Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

August 15, 2014

Twitter Doubles Down on Bifurcation by Verification

In what has to be one of the oddest, and least nimble — but purposeful Public Policy gaffes and pre-planned Public Relations stumbles — Twitter have doubled down on the bifurcation of their service into 103,000 Verified accounts vs. 271,000,000 active, monthly, non-Verified know-nothings:

And today we’re beginning to roll out two new features to verified users on the Twitter mobile apps: alerts when another verified user follows them on both the Android and iPhone apps and the option to view their verified followers from their own profile on Twitter for iOS only. We hope these two features will help verified users easily connect with each other so we can continue to deliver those only-on-Twitter conversations to users.

Continue reading → Twitter Doubles Down on Bifurcation by Verification

June 19, 2014

Twitter and the Verified Celebrity Contra-Culture

The more time I spend on Twitter, the more confounded and confused I become as to the service’s purpose and merits. Is it a news reporting device? Is it a celebrity PR machine? Is it your television? Twitter can try to be all things to all people, but Twitter does have a serious people problem — a user problem, really — where new users initially sign up and engage the service, and then abandon the nest in flocks, and that’s a bad and dangerous precedent for any social media mingling service.

Continue reading → Twitter and the Verified Celebrity Contra-Culture

October 28, 2013November 7, 2013

The Mighty Scheme of Memes: How to Get @DavidBoles Verified by Twitter?

We are in the process of transitioning our Twitter stream from the old Boles Blogs account to the newer and shinier @DavidBoles account. The reason we’re making the big switch is to provide more impulsive and reactive updates to our hive mind that won’t rely on a formal blog post for propagation.

By moving the Twitter stream to — @DavidBoles — there is a little more freedom to discuss the world without the feeling that we’re unfairly trading on those who only wanted blog post updates. Now the world is a free-for-all — and we’re finally, and gladly, joining the center of that social networking tsunami. Twitter, I surrender!

Over the weekend, a clarion call was sent out to all our social memes — 8,600 on LinkedIn and 4,700 on Facebook and beyond! — to try to help punch up the new @DavidBoles Twitter account.

[twitter-follow screen_name=’davidboles’ show_count=’yes’]

So far, things are going well and we’ve had lots of offers to help spread the word. We appreciate you following us, too!