6 ms·

You need to use social services to understand them

87 points by eugenejen 16y ago

roachsocal 16y ago
I've worked under too many decision makers who think that placing a Like button on something is a pivotal business model move, or adding a share button will magically make content go 'viral' -- these concepts are best understood by those who practice them, not by those who create a blog or Facebook account as a point of presence.
pmichaud 16y ago
I thought this was going to be about social services like welfare and food stamps, and how people don't understand the reality of those services unless they've been in a position to really need them. That could be a great article.
- apu 16y ago
  I don't know any particularly good articles/books on this subject, but Morgan Spurlock had a documentary tv series called "30 days" where he spends 30 days doing things like living on welfare, working for a minimum wage job, living in prison, etc. It's a fascinating show, and while he's the first to admit that even this level of exposure is not equivalent to what people in those situations actually feel (largely because he has a safety net, and his is only a temporary condition), it still dramatically shifts your view of what life really is like for people in very different circumstances. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Days_%28TV_series%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Days_%28TV_series%29
  - sachinag 16y ago
    Ehrenrich did a book called Nickel and Dimed: http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0805063897 http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08...
- georgecmu 16y ago
  If you're interested in the topic, read Sudhir Venkatesh's books, like his most recent _Gang_Leader_for_a_Day_. It's about his experience of spending 8 years with impoverished residents of a Chicago project community, including gang members, drug users, and prostitutes, as part of his graduate studies in sociology. http://www.sudhirvenkatesh.org/books/gang-leader-for-a-day http://www.sudhirvenkatesh.org/books/gang-leader-for-a-day
- js2 16y ago
  You might be interested in http://www.scratchbeginnings.com/ http://www.scratchbeginnings.com/
  - techbio 16y ago
    I was reading about this when I cranked out http://www.emptyfridge.org/ http://www.emptyfridge.org/
- theblackbox 16y ago
  A possible title for such an article is a word I first read about when reading Isaiah Berlin and his students for some philosophy of mind work I was doing a few years back. The term they use is "Einfuhlung", which translates to a "feeling into" (empathy?) but one that is quite directly experienced. Thay claim that one cannot feel and be moved by the depth of woe (or any other emotion, for that matter) in a blues song, for instance, without having experienced it firsthand.
- omouse 16y ago
  Yeah me too. Funny how the meaning of things changes in a different context and how the new speakers of these words neglect to check what the other meanings are.
glhaynes 16y ago
This seems to me to be one of Apple's key weaknesses right now: who among Apple's top folks is involved in social? There was a big furor when @forstall joined Twitter... he's up to 33,000+ followers, still with zero tweets. Does Steve check his Facebook all the time? I don't get the feeling that he does, based on what I see from Ping.
- TedBlosser 16y ago
  very true - you can tell when jobs called TweetDeck "TwitterDeck" in his earnings call - quote here: http://www.businessinsider.com/tweetdeck-steve-jobs-2010-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/tweetdeck-steve-jobs-2010-10 . Hopefully apple doesn't miss the social boat, because i'm a big apple fan
  - Alexx 16y ago
    "Hopefully apple doesn't miss the social boat", I use social media tools as much as the next guy, but I don't believe that a company like apple really needs to get 'inside' the whole 'social media' movement. I think they're playing the right moves focusing on allowing their platform to be a great base for these newer forms of media. All their new products and updates lend themselves well towards being a good base to build robust simplified online interactions on. The iPad + App store are a prime example - it's almost the perfect tool to build easy, simple, social interaction software on top of.
- jlees 16y ago
  s/Apple/Google
- kingnothing 16y ago
  My employer does a significant amount of work with Apple and, regarding their social media awareness, they're more cognizant than 90% of our clientèle about what they should and shouldn't be doing in the space. As for individual contributors at Apple, I have no clue, but the company as a whole is doing well in that regard.
jakerocheleau 16y ago
My friends always ask why I pull out my phone whenever we go somewhere. I'm hesitant to explain "oh I'm checking into Foursquare" because I don't want to get them hooked too Basically I agree 100%. There's no reason to tweet or check-in places but once you start it's pretty difficult to go back. Although maybe I'm just a secluded Twitter addict
- natch 16y ago
  But there is a reason. Plenty of reasons, in fact, some of which the article explains.
nphase 16y ago
I was one of the people that was very gung ho about Twitter's role in the Iranian Election brouhaha. I recently got an email from a friend linking the Gladwell post with the underhanded "Look at how wrong you were" statement. There's nothing wrong with being wrong (albeit in a very public way), but my response was this: Even though Twitter may not have played as direct of a role as the media was portraying, it was the open, decentralized nature of new social media/communication that made it so much harder for the Iranian government to strangle what got out. These sorts of protests have been going on for a while in Iran, but those of us in the west have never had such an intimate, play-by-play look at it until the 2009 elections. That's how we got pictures of Neda shot to death, stories about the Basij wreaking terror at night, and so on, practically in real time. Sure, most of us have forgotten about it and moved on (I haven't; most of my extended family is in Iran), but the level of coverage and fostering of connections just means the next time something happens, support from the rest of the world will be stronger (which I can personally say is extremely encouraging to my friends/family in Iran -- they've felt isolated, until now). Yes, I wasn't on the streets in Tehran, but I was helping some of them coordinate and communicate with shells/proxies/tunnels/etc. I think at this point, a better interpretation of the phrase "The Revolution will be Tweeted" would be that in this day and age, if anything is happening anywhere, it will be tweeted about as close to real-time as possible. Iran is "lucky" in this sense, they have a fairly modern communication system. Imagine if live streams of the atrocities in Darfur or North Korea were up on Twitter. These causes could emerge from being momentarily trendy to actually being a subject of intense worldwide criticism. And then maybe something good will become of it. </rant>
- joshstrike 16y ago
  The decentralized, anonymized web definitely helped get those videos out...but I don't know whether the social networks really had much effect. Even if they had, you're assuming that the Iranian gov't cares what a mass movement of its citizens thinks, which by all indications it doesn't. Things like Wikileaks, Cryptome and YouTube, which are not social networks in the sense that "social" is understood by the Valley, have far more potential to influence events on a government-to-government level -- or between other parties with power parity. The social nets are just a bunch of squawking parakeets that governments like North Korea and Iran are free to ignore at will.
notmyname 16y ago
And you need to be poor to understand and effectively help the poor. And you need to be a minority to understand the problems minorities face. Yes, participating in something or belonging to a group helps one understand it, but participating and belonging are not pre-requirements to help and understand.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
- arikfr 16y ago
  Paul Graham and most other (good) investors invest in people rather in ideas, so this is why it is less important for them to use social services to invest in social services. As for Steve Jobs -- he's the perfect example for @cdixon's argument, because Apple doesn't get social.
  - rick888 16y ago
    "Paul Graham and most other (good) investors invest in people rather in ideas," If this is the case, why don't people pitch their autobiography and personal interests rather than their new business idea?
    - arikfr 16y ago
      OK, let me rephrase -- they invest in people first and ideas second. Idea without a team that can execute it worths nothing. And while pitching your idea, you communicate something about yourself implicitly (besides the explicit background you give about yourself).
    - philwelch 16y ago
      Have you read the YC application form? "Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive other than this startup that each founder has built or achieved." "Please tell us about the time you, philwelch, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." "Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible." "How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?" "Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)" The problem is that autobiography is awkward and weird to discuss. So while you may discuss ideas, that's probably so you have something less awkward to talk about in the process of feeling each other out as people. Discussing your ideas shows how you think and operate; telling someone how you think and operate is, OTOH, fraught with cognitive error and lies, since most people don't have an accurate self-image.
joshstrike 16y ago
You can make distractions for the masses or you can consume them; ya can't do both. If you have a thousand telephones that won't ring, then social networks are a great way to get suckers to sell your garbage to each other with as little effort as possible. They're the internet equivalent of reality TV: The content creates itself, so it's cheap to run; product placement through aspirational, voyeuristic relationships are the paradigm; topics are vapid, memory is fleeting. Gen X mostly understands this, but we're basically irrelevant to the marketers -- actually, in most cases now we ARE the marketers, which might explain why we have a better handle on it. But Gen Y seems to have an impossible time grasping the idea that they're being used by all these neat little tweets and likes. They've got an insatiable appetite for short-attention-span candy. It's easy fishing if you want to profit off it; they're like a bunch of trained goldfish in a perfectly transparent tank. Total advertising saturation has apparently done to our culture what it was intended to do: Replace genuine interaction with a series of tailored sales pitches, in a Truman-Show-like fashion. I guess the question now is, what do we do with 30 million kids who can't write a complete sentence? And the correct answer is: War.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  You sound awfully cynical about this. I see the data collection as part of the service. They provide a way for people to communicate easily, refine searches and ad displays to interests, and they get to sell the aggregate data. It's not exactly a bad deal. I certainly don't miss the days of poorly targeted everything.
  - joshstrike 16y ago
    How can targeted advertising be a service? It would only be a service if you wanted to buy something but you didn't know what until you saw an ad for it. I think it's bizarre that anybody who grew up after the '50s would buy anything based on an ad... and yet... I make a living in advertising because it's true. I'd rather live in a world where it wasn't.
    - mkr-hn 16y ago
mkr-hn 16y ago
I was sold on social media when I asked a friend about Square's encryption via twitter (he was ecstatic about it), and got an answer directly from the top in response.
MJR 16y ago
This is the exact reason that I ignore any article or blog post announcing that the author has quit Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or any other social service. If you're quitting you're not seeing the benefits. The people who continue to use the services are reaping the benefits.
- jmatt 16y ago
  Ya I hear that. My take is if you have a way to announce to people that you are quitting social_network_001 then you likely didn't need it and aren't even close to an average user anyways. It's when your average user stops or worse slowly stops using your service that should set off the alarms.
terra_t 16y ago
I remember a time I was sitting in a restaurant run by some Egyptians, watching a satellite channel aimed at the middle east. There was a show on that was something like "American Idol"; they listed numbers that you could text to, in different countries, to vote for your favorite music videos. One country was Iraq... And i'm thinking, the majority of these people must be really pacified, not jihadists, if you can get them to send texts to vote for music videos.
- rue 16y ago
  I find it tremendously sad that this would be surprising to you.
  - terra_t 16y ago
    I wasn't surprised. But it reconfirmed my convictions in a memorable way. I'm pretty sick and tired of the "hate muslims" wave that's sweeping the U.S. as the election nears. What makes the U.S. great is that people come here from all over the world and get treated fairly -- at least more fairly then they'd be treated anyplace else. Yes, we've got discrimination, racism and other stupidity, but just try immigrating to any place else. Americans who decide they hate immigrants are turning their backs on who they are.
gruseom 16y ago
Chris makes a good argument, but there are counterexamples. It's well known that Ron Conway doesn't use these services. PG's a pretty good counterexample too, though he did finally dip a toe into Twitter. Ok, two toes.
scotty79 16y ago
This is necessary but not sufficient. I use facebook but I still don't get what is the point of using it.
MarinaMartin 16y ago
When I first read this title, I thought "Why is Chris Dixon on welfare?"
moron4hire 16y ago
Aside: I initially misinterpreted the title in that I thought "social services" referred to public welfare programs. However, it brings up an interesting question: does the statement still hold? Is it necessary to use public welfare programs to understand them properly?
zzzeek 16y ago
I use twitter extensively all day long, and I still agree with Gladwell. The author of this post seems to misunderstand Gladwell's point. Of course you can make new friends and business contacts online, including via twitter, which become strong real life bonds. But can you get 6,000 of your followers to face down riot police ? Not likely. Gladwell is not talking about establishing a few dozen close contacts a year. He's talking about motivating vast numbers of people to make serious sacrifice and commitment around important issues. As it stands we can barely get enough people to vote.
QuantumGood 16y ago
When I last checked, my main account (@TweetSmarter) had more retweets (lifetime) than the main New York Times account (@NYTimes). The real reason why? My wife and I offer Twitter advice through that account to anyone who asks...and a lot of people are really confused out there.
mark_l_watson 16y ago
Since starting work for CompassLabs, I find myself using more social networking sites as a learning experience. There are two social networking sites that I have been using long term: Twitter (I follow people who post very interesting links) and LinkedIn (for me, just because it is fun: I have reconnected with a lot of people who I used to work with).

87 points by eugenejen 16y ago

I've worked under too many decision makers who think that placing a Like button on something is a pivotal business model move, or adding a share button will magically make content go 'viral' -- these concepts are best understood by those who practice them, not by those who create a blog or Facebook account as a point of presence.

pmichaud 16y ago

I thought this was going to be about social services like welfare and food stamps, and how people don't understand the reality of those services unless they've been in a position to really need them. That could be a great article.

apu 16y ago
I don't know any particularly good articles/books on this subject, but Morgan Spurlock had a documentary tv series called "30 days" where he spends 30 days doing things like living on welfare, working for a minimum wage job, living in prison, etc. It's a fascinating show, and while he's the first to admit that even this level of exposure is not equivalent to what people in those situations actually feel (largely because he has a safety net, and his is only a temporary condition), it still dramatically shifts your view of what life really is like for people in very different circumstances. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Days_%28TV_series%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/30_Days_%28TV_series%29
- sachinag 16y ago
  Ehrenrich did a book called Nickel and Dimed: http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/0805063897 http://www.amazon.com/Nickel-Dimed-Not-Getting-America/dp/08...
georgecmu 16y ago
If you're interested in the topic, read Sudhir Venkatesh's books, like his most recent _Gang_Leader_for_a_Day_. It's about his experience of spending 8 years with impoverished residents of a Chicago project community, including gang members, drug users, and prostitutes, as part of his graduate studies in sociology. http://www.sudhirvenkatesh.org/books/gang-leader-for-a-day http://www.sudhirvenkatesh.org/books/gang-leader-for-a-day
js2 16y ago
You might be interested in http://www.scratchbeginnings.com/ http://www.scratchbeginnings.com/
- techbio 16y ago
  I was reading about this when I cranked out http://www.emptyfridge.org/ http://www.emptyfridge.org/
theblackbox 16y ago
A possible title for such an article is a word I first read about when reading Isaiah Berlin and his students for some philosophy of mind work I was doing a few years back. The term they use is "Einfuhlung", which translates to a "feeling into" (empathy?) but one that is quite directly experienced. Thay claim that one cannot feel and be moved by the depth of woe (or any other emotion, for that matter) in a blues song, for instance, without having experienced it firsthand.
omouse 16y ago
Yeah me too. Funny how the meaning of things changes in a different context and how the new speakers of these words neglect to check what the other meanings are.

glhaynes 16y ago

This seems to me to be one of Apple's key weaknesses right now: who among Apple's top folks is involved in social? There was a big furor when @forstall joined Twitter... he's up to 33,000+ followers, still with zero tweets. Does Steve check his Facebook all the time? I don't get the feeling that he does, based on what I see from Ping.

TedBlosser 16y ago
very true - you can tell when jobs called TweetDeck "TwitterDeck" in his earnings call - quote here: http://www.businessinsider.com/tweetdeck-steve-jobs-2010-10 http://www.businessinsider.com/tweetdeck-steve-jobs-2010-10 . Hopefully apple doesn't miss the social boat, because i'm a big apple fan
- Alexx 16y ago
  "Hopefully apple doesn't miss the social boat", I use social media tools as much as the next guy, but I don't believe that a company like apple really needs to get 'inside' the whole 'social media' movement. I think they're playing the right moves focusing on allowing their platform to be a great base for these newer forms of media. All their new products and updates lend themselves well towards being a good base to build robust simplified online interactions on. The iPad + App store are a prime example - it's almost the perfect tool to build easy, simple, social interaction software on top of.
jlees 16y ago
s/Apple/Google
kingnothing 16y ago
My employer does a significant amount of work with Apple and, regarding their social media awareness, they're more cognizant than 90% of our clientèle about what they should and shouldn't be doing in the space. As for individual contributors at Apple, I have no clue, but the company as a whole is doing well in that regard.

jakerocheleau 16y ago

My friends always ask why I pull out my phone whenever we go somewhere. I'm hesitant to explain "oh I'm checking into Foursquare" because I don't want to get them hooked too Basically I agree 100%. There's no reason to tweet or check-in places but once you start it's pretty difficult to go back. Although maybe I'm just a secluded Twitter addict

natch 16y ago
But there is a reason. Plenty of reasons, in fact, some of which the article explains.

nphase 16y ago

I was one of the people that was very gung ho about Twitter's role in the Iranian Election brouhaha. I recently got an email from a friend linking the Gladwell post with the underhanded "Look at how wrong you were" statement. There's nothing wrong with being wrong (albeit in a very public way), but my response was this: Even though Twitter may not have played as direct of a role as the media was portraying, it was the open, decentralized nature of new social media/communication that made it so much harder for the Iranian government to strangle what got out. These sorts of protests have been going on for a while in Iran, but those of us in the west have never had such an intimate, play-by-play look at it until the 2009 elections. That's how we got pictures of Neda shot to death, stories about the Basij wreaking terror at night, and so on, practically in real time. Sure, most of us have forgotten about it and moved on (I haven't; most of my extended family is in Iran), but the level of coverage and fostering of connections just means the next time something happens, support from the rest of the world will be stronger (which I can personally say is extremely encouraging to my friends/family in Iran -- they've felt isolated, until now). Yes, I wasn't on the streets in Tehran, but I was helping some of them coordinate and communicate with shells/proxies/tunnels/etc. I think at this point, a better interpretation of the phrase "The Revolution will be Tweeted" would be that in this day and age, if anything is happening anywhere, it will be tweeted about as close to real-time as possible. Iran is "lucky" in this sense, they have a fairly modern communication system. Imagine if live streams of the atrocities in Darfur or North Korea were up on Twitter. These causes could emerge from being momentarily trendy to actually being a subject of intense worldwide criticism. And then maybe something good will become of it. </rant>

joshstrike 16y ago
The decentralized, anonymized web definitely helped get those videos out...but I don't know whether the social networks really had much effect. Even if they had, you're assuming that the Iranian gov't cares what a mass movement of its citizens thinks, which by all indications it doesn't. Things like Wikileaks, Cryptome and YouTube, which are not social networks in the sense that "social" is understood by the Valley, have far more potential to influence events on a government-to-government level -- or between other parties with power parity. The social nets are just a bunch of squawking parakeets that governments like North Korea and Iran are free to ignore at will.

notmyname 16y ago

And you need to be poor to understand and effectively help the poor. And you need to be a minority to understand the problems minorities face. Yes, participating in something or belonging to a group helps one understand it, but participating and belonging are not pre-requirements to help and understand.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

arikfr 16y ago
Paul Graham and most other (good) investors invest in people rather in ideas, so this is why it is less important for them to use social services to invest in social services. As for Steve Jobs -- he's the perfect example for @cdixon's argument, because Apple doesn't get social.
- rick888 16y ago
  "Paul Graham and most other (good) investors invest in people rather in ideas," If this is the case, why don't people pitch their autobiography and personal interests rather than their new business idea?
  - arikfr 16y ago
    OK, let me rephrase -- they invest in people first and ideas second. Idea without a team that can execute it worths nothing. And while pitching your idea, you communicate something about yourself implicitly (besides the explicit background you give about yourself).
  - philwelch 16y ago
    Have you read the YC application form? "Please tell us in one or two sentences about something impressive other than this startup that each founder has built or achieved." "Please tell us about the time you, philwelch, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage." "Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible." "How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?" "Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)" The problem is that autobiography is awkward and weird to discuss. So while you may discuss ideas, that's probably so you have something less awkward to talk about in the process of feeling each other out as people. Discussing your ideas shows how you think and operate; telling someone how you think and operate is, OTOH, fraught with cognitive error and lies, since most people don't have an accurate self-image.

joshstrike 16y ago

You can make distractions for the masses or you can consume them; ya can't do both. If you have a thousand telephones that won't ring, then social networks are a great way to get suckers to sell your garbage to each other with as little effort as possible. They're the internet equivalent of reality TV: The content creates itself, so it's cheap to run; product placement through aspirational, voyeuristic relationships are the paradigm; topics are vapid, memory is fleeting. Gen X mostly understands this, but we're basically irrelevant to the marketers -- actually, in most cases now we ARE the marketers, which might explain why we have a better handle on it. But Gen Y seems to have an impossible time grasping the idea that they're being used by all these neat little tweets and likes. They've got an insatiable appetite for short-attention-span candy. It's easy fishing if you want to profit off it; they're like a bunch of trained goldfish in a perfectly transparent tank. Total advertising saturation has apparently done to our culture what it was intended to do: Replace genuine interaction with a series of tailored sales pitches, in a Truman-Show-like fashion. I guess the question now is, what do we do with 30 million kids who can't write a complete sentence? And the correct answer is: War.

mkr-hn 16y ago
You sound awfully cynical about this. I see the data collection as part of the service. They provide a way for people to communicate easily, refine searches and ad displays to interests, and they get to sell the aggregate data. It's not exactly a bad deal. I certainly don't miss the days of poorly targeted everything.
- joshstrike 16y ago
  How can targeted advertising be a service? It would only be a service if you wanted to buy something but you didn't know what until you saw an ad for it. I think it's bizarre that anybody who grew up after the '50s would buy anything based on an ad... and yet... I make a living in advertising because it's true. I'd rather live in a world where it wasn't.
  - mkr-hn 16y ago

mkr-hn 16y ago

I was sold on social media when I asked a friend about Square's encryption via twitter (he was ecstatic about it), and got an answer directly from the top in response.

MJR 16y ago

This is the exact reason that I ignore any article or blog post announcing that the author has quit Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or any other social service. If you're quitting you're not seeing the benefits. The people who continue to use the services are reaping the benefits.

jmatt 16y ago
Ya I hear that. My take is if you have a way to announce to people that you are quitting social_network_001 then you likely didn't need it and aren't even close to an average user anyways. It's when your average user stops or worse slowly stops using your service that should set off the alarms.

terra_t 16y ago

I remember a time I was sitting in a restaurant run by some Egyptians, watching a satellite channel aimed at the middle east. There was a show on that was something like "American Idol"; they listed numbers that you could text to, in different countries, to vote for your favorite music videos. One country was Iraq... And i'm thinking, the majority of these people must be really pacified, not jihadists, if you can get them to send texts to vote for music videos.

rue 16y ago
I find it tremendously sad that this would be surprising to you.
- terra_t 16y ago
  I wasn't surprised. But it reconfirmed my convictions in a memorable way. I'm pretty sick and tired of the "hate muslims" wave that's sweeping the U.S. as the election nears. What makes the U.S. great is that people come here from all over the world and get treated fairly -- at least more fairly then they'd be treated anyplace else. Yes, we've got discrimination, racism and other stupidity, but just try immigrating to any place else. Americans who decide they hate immigrants are turning their backs on who they are.

gruseom 16y ago

Chris makes a good argument, but there are counterexamples. It's well known that Ron Conway doesn't use these services. PG's a pretty good counterexample too, though he did finally dip a toe into Twitter. Ok, two toes.

scotty79 16y ago

This is necessary but not sufficient. I use facebook but I still don't get what is the point of using it.

MarinaMartin 16y ago

When I first read this title, I thought "Why is Chris Dixon on welfare?"

moron4hire 16y ago

Aside: I initially misinterpreted the title in that I thought "social services" referred to public welfare programs. However, it brings up an interesting question: does the statement still hold? Is it necessary to use public welfare programs to understand them properly?

zzzeek 16y ago

I use twitter extensively all day long, and I still agree with Gladwell. The author of this post seems to misunderstand Gladwell's point. Of course you can make new friends and business contacts online, including via twitter, which become strong real life bonds. But can you get 6,000 of your followers to face down riot police ? Not likely. Gladwell is not talking about establishing a few dozen close contacts a year. He's talking about motivating vast numbers of people to make serious sacrifice and commitment around important issues. As it stands we can barely get enough people to vote.

QuantumGood 16y ago

When I last checked, my main account (@TweetSmarter) had more retweets (lifetime) than the main New York Times account (@NYTimes). The real reason why? My wife and I offer Twitter advice through that account to anyone who asks...and a lot of people are really confused out there.

mark_l_watson 16y ago

Since starting work for CompassLabs, I find myself using more social networking sites as a learning experience. There are two social networking sites that I have been using long term: Twitter (I follow people who post very interesting links) and LinkedIn (for me, just because it is fun: I have reconnected with a lot of people who I used to work with).