Further to this, I think Abir has raised a subject that gets little attention
on this list, user behaviour. It is relevant as we must take it into account as
we design our apps.
My initial response to the OP was of course facetious. If a message arrives in
my timeline I will read it, which is why spam must be dealt with mercilessly by
Twitter. As another poster pointed out recently, keyword based fake @replies
are a violation of Twitter TOS. As with email spam, this should apply equally
to automated and manually composed messages.
But it would be interesting to know more about the behaviour of different types
of Twitter users and for this one would first need to establish a typology of
users. I suggest two broad categories, readers and writers, and maybe a third
category that would include those engaged in massive mutual following. Users
who follow thousands of accounts can't possibly be reading much of their
streams, and may not be writing much either. As a writer I tend to regard
members of this group (those that are human) as disoriented, and focus my
attention on followers who are following reasonable numbers of accounts.
As for the effectiveness of 'targeting' users by keywords, I've seen a clever
implementation lately whereby I was followed by an fully automated (or
possibly, 'curated') account that was just amassing followers based on keyword.
Checking out their website one finds thousands of similar keyword-based
accounts, a big system. Evidently the intention is that you should follow them
and click on a link or whatever. It was almost credible, I'll hand them that,
but could not withstand any real scrutiny. Still, plenty of high quality
accounts had followed them back..
What can you all say about user behaviour that you have observed?
From: and...@badera.us
Date: Mon, 18 Jan 2010 04:59:56 -0500
Subject: Re: [twitter-dev] @ Message read rate for non-followers
To: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com
On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 3:00 AM, Ken Dobruskin k...@cimas.ch wrote:
Zero percent, and report for spam.
Date: Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:13:33 -0800
Subject: [twitter-dev] @ Message read rate for non-followers
From: abstar...@gmail.com
To: twitter-development-talk@googlegroups.com
Hey Guys,
Do you know what % of people read @ messages if you are not a follower
+ targeting them based on keywords or search api's?
Thanks,
Abir
++ to reporting as spam.
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