Randomosity: Starry Night Edition
Jul 6, 2012 Randomosity
I’ve always loved watching dominoes fall, but this video is especially cool for several reasons. One, I just love Van Gogh’s Starry Night. It’s one of the rare pieces of art that doesn’t make me say “blech!” when I see it on an umbrella. Two, I’m fascinated by the method this person is using to place the dominoes. She seems to be holding a ruler on a little copy of Starry Night and placing the dominoes by color. No complicated charts or anything. And she makes it look so easy! Three: she shows her mistakes. Enjoy!
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There’s a lot of misinformation out there about health care reform. Before you spread more of it around, take this health care reform quiz and see if you know what you’re talking about. For what it’s worth, I got 9 out of 10 right, but I think one of the questions is worded badly so I’m counting it as a perfect score. :-)
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Tags: health care reform, Starry Night, Twitter
Randomosity: Frivolous Lawsuit Edition
Jun 14, 2012 Randomosity
Every frivolous lawsuit should be handled this way. Funny site The Oatmeal had their stuff stolen by another site, and then that other site had the audacity demand $20K for what The Oatmeal said about them. And then things got hilarious.
I make decent stove-top popcorn (when I’m not munching on my favorite dieting crutch, SmartPop 100 calorie bags), but this is an even better method than the one I use – definitely going to try it soon (via LifeHacker).
Happy birthday! Now drop dead. Yup, Gizmoto reports that you’re more likely to have a heart attack or stroke on your birthday. Perhaps you shouldn’t be trying quite so hard to blow out those candles.
Ever had the urge to use chalkboard paint, but didn’t want a big old ugly black box of paint on your pretty wall? It looks like mixing your own chalkboard paint is pretty easy, in any color you want!
The Twitter clean-up continues with Proxlet
Sep 22, 2011 Blog & Social Media Stuff
[UPDATE: I've had to uninstall Proxlet from my Tweetdeck account. It was preventing me from getting DMs on my computer. It's still working very well on Twitter.com, so I guess when I want to catch up on Twitter without all of the Triberr noise I'll have to do it there. Bummer.]
So yesterday I wrote about how I unfollowed over 1,300 people on twitter – mostly accounts that were no longer active, or people I just didn’t recognize and couldn’t figure out why I was following. But I had actually started streamlining a few days earlier with a completely free service called Proxlet.
Proxlet is an app for the Chrome browser that easily filters out certain tweets, or mutes tweets for a certain period of time.
I first tried it out a while ago because it looked interesting, but I discovered that I didn’t need it – there wasn’t really anything happening on twitter that was bugging me much.
Now though? Ugh. I need it.
You can use it directly on Twitter.com, which is very handy – a Proxlet option appears for each tweet, giving you a range of actions to take.
Although why you would want to mute me talking about carrying cardboard cutouts of Harrison Ford around NYC, I have NO idea.
Some Proxlet applications can be configured very easily right from the Proxlet homepage. Another, even more configurable option is to DM commands directly to Proxlet.
There are certain evenings where my entire stream is taken over by twitter parties, where dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people chat about a certain topic using a particular hashtag. And while I have nothing against twitter parties – I actually like them (the smaller ones, anyway) – they can be very annoying when the topics just aren’t for you and it seems like you’re the only one not participating.
With Proxlet, I can now mute those twitter parties that I have zero interest in. If everybody I know is talking about #ACMEDiapers and I couldn’t care less, I could mute every tweet with that hashtag for, say, two hours. Problem solved. Don’t want to hear about #RHONY for an hour (or a lifetime)? No problem. Don’t want to know who got kicked off of #ProjectRunway? Mute that hashtag until you’ve watched the episode.
A more recent problem – the one that actually prompted me to start using Proxlet again – is Triberr. It’s been aggravating me so much that I wrote a whole post about why bloggers shouldn’t use Triberr. Thanks to Proxlet, it’s no longer a problem (at least not on my computers, anyway – more about phones later). I’ve blocked everything that’s automatically tweeted out by the Triberr service.
I also block tweets from FourSquare. I use the FourSquare service myself, and if I want to know where people are I’ll just use the app (I only want to know where people are if I’m there too).
And those ubiquitous paper.li tweets? Gone. Filtered out.
Thanks to Proxlet my twitter stream has been streamlined to include more of what I think is interesting, authentic content, and fewer autotweets (I hate autotweets so much I don’t even autotweet my own posts!). [Update: Just realized that's not totally true: I autotweet anything I post from my phone. I wanted that process to be Twitpic-like (but without giving them the traffic).]
So how can you do it? Originally I was going to write a big guide on exactly how to use Proxlet, but then I stumbled on this post all about Proxlet, which has already done it so well. So go read that and all should be clear.
Since my Tweetdeck has been Proxletized (ha! I guess I’m Proxletizing to you right now!), catching up on twitter on my phone has gotten a lot more annoying, since Proxlet doesn’t work there. The difference in my twitter stream with and without Proxlet is huge. Proxlet does work on a lot of smartphone clients though, so you might get lucky.
I don’t like the direction twitter is going in. I feel like more and more people are trying to “cash in” on it in the quickest, easiest, most automated way possible. I’m very grateful that I can reverse that trend with Proxlet, even if only I can see it.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Proxlet, social media, Tweetdeck, Twitter
Cleaning up twitter with Just Unfollow
Sep 21, 2011 Blog & Social Media Stuff
So you’re on twitter and you want to get more out of it. The easiest way is to trim the fat – unfollow all of those accounts that aren’t adding anything to your tweetstream. I just did this and feel lighter. 1,350 followers lighter, in fact.
I did two separate things: I unfollowed just about everyone who hadn’t tweeted in at least a month, and I unfollowed a large number of the people who weren’t following me back.
Why do this, you might ask?
Honestly, if you’re just a casual user of Twitter following a few hundred people, it probably doesn’t matter at all. But if you’re a slightly more active user of twitter…
Twitter puts limits on how many people you can follow without having a certain number of people following you back. Basically, you can follow up to 2,000 people no matter how many (or few) are following you back. But, once you’re following 2,000 people you may run into trouble following more. So, if you want to follow more people but can’t because of this limit, then getting rid of the dead weight – people you are following who simply don’t tweet – will help free up those spots so that you can follow more interesting accounts.
Heavy Twitter users like myself run into a different problem, especially if we use Twitter for professional reasons, and it’s one that’s harder to define. While I have no evidence of this, I think my Klout score is probably affected somewhat by the number and “quality” of Twitter accounts I’m following (and by quality I don’t mean how I define it, I mean how Klout defines it, and frankly I have no idea how they define it). So if I’m following accounts that don’t tweet, I may be hurting my Klout score. Since Klout is starting to affect the work I get, I need to pay attention to that.
Get rid of the dead weight
I used JustUnfollow.com. There is a free version, but it limits you to only 25 unfollows a day. Or, you can double your limit to 50 by tweeting about the site (instructions will appear once you hit the limit). If you don’t have a lot of cleaning up to do – or you don’t mind doing a little each day – the free version is great. [Update: Thanks to Liz for clarifying in the comments that once you send that one tweet, your limit is permanently increased to 50/day - you don't have to keep sending out the tweet each day.]
However, I had a lot of cleaning to do, so I upgraded to the premium version, which is only $9.99 for a year of no unfollow limits.
After authorizing Just Unfollow to access my twitter account, I clicked on their newest feature, Show Inactive Following. I was quickly able to see who hadn’t tweeted in a month or more. With a couple of exceptions, I got rid of them all.
Get rid of non-followers
This is a more difficult one for me to justify, because I’m following about one-quarter of the people who follow me. But using Just Unfollow I went through the thousand or so people I was following who weren’t following me, and got rid of about two-thirds of them.
If I didn’t recognize them at all – the twitter handle was unfamiliar, the picture didn’t ring a bell – I got rid of them. At one time we were probably following each other, so I was really just finishing what they had started.
I kept the people I instantly recognized. These are people whose tweets interest me, no matter whether they follow me or not. I don’t care if they’re not following me back, they make twitter interesting.
I kept all of the celebs. I really don’t expect Charlie Sheen to follow me back, but I still get a kick out of watching his crazyboat sail by in my twitter stream.
And now I’m done tinkering for a while.
A note about Twitoria
I tried out about a dozen services before settling on Just Unfollow. I ultimately picked it based on its ease of use, the services it offered, and price. I wasn’t planning on reviewing the ones I didn’t choose. But one of them was so bad, I feel like I need to warn you away from it. Twitoria gave me a list of people it said had NEVER tweeted.
It was page after page filled mostly with accounts I’ve tweeted with personally, or whose tweets I’ve seen many times. Now, I can’t tell you for 100% certain that Just Unfollow didn’t make any mistakes, but I didn’t notice any – every person they said hadn’t tweeted in a month or more looked accurate to me. Maybe Twitoria is simply suffering from a temporary glitch, but I would stay away.
And what about Friend or Follow?
A lot of people I know use Friend or Follow. In fact, I think it’s probably the best known of all of these sites and services. I even signed up for the premium service, thinking it was worth trying out for $9.99. After signing up however, I realized it was $9.99 per MONTH, not per year. That’s ridiculous. Luckily there’s a seven-day trial period, so I was able to immediately cancel without being charged for the first month.
Besides the price though, I found it to be very buggy.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: klout, social media, Twitter
Racist, homophobic, completely offensive fake Applebee’s twitter account looks like the real thing
Sep 8, 2011 What's Going On
[Note: sometime Thursday (9/8) evening the owner of the twitter account in question changed his page drastically, and it no longer resembles the official Applebee's twitter account in any way.]
There are tons of fake twitter accounts out there. Most of them exist as some kind of obvious parody of their subject, and many of them are quite funny. But last night I saw this tweet from an acquaintance of mine who’s a PR pro.
I went over to the supposed Applebees twitter stream, thinking that they must have been hacked. There were tweets like this
and this
and this
and these.
Lovely. It looked for all the world like it was real. But then I noticed something in the url:
The lowercase “L” in Applebees was actually a capital “i.” Because of the font used on twitter’s pages, it looked correct, except in the url. Then I went to the actual Applebee’s twitter page. Except for the little “official” blue checkmark, and the number of followers, the fake one could easily be mistaken for the real one by just about anybody.
Real Applebee’s page:
Fake Applebee’s page:
I think it goes beyond what should be permissible on twitter. It’s similar to how a Bill Clinton impersonator is allowed to do commercials for a used car dealership, as long as it’s over-the-top obvious that it’s not really Bill Clinton selling used cars, but you can’t try to trick the public into thinking that the former president is endorsing something he’s not.
I wonder if the PR people who handle Applebee’s twitter account have seen it? And if they have, is there even anything they can do about it?
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: advertising, PR, Twitter
find out which tweeps you’re blocking on twitter, you may be surprised!
Jul 9, 2011 What's Going On
So a couple weeks ago I met up with someone whom, at this point, I would consider a real-life friend, not just an online acquaintance. After all, my daughter and @MacaroniKidNYC’s daughter have completely bonded at several blogging events and trips. In fact, to an almost creepy degree (I’ll let Monica share those stories in the comments if she wants to).
She mentioned that I had blocked her on twitter, and I was shocked! I block plenty of people, but they’re all spammers. You know, those people with usernames like @jenniebo237432 who have zero followers, are following zero people, and yet have posted ten-thousand tweets. Block!
I vowed to get to the bottom of it as soon as I got home, and naturally forgot about it for two weeks. But something just jogged my memory and I discovered that among the dozens of people I’ve blocked on twitter, two people whom I know in real life and would never ever block had slipped in there! How embarrassing. I wish I had checked earlier.
So how can you check to see if you’ve accidentally blocked someone? I used this site: Who I Block. I found it through google and while I can’t promise you that it didn’t infect my computer and is going to send all of my followers a tweet linking them to a porn site, so far so good. It quickly gave me a list of twitter accounts I’ve blocked and I was able to unblock the people who weren’t supposed to be there.
There are plenty of people I can’t stand, but I don’t want people I actually like to think I don’t!
Of course now, my ego is demanding a list of people who have blocked me, but I haven’t been able to find a way to get that list. Anybody?
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Twitter
How social media has changed my life, in more than 140 characters
Jun 21, 2011 Paid/Sponsored Post
[The following post is sponsored by Bing]
Thank you to BING Social Search for sponsoring my post about social media. I was selected for this sponsorship by the Clever Girls Collective, which endorses Blog With Integrity, as I do.
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Sometimes it’s hard for me to express how social media has changed my life, because it’s difficult for me to remember life before I was immersed in it. It’s like remembering life before kids: intellectually I can recall what it was like to sleep in until noon every Sunday then go out for a two-hour brunch, but emotionally I can’t connect with it.
For me, social media is Twitter. Sure, I post to Facebook, but it’s almost always a forced afterthought. Twitter comes naturally. I joined on July 19th, 2008 (you can find out when you joined twitter here), so my three-year anniversary is coming up in less than a month. According to Wikipedia the traditional three-year anniversary gift is leather – do I owe my computer a new leather pouch?
Actually, I owe Twitter a big thank you (or probably “thanks” because that takes fewer characters) for forcing me to learn brevity. I’ve always been rather verbose, and the fact that I have to convey complete thoughts in 140 characters has been a challenge that I think I’ve met pretty well. In fact, I was named Funniest Mom on Twitter by Babble.com last year, so I think I’ve done pretty well adapting this new writing format to my sarcastic personality.
The people who know me in real, actual, three-dimensional life owe twitter a thank you as well, because Twitter has allowed me to stop forcing myself on people. I’m pretty opinionated (no, seriously!), and as much as I wanted to express myself before, I couldn’t help but think that I was foisting my opinions on people who couldn’t care less. But with Twitter, it is completely voluntary. There’s no awkward “Well, it was nice talking to you, but I have to get to my root canal.” If you’re following my tweets you’re there of your own free will.
Sure, I have other places to express myself, like on this blog, but only a small fraction of what I want to talk about ends up here. With Twitter, I can say my piece about whatever the hell I want and then get back to what I was doing ten seconds later. It’s me, almost completely unedited. Or, as my mom would say, me with verbarrhea, where the words just run out uncontrollably (nice mental image, no?).
People talk about how social media is making us, ironically, un-social. But instead, I prefer to think of it as a new kind of social. It doesn’t take the place of people, but sometimes, you want to save the real people in your everyday life from your every opinion about everything. Twitter has become my repository. Sure, I may corner a friend occasionally and tell her exactly what I think about people who can’t keep “its” and “it’s” straight or what I think about high-heeled sneaker shoes, and sometimes I even get my act together enough to write whole blog posts about people who sign their emails with “God Bless You.” But I think it works best when I just throw it out there on Twitter for people to come find, and they can discover me.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 13. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Facebook, social media, Twitter
I may be balding, but at least I’m rocking the glasses
May 12, 2011 Blog & Social Media Stuff
Last night, for reasons I can’t figure out, TweetDeck decided to change my picture. At least I look happy.
Originally posted on Selfish Mom. All opinions expressed on this website come straight from Amy unless otherwise noted. This post has a Compensation Level of 0. Please visit Amy’s Full Disclosure page for more information.
Tags: Twitter
