ben bloch’s posterous

I’m excited to announce that I’ll be starting 2010 in San Francisco. This is something that’s been on my map for some time now. Fortunately, I get to make the move with Scrapblog. 

Having lived in Florida for all of my 26 years, a geographic change is more than welcome.  Along the way, I’ve had the opportunity to make lifelong friends and work with some very talented people. I’ll miss Refresh Miami and all of the people I met through the meetup. I feel confident that the iPhone meetup I founded is in good hands with Davide Di Cillo. My family lives in South Florida, so I’ll be back from time to time to visit.

The search for an apartment in San Francisco is proving difficult. It seems that most landlords are not pet friendly. I’ve done a fair amount of research on neighborhoods, but I can’t really draw any conclusions without spending some time in each of them. If you live in San Francisco, neighborhood recommendations are very welcome. I’d like to live in an area and a building that feels unique to the city. Think victorians and steep hills. I’d also like to be able to walk to good cafe’s and restaurants. The Mission seems attractive to me because I like burritos and good coffee, but I’m not sure if I want to live there yet. After enduring the oppressive heat and humidity of South Florida, a cool (micro)climate would be nice as well.

If you’ve got any advice for moving to San Francisco, or can recommend a rental agent, please do. If you’re in the market for a road bike or mountain bike and live in Miami, let me know.

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Let’s face it, direct messages are the bane of twitter, often amounting to spam, phishing attacks and relentless game invites. Direct messages aren’t inherently bad, even when sent by a third party (expectedly). 

One of the issues with third party apps that send direct messages is that they rarely provide the user with granular control of who to send those messages to. If we empower the user to select the recipients of a DM, and understand what they’re sending up front, I’m willing to bet that the result would be more messages sent over time (good for the third party) and less pissed off followers (good for the sender).

In facebook, we have a friend selector control.

Here, we have a high level of granular control. A user can search by name, list, and network.

Why not do the same with twitter? Maybe something like this...

Similar to the facebook friend selector, such an interface could provide a user with the ability to search for friends to select, filter them by lists, and provide granular control of who will receive the message or invitation.

We can’t assume that twitter will take control of their app ecosystem and put tight policies in place, as facebook has. We can’t assume that twitter will provide us with friend selector controls like the one above. But hey, they’ve got a great API, why not build such a control/service? Well, there are limitations. The main issue is that it takes a lot of time to calculate bi-directional relationships in twitter. These are the users you’re able to direct message. I wrote a little ruby script to do just that as a proof of concept, I may put it on github in the near future. For my account, it takes a little under a minute to page through all of my friends and followers and calculate the intersection of those lists. Most users would drop off before the script completes. If twitter provided a way to request a list of user statuses for which a bi-directional relationship exists, this wouldn’t be an issue. Note: I’m using the status methods for friends and followers, which provide a good amount of metadata about the user, not just the user id.

If you’re providing such an interface in a third party app today, I recommend displaying the entire list of friends (paginated). Obviously, all of the messages won’t succeed, but you could provide feedback to the user about which ones did/didn’t and why. You could even deduce the bi-drectional relationships by looking at which messages succeeded.  

Finally, what if the sender isn’t operating in the recipient’s best interest, intentionally or unintentionally? I propose that such a service would allow recipients to unsubscribe to messages from any given application or sender. It’d be better if twitter facilitated this, but again, we can’t assume that they will.

If you know of any applications that do this well, please let me know in the comments.

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(originally posted June 12, 2009 on benbinary.com)

Until lately, I’ve been able to keep my twitter friend activity stream fairly spam-free. It’s easy to spot a twitter spammer. They either have a username following a pattern like femailName1234, are following a lot of people with few follow-backs, have little to no tweets, or tweet nothing but links.

Then spymaster happened. The mafia-wars clone for twitter which polluted activity streams everywhere and bombarded users with direct message invites. This upset a lot of people. Forgetting direct messages for a moment, one might argue that voluntarily updating status as it relates to a social game is a legitimate use-case. If I’m an active spymaster user, for example, maybe I want to see what my friends are doing in this game. Others might find this to be intrusive and spammy activity, depending on the frequency and density in their friend stream.  The point is, the spammyness of these types of social game activity updates are completely subjective. Some may think it’s fine, some may think it’s completely spammy.

Following spymaster, the next most pervasive friend-spamming incident relates to the squarespace marketing campaign. The basic idea is, tweet about this product, potentially get a free iPhone. This campaign prays on people’s desire for free things, especially when it comes to arguably the most desirable consumer good on the market. If a few friends catch on and throw a few tweets out there, it’s forgivable and probably not much of a problem. When half of your friend stream consists of these tweets, daily, it becomes a problem. We all know, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. When you advertise a product in a tweet, you are potentially losing credibility and followers. I’ve had to unfollow a good number of people due to their obnoxious requests for a free iPhone. Pimping a product in your tweet with the sole intention of reaping some reward is just as bad as selling advertising in your tweet. There’s an app for that, but that’s another post altogether.

So how do we deal with an influx of undesired activity? Right now you’re options are unfollow, get better friends, or do do nothing. Neither of these options are good enough. Hopefully this post convinces them to stop, but I’m not counting on that. I have it on good authority that twitter does not plan on doing much to address this problem, as it’s an entirely human, subjective issue. The only clear solution is better filtering. Twitter clients that allow us to easily filter out spymaster tweets or tweets mentioning squarespace, for example. As this list of things I might want to filter out grows, this will get a bit more complex. Additionally, twitter users tend to use several different clients, and change clients fairly often. The portability of filtering preferences would need to be addressed. Another approach might be to have a server-side proxy for filtering tweets based on preferences I set in a centralized location. Your favorite twitter client could potentially integrate this proxy. I’m not sure what the answer will be, but I hope to see a solution soon.

On to direct messages. When spymaster launched, I received numerous invitations via direct message to play spymaster. This is incredibly annoying and intrusive, but luckily spymaster acted quickly to provide a solution by allowing people to opt out of invites. This is similar to blocking app requests in facebook but relies on third parties to implement the opt-out. Now, if someone invites me to play the newest social game, I might either think this is a huge violation of my trust, or I might be excited to play this new awesome game. So again, this is a subjective matter. I think the only good way to handle spammy direct messages is on a human basis. Unfollowing will always do the trick. As for me, any direct message request to digg something, retweet something, play a game, etc. will result in an unfollow, in the least.

I don’t think this problem is going away. In fact, I think this type of activity will accelerate rapidly. To avoid losing friends, please don’t using twitter as a marketing tool. Provide genuine human interaction. And if you want to broadcast your social gaming activity, consider making another twitter account so people can follow that if they are interested.

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