. This means it will make 30 requests at once.

3. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″. This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

Have you ever gone to a website’s login page, typed in your user name and password, only to find that Firefox does not ask to save your password. This usually happens with banks, credit card companies, etc.

The problem is not with Firefox. The issue actually arises from the Javascript used on the website. Many companies feel that they create a more secure environment for their users by not allowing passwords to be saved.

Sometimes, the risk of a Mozilla Firefox password list being compromised is incredibly low. Sometimes, you may just not care about securing your passwords. The risk should be up to you.

So how do you save those “unsavable” passwords in Firefox?

1. Save the Javascript to enable password storage. Drag the following link to your bookmark bar: Enable Password Saver.
2. Whenever you come to a website where passwords can’t be saved, just click on the “Enable Password Saver”.
3. Finally, enter the password as normal, and submit the form.
4. Firefox will ask if you want to save the password. Tell it you would like to do that!

Some great news broke today. MySpace will utilize Google’s new Social Network API, OpenSocial.

According to TechCrunch, the APIs allow applications to run on multiple social networks and use standard web development tools like html, javascript, and flash.

Using the API, you can access Profile Information, Friends Information, and Activities (i.e. profile changes).

These APIs will be incredibly useful for those who have their own website. It finally allows us to realize the goal of a “Social” web environment.

For those looking to get extra help with the APIs, there are already sites being created to help developers build websites based on OpenSocial standards. One such site is OpenSocialStuff.com.