News At The Speed Of Internet

On Twitter itself I saw someone complain Fox News and CNN had dropped the ball. I guess he was expecting them to have crews standing by in Tallahassee in case anything ever happened at midnight.

There’s a new boss in breaking news.

CNN is on with news from Tallahassee. People have been shot in the FSU library.

CNN didn’t break this story. I first got the news on Twitter. That’s becoming more rule than exception.

FSUShootingInternal640Florida State’s original tweet about a DANGEROUS SITUATION caught fire! News like this explodes through social media. It becomes unavoidable.

Meanwhile, it’s still the traditional news sources we turn to once we get the tipoff. That’s why the TV went on. But their resources pale in comparison to crowd sourcing. Right now it’s social media CNN is relying on!

I saw someone complain Fox News and CNN had dropped the ball. I guess he was expecting them to have crews standing by in Tallahassee in case anything ever happened at midnight.

There’s a new boss in breaking news.

How Facebook And Twitter Differ For Me

twitter logoI use Twitter and Facebook differently. Facebook has conversations. Twitter is more a shout into the darkness.

I follow interesting people on Twitter. Some are funny. Some are profane. A few are silly.

Each describes himself in a self written mini bio.

@KevinSpacey
Former shoe salesman now making a go at film and theater. Wish me luck…

@TheEllenShow
Comedian, talk show host and ice road trucker. My tweets are real, and they’re spectacular.

@pattonoswalt
Mr. Oswalt is a former wedding deejay from Northern Virginia.

@ElaineStritch
Legend, Hat aficionado, Lady who Lunched

@bobsaget
I like long walks on the beach…and then to be dragged through the sand by an off-road vehicle, and then hurled off a catapult.

@StephenKing
Author

@HillaryClinton
Wife, mom, lawyer, women & kids advocate, FLOAR, FLOTUS, US Senator, SecState, author, dog owner, hair icon, pantsuit aficionado, glass ceiling cracker, TBD…

@jeffgarlin
comedic person of some notoriety

@Jeff_Daniels
Professional Pretender

Not all of them are active tweeters. I just like them in my eclectic mix. Clever people. The world in 140 characters.

Breaking news shows up on Twitter faster than any other source. That’s correct whether the rumor is true or false!

The response I get on Facebook dwarfs what I get from Twitter. Still learning.

Teachers Reading Tweets About Themselves!

I found this on YouTube. It’s priceless. I have read tweets about me. Some folks can be cruel. Now the teachers get their turn.

These teachers are from Los Alamitos High School. They’re reading tweets about themselves from their students. Please share this with your teacher (and student) friends.

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The Oscars As A Synergistic Social Media Triumph

oscar selife

Did you watch the Oscars? We did. I suspect numbers will be up this year. It has little to do with Ellen’s performance or anything on-the-show, though she and it were very entertaining.

The Oscars has written the playbook on leveraging social media. It is the synergistic wunderkind! Truly a two screen show.

If you’re on Twitter you can’t not watch the Academy Awards. It our common experience. We’re watching TV together as a family. Welcome back to the sixties.

Of course the Oscar telecast has to bring something to this stew. It’s live. It’s unpredictable. It’s enthusiastically embraced its marriage with the second screen.

Don’t underestimate that last move. Few have done it as effectively or with the ease shown by Ellen tonight.

There were Twitter references everywhere. Ellen set up the selfie you see atop this entry during the show.

Long before midnight Sunday, the photo had been retweeted more than 2 million times, breaking a record set by President Barack Obama with the picture of him hugging First Lady Michelle Obama after his re-election in 2012. Twitter also sent out an apology because all of the retweeting disrupted service for more than 20 minutes after 10 p.m. ET. – AP via npr.org

She took another with Liza Minnelli. And then there was the (real) pizza oscar pizza guydelivery guy. It’s a good night to be @BigMamasNPapas.

My last few years in TV saw a push to engage viewers via social media. We were trying to make you more ‘sticky.’

The fact I have so many followers on Facebook and Twitter speaks to my belief in that. We never did it this effectively.

Has anyone?

The Irrational Twitter Run-Up

NASDAQ Composite  INDEXNASDAQ .IXIC quotes   news   Google Finance

Do you think Twitter is worth $24,460,000,000? I’ll make it easy for you. Twitter is worth $24 billion and change. The market says so. Multiply outstanding shares by price and voila.

Twitter’s new stock issue opened at $24 and closed at $44.90. Twitter makes no profit. Its loss per share is $1.11.

Why is it being bid up?

Where have we seen this before?

The chart at the top of this entry shows the tech heavy NASDAQ index since 1974. That big spike around 2000 is the “Tech Bubble.” If you bought at that peak, you still haven’t made your money back!

twitter logoI use Twitter every day. Twitter and Facebook are how I promote my blog entries and get the word out on projects I’m involved in. I’ve sent over 14,000 tweets.

Compared to Facebook, my response on Twitter is tiny. Maybe it’s not that way for everyone, but I can’t be alone.

I suspect most people don’t quite ‘get’ Twitter and how to set up an account that serves them. Today I heard 30% of those who go on Twitter abandon their account. Twitter is too hard to understand.

The problem with all this money going to Twitter is, it’s not going elsewhere! I worked in TV where we competed against the Internet. We had bills to pay every month. The Internet media saw a profit somewhere in the future. It’s tough to compete against that business plan.

Owning a TV station today is not what it once was. Eyeballs are tougher to come by. The pie is sliced into smaller pieces. Viewers are shortchanged as less is spent serving them. And, like Twitter, the competition often isn’t required to turn a profit.

I’m scared we’ll see this bubble burst as it’s burst before. Bubbles hurt the economy. Selfishly, bubbles hurt me personally. My 401-K is heavily in the market and subject to these gyrations.

This whole Twitter run-up today seems irrational. That’s because it is.

Last Night’s Quake: It’s Tougher To Disregard Twitter

Not a TV network, not a newspaper, not a wire service, I found out on Twitter from Sean Percival (@Percival) who I follow, though I forget why!

Computers do a great job of keeping records. That’s why I know it was 2:27 AM EDT when I sent,

Seeing tweets from SoCal of possible earthquake. Nothing on USGS site yet.

Not a TV network, not a newspaper, not a wire service, I found out on Twitter from Sean Percival (@Percival) who I follow, though I forget why!

Quake?

That’ll get your attention.

Next up was Ken Levine (@KenLevine), baseball broadcaster, former disk jockey (he was radio’s Beaver Cleaver), Emmy award winning writer for M*A*S*H and other shows.

Might have felt an aftershock. Since I don’t have THX and even if I did, the TV was off. I’m guessing aftershock.

By this time USGS’s automated system had spit out a series of web pages. It was listed at magnitude 4.4 (since revised to 4.5) in Yorba Linda, home of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, in the OC.

The quake took place at 2:23:34 EDT. Percival’s tweet is time stamped 2:24!

USGS doesn’t predict quakes, but they do predict damage! A computer model, PAGER (Prompt Assessment of Global Earthquakes for Response) quickly assessed the situation. There was some worry, but not much. There was a 65% probability damage would be under $1 million, 95% it would be under $10 million.

Calculations for loss of life were similar. PAGER calculated a 76% chance of one fatality of less, 100% fewer than ten would die.

This time of day the cable news networks were rerunning their primetime lineup. Nothing. Even when Fox News cut-in for a scheduled live brief, nothing!

At 2:43 AM EDT I tweeted,

Fox News does live news update and doesn’t include quake. Seriously? Back to recorded stuff.

As was the case when Sully landed in the Hudson and with much of the Arab Spring, Twitter was there first. Studio based news wasn’t there at all!

I spoke with my Hollywood based daughter a few minutes ago. She and Roxie were on the floor when the earth moved. She felt it! Her first. If Roxie felt it she showed no signs.

Stef felt an aftershock (aka – another earthquake) within the last half hour.

Easy-To-Do: How To Stop Spam Posts On Your Twitter Account

This fix is incredibly easy and can be done by even the most computerphobic tweeter without fear of screwing things up further.

An old friend recently followed me on Twitter. He’s my friend, I went to follow him back. Uh oh. His Twitter feed is full of spammy weight loss messages, six in the last 24 hours.

My guess is he didn’t know he was sending out this stuff. He does now. It’s hidden in plain sight in a place most Twitter users won’t see!

It’s likely his account WASN’T hacked. Most compromised accounts have given the spammers permission without realizing it.

I sent him instructions to fix it. Here they are for you too!

  1. 1 – With a web browser (Mac, PC, Linux – no difference) go to www.Twitter.com and sign in.
  2. 2 – Click here. You’ll be taken to a list of the applications you’ve authorized to post to your account.
  3. 3 – Go through the list and “Revoke access” from any applications you don’t recognize or have stopped using.
  4. 4 – There is no step four. You’re done!

This fix is incredibly easy and can be done by even the most computerphobic tweeter without fear of screwing things up further.

Spelling Counts

Earlier today I got a tweet from a new Twitter user. As is my custom I took a quick look at her profile to see who she was and ended up sending this note her way.

Earlier today I got a tweet from a new Twitter user. As is my custom I took a quick look at her profile to see who she was and ended up sending this note her way.

On your profile “bare with me” means we should get undressed together. You probably mean “bear with me.” 🙂

Remember kids, spelling counts!

Whatever Happened To Email?

The problem with Facebook and Twitter is they lack the ability to look back in an organized fashion.

I used to wake up to dozens of email messages every day. Now I get very few. People have chosen to communicate via social networks like Facebook and Twitter rather than ‘actual’ email. That’s a problem.

I am a pack rat as far as email is concerned. I try not to throw any messages away.

A few years ago I ran up against Gmail’s storage limit and just bought some more! Problem solved.

Facebook and Twitter both lack the ability to easily look back in an organized fashion. With Gmail (and even my geofffox.com email address is served by Gmail) everything is fully indexed. Everything is easily to find.

I can’t tell you how often I’ve looked for a shred of information contained in an email years old. A few keystrokes entered and it’s there!

I am a very disorganized person. This was the most organized facet of my life!

It’s tough to fight the tide. More-and-more people ask questions or make comments by posting on my Facebook wall, sending me a Facebook message or tweeting. There’s really nothing I can do.

I miss the good old days.

The Phisher Kings

Every image and all the CSS files are on Twitter’s servers. They can’t stop the phishers, but they could make their job more difficult, but they don’t? Why?

A fellow meteorologist from Houston sent me a direct message yesterday afternoon via Twitter.

Bad blog going around about you, have you read it yet? http://t.co/T***48

People have said bad things about me, but there was a suspicious odor to his tweet. I’m curious by nature and clicked. I ended up on a Twitter error page, but of course it wasn’t! It looked like Twtter.com, but it was actually an inside page on Twittelr.com&#185.

You’ve probably seen this before. The Twittelr site is designed to make you think you’re on Twitter and need to log in. If you do you give the phisher your credentials. Don’t expect a thank you note!

I wouldn’t be writing about this but for one small point. Lots of the files these crooks use are hosted by Twitter. Every image and all the CSS files are on Twitter’s servers. They can’t stop the phishers, but they could make their job more difficult. They don’t? Why?

Why doesn’t Twitter limit these hallmark items only to requests that come from their own server? That’s a very simple thing to do.

If the Twittelr folks had to serve their own images and CSS it would increase their bandwidth requirements. It might cost them money and change the economic model of this scam. It might slow them down.

Twitter is an enabler.

Meanwhile this site has been up for a while. It was registered September 23. It has been live with this scam since at least yesterday, hosted by bizcn.com in China.

Why hasn’t it been shut down?

Here are the published details of Twittelr.com. It may or may not be true.

Domain name: twittelr.com

Registrant Contact:
zhang yu
yu zhang sdfgsdfghf@msn.com
0463965823 fax: 0463965823
changhailu12hao
nanning guangxi 230254

&#185 – In the interest of security I’m not going to actually show any of the bad urls here. Twittelr.com by itself leads to an error page with Chinese characters.

The Media Overvalues Twitter

The discussion framed Twitter as a place for political discourse. Maybe it is, but that’s a minor piece of what Twitter is.

I embrace social media. I am on Facebook. I am on Google+. I am on Twitter. Of those three the most misunderstood and incorrectly valued by the press is Twitter.

Today Howard Kurtz interviewed Jeff Jarvis on CNN’s Reliable Sources&#185. They discussed a Jarvis originated tweet with the hashtag #f*ckwashington. (The original didn’t have an asterisk and it’s sort of juvenile that I choose to use it since you all knowthe actual word anyway.)

The discussion framed Twitter as a place for political discourse. Maybe it is, but that’s a minor piece of what Twitter is and unless you know what you’re looking for beforehand politics is impossible to stumble upon.

I have a few special Twitter searches set up on my computers. They’re not looking for keywords. They’re looking for people within a specific geographic region. There’s one centered on a 15 mile circle around New Haven. Another does the same for Hartford.

My original thought was locals would tip me off when something was going on in either place. It works sometimes–not dependably. Most time it’s worthless.

Having this localized firehose of messages lets me see tweets without worrying if they’re sent by people I care about. There’s no concern over the subject matter either. Not all tweets are geotagged yet, but if it’s sent near New Haven or near Hartford there’s a chance it gets to my screen.

New Haven has Yale University. Hartford is the state capitol. You would expect some political talk and smart discussions. And yet I rarely see political or learned tweets! They are a rarity.

Here’s a brief sample received within the last few minutes:

  • Damn, tht was short lived smh oh well. Better luck next time
  • I should brought some weed for this car ride #DecisionsRegreted
  • @Liana_Gianna Yeayeayea, I wass likee ahaa oh heyy lianaa.

You get the idea.

This is not to say there aren’t valuable tweets. They’re just tough to find in all the noise.

The people you want to hear from are already writing elsewhere… and not limited to 140 characters. I continue to come back to Twitter, but sometimes wonder why?

&#185 – CNN’s Reliable Sources hosted by Kurtz examines the media and its role in news and society.

Tonight I Was Chatty

I discovered livestream.com this afternoon. By this evening I was live streaming! It was a good opportunity to interact a little with my viewers.

I discovered livestream.com this afternoon. By this evening I was live streaming! It was a good opportunity to interact with my viewers.

I liked livestream’s control room type app a lot. It let me stream my webcam and switch back-and-forth between it and my computer’s screen. That allowed me to show webpages and photos to illustrate my points.

What I didn’t like was the app crashing halfway through my chat!

Because I’m new and haven’t yet been verified by livestream I was limited to 50 participants. My quota was quickly filled. Wow! Thanks.

I have jumped through livestream’s hoops and hope to have unlimited capacity soon.

The response on Facebook and Twitter was positive. I will be back.

Is There Really A Su Bransom? I Don’t Think So

I’m not sure how Twitter makes money off Twitter, but I think I know how Su does… or tries to!

I’m a people watcher on the Internet. That’s especially true with Facebook and Twitter. Often I’ll just gaze as my newsfeed/timeline scrolls by. That’s how I ran into Su Bransom.

Twitter says Su Bransom is the person behind SuBransom8028. Her profile says she’s from New Haven and an environmental engineer. I think it’s a bunch of bull and that there’s no Su!

I’m not sure how Twitter makes money off Twitter, but I think I know how Su does… or tries to!

Every few minutes Su’s twitter account lets loose with a tweet. They’re random incomplete thoughts cut short by Twitter’s 140 character limit.

A few minutes ago Su said,

“Leading scientists and thinkers writing on everything from robots to physics to behavioral economics”

I threw that phrase into Google and out came a citation from Steve Lohr’s page in the New York Times. Lohr uses those words and more to explain a link he’s included.

Su uses it because she needs words!

So far nothing Su’s done has made any money for her. That part of the game comes in other tweets she sends every fourth or fifth time.

@_SkyLineDrives Finally saw Just Go For It here http://bit.ly/xxxxx-kinect_online?=mzaz&#185

That’s Su responding to @_SkyLineDrives, but not because they’re Twitter friends!

@_SkyLineDrives sent a tweet which mentioned the movie Hall Pass a few minutes earlier. That’s what triggered Su’s response.

Her reply included a link to a site (I’ve never heard of) that streams (or claims to) movies that haven’t yet been released to home video. That’s where the money’s made!

The random text tweets are decoys. They make Su look real to Twitter which is probably on the lookout for anyone who exclusively replies to people they don’t follow! In reality this whole charade is just a sophisticated form of spam! Unlike email spam which goes out en mass this Twitter spam is targeted and goes to one user at a time.

Expect to see a lot more of this as we spend more time on networks that connect us exclusively to people we know and which therefore seem more secure. When there’s money to be made people will find a way!

&#185 – I’ve added some extra characters to keep from spreading the actual link. You can figure it out if you really want to.

From The Cryptic File: A Random Tweet

What do I have in common with Jello packets?

I admit I search my name to see what people are saying about me. Sometimes it’s nice. Sometimes it’s mean. Sometimes it’s cryptic.

This is from the cryptic file! What do I have in common with Jello packets? Should I be worried someone even has a stance on me?

Julierazz who started the conversation keeps her tweets private so I can’t see what she said.

Julie! Inquiring minds want to know.

What Twitter Told Me About Tonight’s Debate

For the whole time I watched there were no debate oriented tweets in this area!

I watched most of the senatorial debate between Linda McMahon and Dick Blumenthal. Because I work in the studio part of the time I had to have the volume turned down. I opened up two Twitter windows to help keep up and was surprised at what I saw.

In one window I had my standard ‘every tweet within 15 miles of the TV station’ search.&#185 In the other I filtered for a few words that would surely bring debate comments.

Both columns scrolled rapidly as the debate wore on, but only the ‘filtered word search’ window had debate action. For the whole time I watched there were no debate oriented tweets in this area!

I am surprised… maybe a little disappointed too.

&#185 – Not everyone lets Twitter know where they are so this isn’t the total view of every tweet near New Haven. It’s the best I could do with what’s available.