Ryan Joy (atxryan)

Michelle Greer asks you to come to the Blood Drive Tweetup. It’s an awesome idea and shows why Michelle is such a cool person. Her energy is boundless.

Do it.

What news have you heard or seen on Twitter first? I’m talking about the kind of news that would’ve been breaking on CNN had you been watching at the time. After each of these tweet discoveries, I went to the Internet to find out more.

Here, I’ll go first… this is all from memory, so I’m definitely missing some things. I especially can’t remember the many deaths that I first learned of on Twitter.

• Anna Nicole Smith’s death
• Earthquake in China
• Charlton Heston’s death
• Heath Ledger’s death
• Both crane incidents in New York
• Ted Kennedy’s seizure and subsequent brain tumor diagnosis
• Ice was confirmed to be found on Mars

Most of these items were tweeted by friends whom I follow. The exciting announcement from Mars came from their Mars Phoenix Twitter account. As I’m starting to follow more traditional sources of news, I expect to learn of other breaking news and be led to their websites for more information.

Ok, your turn…

It appears that part of Twitter’s strategy to mitigate downtime during WWDC 2008 this year is to push tracking, and therefore traffic and constant refreshing, of the event over to third-party search service, Summize. I’ve noticed before that Summize will often not return the most recent tweets associated with a search. So, it may be less than real time.

However, it could also be that Twitter is working closely with the Summize team and will allow unthrottled access to the API during the event while throttling everyone else back… and it just might work.

What do you think?

Update 06.09.2008 11:00am: It’s about an hour away from the WWDC keynote, and Twitter has removed access to archives, direct messages, and the public timeline. They’ve dropped their API request limit to 10 per hour, from 70.

My coworker, Alex, posted the following tweet today referencing our fried chicken taste-off planned for tomorrow:

Setting up the rules for fast food fried chicken taste-off in the office tomorrow.

To which, Popeyes Chicken chimed in with:

@alexcc I know the winner! I know it! Do we have to wait until tomorrow to announce? (sounds like bonafide?)

Note that Alex did not mention Popeyes or @PopeyesChicken in any way. He only mentions fried chicken which must have popped up on their radar via a service like Summize or TweetScan.

Other companies such as H&R Block, Southwest Airlines, Comcast, and Zappos are actively engaging consumers, whether they’re customers or not in some cases, on Twitter. H&R Block apparently responds to people asking general tax questions, including questions about donations and the recent economic stimulus checks. Southwest wishes their travelers a safe flight as well as responds to complaints and compliments that are directed toward ’southwest’ or ‘SWA’.

Most of these tweets are unsolicited. But does that automatically make them spam?

This led to an interesting discussion among my coworkers as to whether or not this type of engagement qualifies as SPAM. I maintain that, at this point, it does not. In this case the message does not go into your timeline or direct messages, email inbox, et cetera… However, it does show up in your Replies tab (when it’s working!), but is that spam? Really that’s a recently added feature of Twitter to help you see when other people whom you may not follow mention you in their tweets.

So, what say you? If a company is being helpful, is it spam? What if they respond with some sort of promotional message? Who draws the line?

For a list of other companies on Twitter, check out this Twitter Brand Index from Fluent Simplicity.

Update 05.30.2008:
I’ve got to update this post because Popeyes is obviously very engaged online. This morning I saw this reply, referencing this very blog post, in my Twitter feed:

@atxryan Spam is pork, not chicken right? I’m respectively interested in your findings.

This is interesting because I never mention any of the aforementioned keywords in any of my tweets. Meaning that our anonymous Popeyes social media guru discovered this post via Google Alerts or something similar and now humorously engaged me via Twitter, even completing the circle with Alex:

@alexcc Good morning. I hope ya’ll have fun in the taste off today. Is Ryan a judge?

I salute you, anonymous Popeyes social media guru.

Well, I just got back from this evening’s SXSW Mixer for Austin. Overall it was good times and only the slightest prelude to the frenzy of parties that is SXSW.

I was able to hang out with fellow Refresh Austin members (Alex Jones, Tim Thompson, Grant Hutchins, Justin Perkins), former Statesman.com coworkers (Nick Welp, Wendy Mitchell, Omar Gallaga, and Jason Meek), and Geek Austin’s Lynn Bender and Michelle Greer.

It was also great to meet up with new Twitter friend LaniAR of rerevealed.com and new contact Benn Rosales of SinglePointe Realty. They’re both promoting better use of technology and media in real estate via Agent Genius.

Oh, and the Southern Sirens are looking to be booked for a SXSW day party or evening event.

Wondering why the local Austin paper doesn’t have a Twitter account so I can get updates like NYT. Ryan, thoughts?
Paul Menard via Twitter

Well, it’s true that you can find Twitter accounts for the New York Times, CNN, BBC, TechCrunch, et al. However, it’s not clear how many of those are actually official branding efforts by those media organizations. In fact, the open nature of the Twitter API and the fact that these companies offer their latest headlines as RSS feeds mean anyone can create a news “river”.

Regardless I had to take up the challenge after being called out directly. I quickly registered accounts from both Statesman.com and Austin360.com. A quick and dirty PHP script later set up as a cron job and voila! While these sites are among those of my employer, my Twitter accounts do not constitute an “official” use of this syndication method. The NYTimes twitter was set up in a similar vein by Jacob Harris

http://twitter.com/statesman
http://twitter.com/austin360

Update: I’ve turned off the cron job until some sort of contextual relevance can be offered to any potential users. Breaking news, weather, jury verdicts, traffic, ticket sales, event listings, A-List events are all options.

What are your thoughts? What kind of updates would you be interested in receiving?