Items Tagged With twitter

In Australia, we have this social effect where anyone who gets too successful eventually gets cut down by everyone else. Effectively, if you get too big for your britches, people feel they have a right to cut you back down. It's probably the single largest thing about being Australian that I have always hated. For some reason, we get jealous and vindictive about the success of others.

But why? I've never understood it. People work hard, make all the right choices, make smart decisions, and reap the rewards. Fair enough to me. I'm not at the point yet myself, but I'm getting there, so why begrudge the succes of others who have gotten there before me.

But I digress....

Today I woke up to find a firestorm of controversy over an article written in Mashable. That can't right I thought, I like Mashable and read it every day. I better have a look. What I read was really just a personal attack on John Reese. It is unfounded, inaccurate, and quite frankly, just rubbish. Aside from attacking John, the inaccurate prediction that internet marketers are going to ruin Twitter for everybody is just mind boggling.Tall poppy syndrome at its finest

What an utterly rediculous argument. I've really enjoyed reading Mashable until today.

This is like saying internet marketers are going to ruin email because they use it. No wait, people can unsubscribe can't they?

So, obviously for Twitter to survive this massive onslaught of people being marketed to by other Twitter users, there needs to be some sort of way to stop following the people who market to you? Hmm...

Honestly, the personal attack on John Reese without even checking the facts is just gutter journalism, something I thought Mashable would be above. I'd love to do a comparison between the number of times Mashable staff have twittered links to their articles, compared to the number of times John has twittered links to his stuff. Just over the last couple of months.

But I don't really need to do I, we both know the answer to that already. It's been quite good though, to see that most of the commenters to the article I'm talking about  don't agree with it, so at least there's some common sense out there.

Mashable is a highly, highly monetised site, that uses Twitter to drive traffic. I follow John Reese on Twitter, and I enjoy his tweets. It's been quite rare to have John link to any of his sites, he's more likely to offer little nuggets of wisdom or vent about different sports. Who's the bad guy here?

I want you to make your own mind up, so I'm not going to put in any quotes from either source. Instead, below I'll link to the Mashable article in question, and then John Reese's response to the attack on his blog. I know who think shows more ethics but I want you to see it for yourself. Make sure you read the comments section too, that's very enlightening all by itself.

The Mashable Article

John Reese's Response

If you're not even using Twitter yet, I'm not even going to try and convince you otherwise. To really have that lesson sink in you need to be following Ed Dale or Dan Raine (you can follow me too if you like). Twitter is really quite an amazing beast, and is sowly changing the way people are communicaing on the web.

Since I first started using Twitter last year, I've tried out many Twitter clients and addons. From Twitterific to Twitbin, from using the built in tool in Flock, to using Hahlo on the mobile phone. Twitterific was the winner there for a while, but the latest version seems to have buggered things uo a bit. I still find when I'm on a single small screen that Twitbin gets a bit of a showing, as it just sits in the browser sidebar. But generally I only use one Twitter app now.

My current fave out of all of these is Twhirl . And here's why.

• You can run multiple accounts using Twirl
• If you have it minimized you get new tweet notification windows
• Icons overlayed on twitter users makes it very easy to reply, direct message, etc.
• The embedded services are very cool. eg. using Snurl to shorten URLs
• It's an Adobe Air app, so it runs on Mac or Windows
• The timeline filtering makes it so easy to keep up with things
• It's very customisable to get a look that you're happy with.
• It also can post your tweets to Pownce and Jaiku