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    The tweetergetter experiment, continued.

    on February 28th, 2009

    And here’s a screenshot of my mail account. :|

    Tweeter Greeter.

    Tweeter Greeter.

    Humph.

    I confess to being puzzled, really. I wasn’t expecting this.
    (Sorry to twitter users whose usernames are displayed here - but I figure this information is public anyway via my twitter profile, so… I assume I will be excused. And no, this is not a fake screenshot - erm, really, now, why would I? Also you could check my twitter profile to confirm!)

    The website claims that this is the explanation.

    A message posted on your twitter will automatically be formated with your unique link. Meaning that when people follow through to this site, they will have to follow you in position 1 to use the system themselves.

    Now when those people refer others via their link, their new followers will also follow you in position 2 and so on down 5 levels deep. By the time you reach the 5th position, you will have thousands, if not tens of thousands of new twitter followers… and it NEVER stops growing!

    Interesting. I worked out the math and it tallies with his claims in theory. I’m just highly amused that it (seems to) work in practice, even to the extent of giving you followers who would interest you (and your business, presumably, if you are running one).

    For those of you who are thinking this an extensive attempt at doing a pitch-in-disguise, please - have mercy, it is not. I am genuinely intrigued, amused, and even pleased. I can’t see why I’ll need a large number of followers at twitter, except that I love meeting/knowing people with whom I can engage in intelligent/entertaining, even if brief, conversation, and I think that’s a lot of fun… and I only want to put my surprise at something like this working on record. Phew!

    You can try this for the fun of it if you like: http://tweetergetter.com/avanimisra
    (Again, I’m not urging you to do it - but if you are simply curious, it’s worth that click. It claims to resort to “whitehat” techniques, and the only downside I can think of is not everyone who’s following you may be impressed by an automated-looking message.)

    PS: It’s worth noting that my skepticism is to do with whether an advertised “system” can actually live up to its usually over-the-top claims (disclaimers and fine print included). I’m not worried, for instance, (at least in this case) about whether I’m cheating by “getting followers” from an automated system, because:

    a. I make sure I follow back followers whom I find interesting, which is good for me, since *I* am the one who finds *them* interesting, and,
    b. If my followers figure that I’m not worth following, they know how to reverse their (initially automated) decision to follow me.

    Although the website may ’smell funny’ because of it’s bold-claims-in-large-fonts style that is bound to put off many (such as myself, as I said in the beginning), it is probably just an interesting (and perhaps even cool/clever) way to find people you’d want to meet anyway, and conversely. In fact, I’m already glad about a couple of interesting people I’ve come across, that I wouldn’t have probably said hello to otherwise. They’ve been nice enough to pingback, too - so, this may even be considered a note of thanks to system.

    *Having said all this, I *do* wish people read more of Strunk and White.
    I frown when I see “1000s”.
    Please, why can’t we say thousands, instead?

    @tweetergetter. Confession Time.

    on February 26th, 2009

    Confession time.

    I am actually impressed. With a certain viral marketing “thing”. And the confession is that I didn’t think I would live to see this day. :)

    Ok, I’m like you, really - I cringe visibly at the sales letters that have text highlighted in yellow, and I hit the “back” button as soon as I see a picture of a new car or someone holidaying at the beach. So generally, I am an unlikely customer victim (?) at the receiving end of a sales letter, or any “Dear {Firstname}”/”Do you want…?” kind of letter, for that matter.

    To put things in perspective, I must describe what sub-category I’d fall into in, lets say a company database that classifies it’s targets according to location, age, intelligence (or the lack of it thereof) quotient, and so on. You can skip the next paragraph if such background is of no interest to you, and get to the meat.

    I’m not a n00b, not entirely, at least, if you will excuse the lack of modesty. I’ve been prowling around, lapping things up for close to four years now, and given the pace of virtual reality, that may actually even be considered non-trivial. I also never found marketing (on the internet or otherwise) an appealing business - I am the kind who’ll accept that it is something that requires skill, sophistication, and creativity (it’s one of those art-and-analysis things, IMO); but I’ll say this with a this-isn’t-my-cup-of-tea expression on my face. I would be skeptical about making a career of it, thankfully. :)

    A couple of days ago, while doing some idle browsing, I was led to this website called http://tweetergetter.com. All my intuitive skepticism crept in as I went through (yet) another pitch with bold claims (What If You Could Press Just One Button & Automatically Start Getting 1000’s Of Legitimate New Twitter Followers On Autopilot… Even If Nobody Knows Who You Are Now?*). This time around, however, a random sense of mischievous curiosity crept in through some parallel neural network. Here’s someone asking me to retweet a single (admittedly marketty and slightly impersonal sounding) message. Since I was brand new to twitter and had one and a half followers, I figured I’d nothing to lose, not even a reputation (I know what I think of tweeters whose tweets read like they’ve come from a viral marketing website… let’s not get into this).

    Now - to cut a long story short - I “fell for it” (although I did ignore the rest of the website then). So what happened? Well, let’s say that’s a story for next time :)

    Compiz Goodness

    on February 24th, 2009

    I am really growing to like the XFCE+compiz configuration now. It’s turning out to be a lot more than just the eye-candy that I thought it would be…

    Compiz Expo showing off six desktops

    Compiz Expo: Showing off six desktops

    I haven’t fooled around enough with window managers to know how commonly used a feature this is - compiz lets you allot windows to workspaces, and even fix their positions inside them. For instance, when I fire up firefox, I can be sure that it lands in the desktop in the second row and second column of that picture above. I can do this for a large selection of the applications I use most frequently… organized by work flow, this makes the kind of difference that is slight but noticeable - and curiously satisfying. I am familiar with the feature from the Mac UI, but never noticed it on Gnome/IceWM/KDE/fvwm.

    Window Placement options in the Compiz Settings Manager

    Window Placement Options in the Compiz Settings Manager

    If you want compiz to place your windows on different desktops, go to the window management category and look up Window Placement; it allows you to specify rules according to which you want to your windows to be classified so you can have them on different virtual workspaces.

    Go rule!

    Keeping Afloat

    on February 22nd, 2009

    I decided to make use of the space in the header to make note of my struggles in dealing with cross-browser, cross-platform, cross-whatever-else difficulties in the time that I spend designing for the web.

    The title takes its inspiration from how much of this wordpress theme has been about keeping the floats together. It’s not hard, really, but it’s not particularly intuitive either, particularly when I was experimenting with an earlier layout/design idea which was somewhat more demanding.

    In my eagerness to get this done, I’ve settled down for something fairly simple and, hopefully, clean. I borrowed some code for the overall layout and the left navigation from the excellent website of Stuart Nicholls, CSSPlay.

    The images for the header and the background at the bottom come from one of my favorite stock exchange photography websites, SXC. The font in the header is FH Nicole , which is free for personal (which I think translates to non-commercial in this context) use. Everything else, if anything is standard, however, if there is any interest at all in this design as a wordpress theme, then drop me a line here, I’ll be happy to work that out. As the theme stands now, I wouldn’t want it in front of a nose that is not mine. :|