Categories
Social Media TechBiz

5 Ways to Reduce Twitter Spam

I’ve been working on reducing the amount of twitter spam.

To me Twitter Spam is any sort of @ reply or DM that links to a site that tries to hack you back, and it can do so more than you care for.

Here are 5 ways that work for reducing twitter spam:

  1. The silent cannot be spammed. If you stay quiet for a few days the amount of folks who will spam you goes down.
  2. Make your account private.
  3. Prune your account of the spam-like and spam vectors. For me this means removing folks that follow more than have followers or act like bots (because they probably are). This also means using Echofon on the iPhone. Echofon is helpful in that it shows the vector a spammer used to get to me. In this case I might get spammed an at reply every time a certain user “ats” me back. Echofon makes this very obvious.
  4. Actively block spammers and report them as spam.
  5. Avoid using terms that spammers like. You know the one’s I mean. I’d mention it here but it would ruin my blog’s ranking. 😀
Categories
TechBiz

Quora’s Troll Proof Trade Off

I wrote an answer to a question using scientifically backed up data on Quora.

The result? My answer is totally at the bottom. Who’s on top? The Internet Famous.

Quora does a good job of giving you troll-proofed answers, but after Scoble burst onto Quora’s scene it’s not obvious that troll-proofing comes at the expense of a decent well-thought out answer with backed up data and a reputable reference.

So what is quora good for, or rather what’s in it for me? If I want a well-thought out, quotable sound byte that has to come from someone famous, this place is pretty much it. But if truth should, God forbid, come from someone like me still trying to make a name for himself, then ya, Convore is the place to be.

Categories
ruby TechBiz

Jim Barcelona, Ruby Rockstar

The term “rockstar” is much maligned in tech circles when applied to job descriptions.

Another sentiment told with utter sarcasm:

Any job description which contains the word, “rockstar,” must also disclose the salary offer.

-Steve

@jangosteve
And to round things out:
There’s nothing more ridiculous than job ads requesting a Ruby rock star. — Giles Bowkett
Since the term is so maligned, I’ve decided to take it. Like a day trader attracted to something at it’s lowest buy point, I’m attracted to the term, “Rockstar.”
My guitar skills aren’t that great. If anybody should be worthy of the term of Ruby rockstar it should be Zed Shaw for meeting the terms figuratively and literally. He plays guitar in an awesome way in the streets and he’s a great coder.
I wrote an email to the SF Ruby Meetup List in jest that was written in the alter ego of a Ruby rockstar. I was poking fun of a combination of stereotypes dealing with coders with egos and rockstars with egos.
The businessman in me thinks it’s such a shame that folks don’t own up to the moniker. Since others won’t; I will. I’m Jim Barcelona, Ruby rockstar.
Categories
scalability hacking sysadmin TechBiz WebApps

Why is Foursquare Down? 3 Educated Guesses

Why is Foursquare down?

Update (5 October 2010 at 5:36 pm PDT) : The folks at Foursquare tell us why in a post-mortem. There are autosharding issues with MongoDB. Yup, my guesses were wrong, unless you consider MongoDB a kind of cache. 😉

I used to work for a few sites that required high scalability expertise. Now that we’re over 5 hours into the outage I’ll share some of my thoughts.

But before I do, I’d just like to say, I really hope that it’s nothing bad and I really like the Foursquare peeps. I’m not putting out this article to harsh on anybody, but just to share some knowledge I have. Outages happen to everybody!

Also, I do not feel that this meltdown is in any way indicative of Amazon’s EC2. I have a site that shares the same IP space and facility as Foursquare and we have had no outages today.

  • The worst case scenario is a full scale Magnolia meltdown. This is where because of a backup process that was off, they cannot restore ever from backup. Odds: unlikely.
  • Someone turned off caching. I’m not sure how cache dependent the architecture is at Foursquare. If someone turned off the cache and the cache is just plain gone, then the caches have to be re-built. Rebuilding caches, depending on the time and complexity of each query can take up to 100x more time that it takes to retrieve the cache. If there’s some cached item that takes 100 seconds per user, the site will be down for a long time. They can only put a user back on foursquare at a rate of 100 per second if that’s the case, unless they can concurrently run the re-building of the cache.
  • There’s an issue with a hacker who has broken through security and is wreaking havoc on Foursquare. It’s happened to the best sites, e.g. Google in the 90s, and it’s pretty tough to recover from. Sometimes you let the criminals in and do their worst while keeping the site up. Sometimes you have 0 tolerance.
  • I wish Foursquare the best of luck. I am more than happy to lend a hand to their issues, if they need another pair of eyes.

Categories
Social Media TechBiz

3 Things The Social Network Taught Me About Startups

Spoiler Alert: You’ve been warned.

If “The Social Network” has a subliminal message, it’s this:

Swinging for the fences means forgetting about everything they taught you in business school, and if you went to business school, you are fucked. However, with the right guidance from Acclime Singapore, you might just find your footing in the chaos.

1.Lunch Meetings and Face to Face is for losers.

If you are going to New York to talk to ad men, you are just cosplaying “Mad Men.” In fact, any social interaction that isn’t mediated and accelerated through something like Flowtown, or Salesforce, or LinkedIn is just that, cosplay. If you are doing business over lunch, then you might as well be dressing up for Renn Faire.

The lesson of this is one of the pivotal scenes in “The Social Network.” Not to give away too much, but in the movie, Fincher and Sorkin take great pains to show what happens to someone who doesn’t get it, even if he’s a co-founder. This person who didn’t get it has a business degree from Harvard, and went to New York to make deals for selling ads on Facebook.

2. Coders can do it faster and better than biz dev or people who cannot code.

Coders code much faster than any “traditional” business arrangement. If you have an idea, and cannot code it, you can never be relevant if you are swinging for the fences. Case in point: The Vinkelvoss twins did have the “idea” for a social network, but so did everybody and their grandma at the time, but execution is very different. Most business folks focus on the idea and the revenue model. The example with Facemash.com in the movie showed that this idea is flawed. Why? Making waves in society with technology will always be faster than a revenue model.

3. Our capacity for having the wisdom to understand the technology we create outstrips the rate at which we create technology.

If this is the case, then the point that the character of Sean Parker pushes throughout the movie, that putting ads on a site is like ending a real cool party at 11 pm, is something all startups swinging for the fences have to take to heart.

EDUARDO: Settle an argument for us, would you? I say it’s time to start making money from TheFacebook but Mark doesn’t want advertising. Who’s right?
SEAN: Neither of you. TheFacebook is cool, that’s what it’s got going for it… You don’t want to ruin it with ads because ads aren’t cool. It’s like you’re throwing the coolest party on campus and someone’s telling you it’s gotta be over at eleven. You don’t even know what the thing is yet.

Great point, Sean. I mean look at what ImDB.com has become because of that ad revenue pop-up model of business. ImDB is so ugly and not cool.

Categories
Social Media TechBiz wordpress

Microsoft moves Blogs to WordPress

At the TechCrunch Disrupt event today, Twitter user, @bigs, broke the news that Microsoft announced that it would be moving over 30 million users of their Live blogging service to WordPress.

As a WordPress expert that has had to work on WordPress in a Windows environment there is one big gotcha: character encoding.

Here are what common characters look like when they are moved from a Windows environment to WordPress:

a return: ^M
single-quotes: ?~@~Y
asterisk: ?~@?
double-quotes: ?~@~\ or ?~@~]

If the WordPress migration process is robust, then it will translate these characters correctly into UTF-8 or something friendly like that.

Live users will definitely welcome the link schema and permalinks on WordPress. Instead of

http://cid-d4909e7f27e254e9.profile.live.com/

a user will get

http://barce.wordpress.com/ .

Also WordPress users can now link their accounts to MSN Messenger so that they can update their MSN friends or co-workers.

Are you a Windows Live Blogging user? How’d your upgrade process go?

Categories
iphone iPhone Dev Mobile Apps TechBiz

Lots of Phones to Test At AppDevAndMarketing.com

We test so many phones at App Dev + Marketing because we are exploring the issues involved with tackling cross phone performance issues.

MyChamberApp is an app we created that works on

  • Android
  • iPhone
  • Blackberry, and
  • Mobile Web.

It leads to a lot of late nights and heartache but when you hear from a customer like the Vicksburg Chamber in Mississippi saying how pleased they are it makes it all worth it.

Right now I’m wrestling with Android issues which hopefully me and my team will fix tonight for our partners, Target Marketing aka Chamber Maps.

Categories
TechBiz

Want to be Successful Like Joel on Software?

If everything got deleted from the Joel on Software website, I would miss 2 articles:

Best Working Conditions -> Best Programmers -> Best Software -> Profit!

At the company where I’m the lead software developer, we are committed to the Joel Plan. At first we started out by trying developers on the cheap but have started to focus more towards making budget for a great environment (an office in Westwood close to food and parking), and hiring the best developers. We have one of the guys working on the Kohana framework, Justin Hernandez, helping us with key pieces of software.

Some folks think lean means:

  1. leveraged open source frameworks (LAMP + Danga) ( @ericries)
  2. agile
  3. customer-centric development, where devs interface directly with customers

We definitely agree with what Eric Ries, and other successful entrepreneurs are saying about the lean startup.

However, I personally don’t agree with folks that sacrifice the first two parts of the Joel Plan, the best conditions and the best developers, under the name of lean startup. I won’t name names because these guys in the East Coast C and D’d me before but honestly, if you want your East Coast company to think like a startup, you have to treat your East Coast developers like the valuable resource they are.

Categories
blogging How-To TechBiz

4 Things I learned from blogging 11 days straight

I said I was going to blog for 6 months straight but last night after a streak of 11 days I stopped.

I was at home, and after I moved my things into my new flat, I just passed out. I’ve been plain tired with the start-up, planning for the CSS meet up, an early and long drive from SF to LA, and a touch of jet lag from returning back from NYC.

But even though the project is a fail, here is what I learned:

  • I learned that you can blog from your smartphone using the WordPress App. This really helped while I was in Brooklyn and didn’t have my laptop.
  • Weekends really suck for a tech blog. My traffic just dropped.
  • Keyword focused-posts and quality posts grow traffic. There is no way around this.
  • A really good blog post can take up 4 hours of your day.
Categories
Social Media TechBiz

Have You Used Facebook Places?

Have you used Facebook Places? Do you find it useful? I used it once and didn’t find a need for it, or didn’t get hooked the way I got hooked with Foursqaure.

I have seen interesting interactions by folks who don’t use Foursquare in terms of creating fun pages for a Pho Venue in San Francisco.

That Pho place already has a great Yelp page, but now they’ve got a page on Facebook, too, so it really helps drive more eyeballs onto a business.

Comment below about what you think of Facebook Places.