Using twitter to create a community

It seems like twitter is having his momentum right now, with more and more people joining. So, here is a quick tutorial on how to use it in order to accomplish the following goals:

• Bring constant traffic to your site
• Create an interactive and dedicated community

First of all, this quick guide doesn’t apply to any of the black hat projects that you’d might have. It simply doesn’t work this way.

You will need to have a site that:

• Is community oriented: this implies one or more of the following:
  • visitors can create accounts on your site
  • visitors can create content on your site
  • visitors can comment on the existing content
  • any other way of interaction between the visitors and your site
• Is not static: this implies that you have periodically fresh content (news/articles)

Using twitter for traffic and community has 2 ways:

1. The passive way. This is pretty straight forward. Create a twitter account, announce that on your site, make a link on the homepage or on your template, add your website to your twitter profile and start using twitter. That rest will follow. Slowly but steady.

2. The active way. This is what this post is about.

• First of all, start doing the steps from the passive way.
• Than use twitter for 1-2 weeks, periodically adding content
• Identify twitter users that might be interested in your site. Do that by searching in Google for: site:twitter.com [keyword]. Where the [keyword] represents the main keywords for your website. If you do that, you’ll get as results people that have used on their twits that keyword. Some of them have used them accidentally, but most of them will have a real interest in your topics.
• Make a list of all the profiles identified. From that list eliminate all the profiles that are dead (no longer updated) and start following the remaining ones. Many of them will reciprocate.
• Start interacting with the followed profiles, try to answer any conversations.
• Make periodical announcements of new content on your website and be active in answering any feedback.
• If you have an RSS feed for your site, for your own good don’t be an idiot and add that to your twitter account. Is one of the most annoying and lame behaviors and will soon result in people following you to use the block button

Well, that’s it. happy twitting and if you will use this mini guide, feel free to post in comments any results that you will get

Posted in Blogging, General, Social Traffic, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

About Bugs

Tonight I was playing with some YouTube features that I need for a web project. Those features are not very common for the vast majority of the users. I am talking here about playlists and custom players.

If you describe to a technical person those features, or even if you only name them, instantly they’ll understand what are they about and they’ll see great use in them. Unfortunately we, technical people, tend to forget that our frame of mind has nothing to do with the regular user. The regular user that comes in huge numbers and it’s our main revenue source. And by forgetting that, we overdevelop things that we like and by doing that we overdelay the launch of the product or we ignore the common features considering them insignificant.

The YouTube features I mentioned above work like total crap. The playlists never display the correct number of videos and the custom players never display all the videos and more than that, this morning were displaying other people playlists. Who the hell cares beside me and maybe a dozen other people. Youtube works well on what is suppsoed to do. Upload and play videos.

If you are in a control position, try explaining to the top management or your client that the fancy crap he needs are not worth any delay. Time is money and the markets are crowded. Release in small chunks and release often. Keep in mind that your products has a final target in the masses not in the elites. Screw the early adopters. Let them complain. If your unique, fancy (and useless most of the cases)  features are so important, the early adopters will wait for them.

Posted in Information Architecture, Usability, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments »

Why usability matters

When the new Gmail version was made available, lots of new features were announced  and than people started to point  to new ones. But behind the great fireworks some other small changes with deep impact were made.

Here is an example on how some small changes can lead to feature awarness.

A few nights ago, my girlfriend called me that she saw that Google added, to the compose screen, the option to create invites for Gcal. While I knew that this was an pretty old feature, I knew that something has changed but I couldn’t put my finger on it. Happily, you can switch between the old and new interface and than I saw it:

Gmail old interface:

Gmail new interface:

(click on thumbnails for the bigger pictures)

What really changed  so that feature become more vizible to the “regular” user:

• In the old version,  the link to create new event was placed on the far right of the screen. Most people don’t move their eyes so far so is practically invisible even though it’s in front of your eyes.
• Labeling. In the original version, the feature was labeled “” Add event info”. That basically doesn’t say anything to “regular” users. What event? It’s an freakin email. What info should I add?(those questions appeared in the rare case they spotted it). In the new version, the label says “Add event invitation”. This label is more clear and in plain view.

Those 2 small changes might appear as insignificant to most of the people. But I am willing to bet a lot that the spike in usage after the roll out was pretty huge.

So, summing it up. Just because you use the internet on a daily basis and develop web apps that doesn’t mean that those are going to be user friendly. Not even if you are a huge, popular company. Hiring  a team or an usability company, might not also guarantee your success but at least you have more chances than your competitors

Posted in Google, Information Architecture, Usability, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Intense Debate might be a winner

I was reading yesterday on Techcrunch about a new web 2.0 player: Intense Debate. After the review and a first look at the site I already got a “WOW” feeling. Basically they start from the initial ideea of CoComment and push it a litlle bit further.

Key features:

• Centralized comments management for all your blogs. I am curious how well are they going to handle comment spamming and how much it will take untill the first bot dedicated to them will appear
• Allows you threaded comments and voting, something like Digg comments. Because this lacks from the major platforms and cannot be added to platforms like Blogger this will appeal to a lot of users moving them to change
• Easy account creation for commenters that will allow them to spread like wild fire in the blogosphere
• Commenter profiles

Minuses or were they might fail:

• You cannot track a conversation unless is on a blog that’s Intense Debate enabled
• They’d better be prepared for high traffic because if they are down, blogs that are using them will be down.
• Due to the fact that is an AJAX based system, the comments that your visitors make will not be available to the search engines. I think that this is a major downside and if I’ll remove it this will be one of the first reasons.
• Also due to Ajaxa, commenting oncertain browsers (like Opera Mini) is not possible

All in one I like it and I like it a lot and that’s why I am willing to give it a try here and on my romanian language blog.

Posted in Web 2.0 | No Comments »