Blog of Mr. Tweet

*Update: thanks for all the uplifting notes we have received in the form below- we are definitely working hard to repay the faith!

Hi folks! With Twitter rolling out their own user recommendation service, we are very happy to announce that we are  moving on to the next phase of our service.

The original “who to follow” service has been discontinued, while we are launching a refreshed service on September 10th.

We started in early 2009, helping Twitter users find great people to follow. We were met with overwhelming enthusiasm, and we quickly grew to be one of the most popular twitter applications.

400,000 users have used MrTweet to discover people like themselves. To date, more than 14Million connections have happened through our service.

With such support, we are obviously a little sad to discontinue the original service, but we felt the need to focus on a new service that has the potential to add much more value beyond just helping you find who to follow.

—–FAQ—–

What is the new service about?
Like MrTweet, we help you find great people. But besides pure recommendations on who to follow, we want to help you express your strengths as well as interact with other great people in the same networks as you.

Why September 10th?
Mom’s birthday. Need a break to say Happy Birthday to her on that day.

How can I get involved?
Give a comment and give us some love! Seriously, user feedback (good or bad) is super important for us

Why are you discontinuing the “who to follow” service?
We had a great thing going with the original MrTweet, but trying to blend in the old “who to follow” model (while very useful) constrained us significantly in new services we wanted to launch.

Maintaining MrTweet while trying to build out the new service became unsustainable, since MrTweet required lots of server and database maintainence.

Besides, Twitter’s implementation was very similar to ours, so we believe impact to users would be minimized.

Talking about “you”, who are you anyway?
@mingyeow on Twitter. I am kinda like Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes, except I am not as cute and I have a virtual owl instead of a virtual tiger.

How to get involved?
By letting us know here!

Hi folks! With Twitter rolling out their own user recommendation service, we are very happy to announce that we are  moving on to the next phase of our service.

The original “who to follow” service has been discontinued, while we are relaunching on September 10th.

We started in early 2009, helping Twitter users find great people to follow. We were met with overwhelming enthusiasm, and we quickly grew to be one of the most popular twitter applications.

400,000 users have used MrTweet to discover people like themselves. To date, more than 14Million connections have happened through our service.

With such support, we are obviously a little sad to discontinue the service, but we felt the need to focus on a new service that has the potential to add much more value beyond just helping you find who to follow.

—–FAQ—–

What is the new service about?
You can think of it as MrTweet, but shifting from pure recommendations to helping you find and interact with great people in the same networks as you.

How can I get involved?
Give a comment and give us some love! Seriously, you have no idea how important user feedback (good or bad) is in keeping us going.

Why are you relaunching?
We had a great thing going with MrTweet, but trying to blend in the old “who to follow” model (while very useful) constrained us significantly in new services we wanted to launch.

Maintaining MrTweet while trying to build out the new service became unsustainable, since MrTweet required lots of server and database maintainence.

Talking about “you”, who are you anyway?
@mingyeow on Twitter. I am kinda like Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes, except I am not as cute and I have a virtual owl instead of a virtual tiger.

Why September 10th?
Mom’s birthday. Need to take a break to say Happy Birthday to her on that day.

Want to get involved? Let us know here!

Hi folks, very happy to announce the second version of our Firefox plugin. The first version received great reviews from users and we also received a lot of feedback about what you folks wanted in the next version.

“This tool is very useful! Sometimes I would have to follow people for a few days to find out the information that this plug-in gives me instantly. It makes the decision of whether to follow much easier” – Rebecca Mayo (Review of V1 from Mozilla Website)

V1: Twitter habits and recommendations

In this version, we add on to the goodness of the first version, including features like:

1) Understand a user’s network and tweeting habits at a single glance. See useful information like who he interacts with the most, recommendations he has received, how often he tweets, etc.

Who he interacts with the most

2) Build up relationships by easily recommending him to MrTweet right from his profile.

Recommend awesome people directly from their profile

3) See Twitter search results in Google - an excellent way of getting both types of search results!

Twitter search + Google search = Happiness

4) Enhanced user interface for Twitter.com – threaded conversation, inline pictures, and many more (can easily be enabled/disabled)

Threaded conversations, inline RTs (and others)

Alright folks, convinced that this is goodness manifested yet? If so, head over to the firefox plugin page now!

Dear peeps, over the last 3 months, we have been improving MrTweet according to the hundreds of feedback we get daily via our feedback form and GetSatisfaction.

Here is a summary of improvements we have made over this period:

Revamping Infrastructure To Support Daily Updates: Old time users might recall long periods of suggestions not being updated. We have managed to turn that around completely -Every time you come back to the MrTweet, we will update our suggestions for you.

Updated suggestions everytime you come back

Relevance over celebrities: This is the one we work the hardest on: Fine tuning our suggestions so as to facilitate discovery of relevant folks who share your interests, as opposed to merely popular people. Relevance is a never ending process… but we are trying hard!

Focused on helping YOU find people relevant to your interests

Option for OAuth: Which means you do not need to use your Twitter credentials if you do not want to

Support for OAuth where ever login is needed

New Dashboard: Allows for ease of viewing of your MrTweet suggestions

New Dashboard To Allow You To View Everything In One Place

Make Recommendations In The App: Which means you do not need to tweet out your recommendations

Recommend awesome people in the app itself

We are continuing to make changes based on your feedback, and please let continue to let us know how we can do a better job of being your personal assistant!

One of the most biggest untapped potential of this new social web lies in entrepreneurs using their domain knowledge to create apps that solves real world problems for the verticals they are passionate about.

Tweetminister, an application that aims to allow political professionals to keep updated with the information that matters is one of the first to take a concerted effort in doing so.

Helping Political Professionals Get Started With Ease

With their understanding of the UK political scene, they have created a site that allows political professionals in UK to easily keep up to date with everything that matters without having to set up anything.

LiveWire Screenshot

MrTweet Goodness: Keeping TweetMinister Updated With The Most Influential Folks Automatically

With the ever changing landscape that is politics, with new influential players emerging out of nowhere, the MrTweet discovery technology allows them to retrieve a continuously updated list of influential people in the political scene.

MrTweet Recommendations Inside TweetMinister

This is early days yet of course, but we think this is an prime example of how domain expertise sprinkled with discovery magic can make life for professionals in the domain without any setup work.

If you are a political professional, make sure you check it out and give them more ideas!

Try it here: TweetMinister Livewire

In the most exciting encounter between an owl and a raccoon since the beginning of time,  the co-founder of Mr. Tweet (@mingyeow) met Mr. Seemic (@loic) last week. The meeting ended with Loic pulling out his ever handy Flip Mimo and doing an interview which scared the camera shy mingyeow, probably for life. Check out the video below:

Seriously, Loic has the most energy amongst anyone I have had the pleasure of meeting with. Not to mention Seesmic has tons of great stuff in the works. Be sure to tell Seesmic how you want them to improve their services!

Followers, followers, followers. That’s all you ever hear about on Twitter these days. Everyone wants followers and there are a million ways to attract them. People are constantly tweeting ways to attract followers on Twitter. There are also more than enough articles on the topic. From auto-follow services, to recommendation engines like our very own Mr. Tweet, you’re bound to find at least one solution that will work for you.

Discover If You’re Followable

These easiest and most humbling way to get more followers is to attract them with the content that you tweet. From links to the discussions you choose to participate in, potential followers will be able to decide within the first 15 seconds of viewing your profile, whether or not you’re followable. The best way for you to take advantage of this and improve your following is to go to the source: your profile (duh!).

Go to your twitter profile (you can find ours here: @corvida or @mrtweet) and look over your Twitter profile for 2 minutes. Done? Now, answer the following questions:

• Would you follow yourself or would you pass up the opportunity?
• What did you like about your Twitter profile?
• How might others feel about your profile after taking one look at it?

Glance over your profile again for 10 seconds. Done? Now answer the following:

• Do you think you’re followable?
• If so, how do you make your profile stand out?
• If not, what could you do to improve?

Share your suggestions, tips, and stories with us in the comments!

Lots of awesome (and funny) tips by our users (some samples below)

Super Useful Software:

Self Control.app Google it. It’s wonderful. You can select the domains you want blocked
- Paul Carroll

Give Up:

I don’t. For me, the question is, how do you avoid working when using tools like Twitter and Facebook?
- Laura Anderson-Gavin

Best State Of Denial

I have no problem working w- ooooohh!!! Something shiny on Twitter!!
- dbabbitt

Making It Hard To Use Twitter:

Simple! use Gravity and the Facebook widget on my N97 and try to ignore the beeps and trinkles of them both alerting me to reply to tweets LIKE THIS ONE!
- awallafaShagba

Turn It Off

Turn them OFF. Unfortunately, if they are on, I just can’t resist the temptation!
- Astrid and Rene

It Is Good To Be Distracted!

I believe that personal distractions are good for the soul and that since I work alone at home, the connectness actually improves my productivity. Otherwise, working at home would be a social drag. Actually joined a number of new networking sites today and working to streamline yet increase my twittering and updating to further increase the portions of soul food! I think it’s working for me.
- Lordeeme

Healthiest Tradeoff

I have forgone smoke breaks in lieu of Twitter and Facebooking.
- Chrissa

Best One Of All…

I try to follow fairly boring people.
- Brett Patterson

It’s that time of the week again, folks! This week we’re giving away one cool The GodTwitter T-shirt. Made by the awesomesauce Tony Gigov (@tonygigov), creator of the Twitter Nonsense Comic strip. And who wouldn’t want to rock this shirt at their next tweet-up?

Now, are you ready to win it? Here’s, what you need to do:

• Leave a comment below answering the following question: How do you avoid personal distractions when using tools like Twitter & Facebook while working?
• You only need to answer this question once.
• Winner will be chosen randomly. The winner will receive one (1) GodTwitter T-Shirt in white or black (your choice).
• Entries can be submitted until Friday, July 3rd, 12:01 a.m. PST / 3:01 a.m. EST.

Good luck!

This is a guest posting by Shea Bennett. Shea is the founder of Twittercism, a blog that explores the various aspects of Twitter, from the great to the dark. We love Shea’s wits and guts, so we will be bringing his thoughts to you on a regular basis!

Consider this, if you will: I decide to write a book through Twitter, 140 characters at a time. Moroever, I do this stream-of-consciousness style, and just let it all flow out. I keep no backup. I write my book, tweet after tweet after tweet. Soon, thousands and thousands of my words are in the system.

For their own reasons, Twitter decides I’ve done something wrong, and suspends my account. All my work is lost.

What are my legal rights? Who owns those tweets? Can I get them back?

In Twitter’s terms of service, under a section called, “Copyright (What’s Yours is Yours)”, they state:

We claim no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to the Twitter service. Your profile and materials uploaded remain yours. You can remove your profile at any time by deleting your account. This will also remove any text and images you have stored in the system.

We encourage users to contribute their creations to the public domain or consider progressive licensing terms.

That’s fine, but under “General Conditions”, they also say:

We reserve the right, in accordance with any applicable laws, to refuse service to anyone for any reason at any time.

We’ve seen this happen before with accounts such as the fake Christopher Walken. The reasons for the suspension of that user were fairly clear, but what about all those tweets that he wrote? They’ve also been removed without a trace. The account had a loyal and amused following, and those tweets were funny and had value.

Twitter doesn’t provide any kind of backup service within the site; external ways to ‘save’ your tweets exist, but they’re more than little crude. The majority of tweets are, of course, hardly worth keeping forever, but some are. And I can see many instances in the future where Twitter will be used for different purposes and more and more of these tweets will have value.

One obvious example is where Twitter breaks a news story before anywhere else because the submitter was on the scene when it took place. That tweet becomes a source – who does it belong to?

Moreover, say Twitter decides to produce The Book Of Tweets, and selects 10,000 of the greatest-ever updates for publication. Can they do that without the permission of the authors? Can anybody do that without permission of the authors? Where is the line?

This is a very hazy area and my gut feeling tells me that until a legal precedent is set it’s going to remain that way. Until then, you might want to think about it a little – who owns your tweets? And would you be happy for somebody else to make money off them without your permission?