Adam-Jackson

Earlier, I tweeted:

Seriously. Everyone that keeps adding a period or brackets when you @ someone so it shows up in my timeline. It’s dumb and I hate it!

Some people weren’t quite sure what I was talking about so let’s break down how replies work. Oh I’m sorry “mentions” is what it’s called now. I’m not in the habit of calling it “mentions” but it makes sense given how the system is setup now. Anyway, before the #FixReplies debacle last month, there was a preference on Twitter Settings that gave you control of what you saw in the timeline.

• You would see everyone’s tweets that you follow. You follow 500 people and every single tweet they make will show up on Twitter.com or your favorite Twitter application.
• The second way was to only show tweets from people you follow that don’t contain replies. Basically, I would only see tweets from people if the tweet DOESN’T start with a reply (@johnsmith…) wouldn’t show up. However, an @JohnSmith somewhere in the tweet didn’t affect this rule. It was only tweets that started with an @.
• The last setting showed replies from people you followed ONLY if you’re following the person they’re replying too.

The third option was my favorite because I like seeing people I mutually follow interacting with other people I follow. Twitter added this around 6 months ago (guessing) and the preference was actually removed. You can read more about it here on this Mashable Post.

Lately, people are getting around this feature. My preference still remains that I don’t see anyone’s replies IF they’re replying to someone I don’t follow. Now people are getting around this setting and it clogs up my stream making Twitter less useful for finding information. Here’s how you can beat the filter and annoy the hell out of your friends who don’t want to see all of your replies to other people.

• Put a period before your reply. The person you’re replying to still sees it and so do ALL of your followers. .@JohnSmith
• Put brackets around the person’s name you’re replying to [@JohnSmith]
• Put quotes around your reply “@JohnSmith”

Basically any punctuation character will work to defeat Twitter’s system. Honestly, it’s annoying to those of us that specifically told Twitter that we don’t want to see your replies and maybe it’s something Twitter will fix soon. For now, I’ll just have to un-follow people that do it too often.

Twitter is only 3 years old but in Internet years, it’s been around the block a few times. A lot of people join, follow the “suggested users” and then they might invite a few friends via Gmail or Yahoo! Mail. After that, it’s that time to send out the first tweet and it usually contains something like, “Um… I’ve joined Twitter and I’m going to try this out. Anyone out there?” I love reading the first tweet from users because it’s entertaining and they’re always similar.

Let’s fast forward a month and now that user has 50 followers which consists mostly of their friends and family or some old schoolmates and maybe a co-worker. They might have a few followers that are accounts operated by companies or spammers but most users that aren’t joining Twitter as a celebrity will probably have 50-200 users after the first month and they are following some people that have thousands of followers so what gives? Well, the next step is asking Twitter, “How do I get more followers?” Someone replies back saying to go to a website to get thousands of followers and of course the new user clicks because they’re very interested.

This reply could be considered spam but they did ask for more followers so I guess it’s relevant, but I’m not going to dive into what’s ethical regarding spam. So this website promises 16 thousand followers and the first week FREE if they sign up and pay $35 a month. So the user signs up and instantly receives 50 new followers and that count continues. (What does that mean, “count continues”?) Pretty soon, they have 16 thousand people following their tweets and the “following” section looks like this.

Additionally, this is what their following / followers section looks like this.

As you can see, this person has nearly the same amount of followers / following and they’ve only updated a few hundred times.

I’ve done research and realized that none of these individuals are celebrities and 200 updates is nothing compared to some of the people I follow. Strike 3 is the fact that this user has a near equal amount of followers and following. At this point, it’s clear that they’re using one of these services.

What’s wrong with these services that allow you to get thousands of followers? It’s simple actually and it’s not an issue for some people. Not all of these pay-to-play Twitter hacking tools explain how you’re going to get thousands of followers but it only takes a few days to realize you have just followed hundreds of new people. I received an email from a friend last night who signed up for one of these services:

“I wanted to see if you knew of anyway I can purge all my users and then add people I actually know/want to follow. I had signed up for something that auto-added.”

I linked him to a few sites like this one.

“Way too much garbage. As a Twitter novice, I made the mistake of signing up for one of those get more follower services. The ratio of simple garbage went WAY UP. I am going to close my account and then re-invite people I actually want to see. The whole idea of mutually following people or following people that just post garbage is silly.”

Our conversation got me thinking. I hadn’t put too much thought into how these services work because they all looked like scams but then I did a Google search for “gain Twitter followers” and saw this.

It looks like these services are doing so well that they are able to afford Google ads to sell their product. But as far as organic Google page-rank, they don’t have any because blogs aren’t linking to them.

What a great tactic though. A new user is trying to get more followers and searches Google and is greeted with dozens of ads on getting more followers. Many of the services are free and a quick submission of your Twitter credentials and you’re in!

This ruins Twitter as my friend realized. Twitter is as much about listening and absorbing than it is about telling the world what you’re doing. The economy and beauty of Twitter is that it’s a two-way country highway with friends passing in the opposite direction. You both share some ideas, links, thoughts and mind-share and then move on as opposed to most social networks that resemble an 8-lane highway with exits, detours, road construction and accidents. I love Twitter’s simplicity but it’s only valuable if you’re receiving updates from people you are interested in.

Twitter is all about being organic and these services take the fun out of Twitter. It’s like having 1,200 channels on your television but the TV is always scanning and never sitting on one channel for more than 5 seconds. Sounds pretty painful, right? That’s exactly what it’s like when you realize that you’re following 16 thousand people that you don’t care about and the stream of “friends” is useless.

There is an alternative where you can use this service and still follow only your friends. There are web and desktop based applications that allow you to configure groups for Twitter. TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop come to mind. I have been against groups since the beginning and neither Twitter.com or its API support groups but people seem to really love them. I’ve asked why and it appears the answer is they follow too many people and just want to read the posts from people they really care about, like family, co-workers or celebrities, in one timeline. My opinion: you’re following too many people.

Let’s say you want to be able to read your Twitter stream and still have thousands of followers using one of these services. The answer is setting up one of these applications with groups for people you actually care about and just looking at the group all day. Now you can have your cake and eat it too but there is still a fundamental flaw that many users haven’t realized.

How do you know those 16 thousand people that follow you actually care what you have to say or if they’re putting YOU in a group of people that they don’t want to read? The final problem might be that they joined Twitter, signed up to a service to get more followers and after their Twitter stream turned into an 8-lane highway, they just quit and moved on. Your 16 thousand followers looks a hell of a lot less now that we realize half of them aren’t reading your tweets, 30% of them have stopped using Twitter and the 20% that are looking at your stream are probably also following 16 thousand people and the likelihood of reading your tweet is so low that you might as well be screaming the password to your gmail account to a herd of elephants. Elephants might be known for “never forgetting” but how many times have you seen an elephant use a computer? Exactly.

At the end of the day, your brilliant idea of getting thousands of followers looks a lot different, doesn’t it? You have a Twitter stream of people you’re following that is barely usable due to the amount of tweets and lack of interesting posts. You are tweeting links to thousands of people that aren’t around, are following too many people who just don’t care about your thoughts and now you have an account that will probably be suspended by Twitter for following too many people too quickly. Oh, and let’s not forget that you probably paid for this service at around $40 a month. Congrats, you’re a Twitter expert and it’s useless.

What have we learned? The organic tips for gaining followers like this one are the tried and true methods for truly making your mark on Twitter. If anyone is asking you to pay money to get ahead on the Internet, just remember it’s all ones and zeros and true social networking happens face to face. If you can get your followers to meet you offline and build lasting friendships, you’re on your way to mastering social media because when Twitter, Facebook and MySpace fade away, there will be other services that pop up and the cycle starts all over but the friendships you made offline will last forever.

SFGate.com is the online destination of The San Francisco Chronicle and I’m pretty sure all of their print stories are put on the website but it’s a known fact that the comments on SFGate are only a step above YouTube in the category of ignorance, grammar mistakes and trolling. For those that don’t know, Trolling is, “Being a prick on the internet because you can. Typically unleashing one or more cynical or sarcastic remarks on an innocent by-stander, because it’s the internet and, hey, you can.” You can find alternative definitions here. Now that we’re all caught up on the definition of trolling, I’d like to provide a few quotes from a recent SFGate article.

The article was posted today and you can read the entire post on SFGAte.com and the story is called, “Comments on news stories a double-edged sword”. The post explains how SFGate’s traffic has exploded since they began allowing comments on news stories back 2007. Page views on the comments grew from 30 thousand page views to over 4 million so comments aren’t going away anytime soon but SFGate along with other publishers admitted that comments aren’t always of the highest caliber and racism, idiocy and trolling is rampant on the site and sometimes the comment wars (AKA flame wars) go rampant and erupt into serious arguments.

As you know, I’ve been a recent supporter of breaking anonymity on the Internet and using systems like Facebook Connect or Amazon to verify the identities of your commenters to help raise the quality of comments and breed a community that serves the reader and doesn’t look like hundreds of simple minded people bickering back and forth. Below are some excerpts and I’m going to comment and offer my thoughts.

The over-the-top declarations and playground humor often spring from the ability to comment anonymously. Most sites have required registration for their commentators, but they’re able to hide behind screen names without punishment, at least until they get booted off for objectionable behavior.

That shroud can be empowering for people who are emboldened to speak up, as if addressing a crowded town square. Or it’s like an invitation to open mike night at a comedy club.

Exactly. Asking for an email address isn’t acceptable and often times, people use fake email addresses or email account reserved for “junk”. Think of a community member as a member of your family. You’re allowing them to post content on your site and this serves to spark conversations and increase pageviews but your first experience with that person is asking for an email address and a username (which can be anything they want to use) and this “family member” doesn’t have the decency to give you an email address they check regularly. It’s similar to allowing my sister’s boyfriend to stay at my place while he’s in town and the first thing he does is give me a fake name and phone number. I think we’d all agree that this relationship is off to a bad start. Let’s continue.

Michael Lee, a vice president for Bank of America in San Francisco, enjoys both options. He often takes to SFGate and the Green Bay Press-Gazette’s Web site (he follows the Packers) to present his views, usually from a more conservative perspective. Other times, he tries out a one-liner or two to lighten the mood.

He said he looks forward to the challenge of facing an often-hostile crowd and getting his thoughts across on news as it’s happening.

“If you’re a conservative voice in a liberal environment, it takes a certain amount of courage and mettle to stick with it,” said Lee, 34. “But in the same vein, it’s easier to take a stand online than in real life.”

I think it’s great that Michael is honest about this and he raises an excellent point. I’ve spoken to HUNDREDS of people who spend hours a day engaging with other people on blogs, forums and chat rooms and when I ask them if they would use their real name, they instantly object despite the fact that they are very responsible users and their comments and interaction with others is always free of foul language or trolling. I feel that most people think they need to hide behind a facade but the truth is, it’s not really necessary. Michael is about to post a comment that reflects Bank of America and I understand why an anonymous voice is important to him but I say to him that you don’t have to comment. If you’re a member of the PETA but think a CGI commercial of a duck being hit by a car is hilarious but you don’t think it’s appropriate to comment then you don’t have to. In my opinion, commenting as “steve from PETA” is a great idea! You can be a little official but also recognize the hilarity of an animation involving the duck. The issue of covering your ass and watching what you say stems from a corrupt society and my opinion of, “who gives a crap” but we’ll save that for another blog entry because this is the society we live in and you have to conform or you’ll be out of a job.

Basically, I don’t think you need to comment on every post that you read and if it’s not appropriate given your job, location or political views then don’t comment and tell your friends later over beers what you think but the few people that have to conceal their identity is only a “few people” compared to the millions of people trolling boards, blogs and chats looking for their chance to dump nonsense into the mix with their hatred, foul language and stupidity. I don’t mind giving up a little privacy if the community as a whole improves and benefits from exposing the first name and last initial of its community.

For many, the draw is to just run a thought up a flagpole and see who salutes. JonSmith, a 49-year-old San Mateo technical writer, is often embarrassed by his many comments, which he dashes off in a minute or two, rife with misspellings and bad grammar.

But he looks forward to communicating and connecting with people, finding validation in both the acknowledgements and attacks of fellow readers.

So Jon likes being anonymous because he’s a technical writer and enjoys the fact that he can say, “whatever” to his grammar and typos and quickly spout off opinions about a subject matter. He then loves “shooting the shit” with other readers who either agree or disagree with his opinion. That’s great Jon and I’m happy you’ve found a place to be lazy, give some commentary and participate in a community. However, SFGate is owned by a newspaper that carries itself to a high caliber of editorial integrity (or at least you’d assume that was the case) and your comment that’s full of errors, misspellings and whatever you feel like saying only causes the quality of comments to degrade to the point where people like myself just don’t bother to read them. People that read SFGate to learn something ignore the comments because it actually leaves us with a bad taste.

You being a technical writer can probably find dozens of issues with my grammar in this blog post but I do my best with a limited education on writing but you would be doing everyone a service if you tried your best to be formal with your comments so everyone benefits from a comment that’s easy to digest and understand.

Jon Continues:

“We do this for the response, and if you get a reaction either good or bad, it’s more worthwhile than if you get nothing,” Nadelberg said. “The disappointing moment is when you write something and no one hated it or liked it. That’s when you fail, when no one gives a damn.”

Jon, this is considered trolling (in my opinion) and if you’re saying something to get a positive or negative response from someone, then join a fight club or create an Argument club on Meetup.com where you can meet up once a week to argue with people. What I find interesting is how childlike this sounds and how no one realizes that these tendencies are so animalistic and basic. Maybe some of you have younger siblings or children and I’m sure you have realized that once the kid figures out what gets a rise out of you, they’ll keep doing it because they get attention. Some kids become starved for negative attention and they keep doing all of the wrong things just so you’ll yell at them. What do you do about this? Ignore it and they’ll stop and go away.

I’ve been ignoring trolling for years and it’s not going away. The issue is becoming more widespread but now that we have the tools and software to combat trolling, it’s time to take a stand and force our users and commenters to hand over a valid E-Mail Address, upload a real photo of themselves and use their real name. If we continue supporting anonymity then the Internet will become worse than reality television and I fear it may be too late.

Liked this post? Subscribe to my RSS Feed!

The Time 100 voting is open where we get to submit and vote people in as the top 100 people in the world of 2009 or something like that. It’s a very serious contest organized by a large media corporation and the results are published in Time Magazine and hundreds of other publications also cover the people who make the list.

Some anonymous cowards on a popular site, 4Chan have decided to “hack” the results and vote up 4Chan’s creator “moot” as the top of the list and completely ruin the top 20 finalists with fake voting. You can read the full report at TechCrunch. First of all, 4Chan is one of the primary sites that is fueled by anonymity and their mob hacking isn’t funny or cute. I blame Time for not implementing Facebook Connect or OpenID to reduce the anonymity. Sure Time would be narrowing the voting to users of Facebook only but it’s a solid 200 million people which isn’t too shabby. Furthermore, I’m sure Facebook would be happy with the news and help Time promote the voting on Facebook.com.

If Facebook isn’t the answer, Time could use systems that call the voter and the vote has to give a verbal confirmation code that they saw on the site. Each number was logged and an even better method is auto-mailers that go to homes with a code that the voter enters on Time.com. All three of these would reduce voting but I think the Time 100 can deal with a 15% drop in votes because it would barely make a dent in the amount of people that do vote in this if this system meant that there was zero anonymity to the voting process.

Time basically screwed themselves by allowing this system to be used so I don’t blame 4chan. If you put a piece of candy in front of a child and close the door, he’s going to eat it because no one is looking and that’s just human nature. The web is crawling with children that feed their egos because no one is looking but if more and more websites expose the children and put them under a microscope, it will reduce a ton of this tom foolery on the web. Take a stand, unmask the cowards and let’s kill anonymity on the web.

UPDATE: Blogging pays off sometimes. I received notification from someone at YouTube that my account was disabled by error. They have resolved the problem and my YouTube channel is back in action! Subscribe Here.

I need some help with this one. A lot of people ask me why I don’t use more cloud based services. Why I don’t use WordPress.com or store all of my photos on Google or MobileMe or why I don’t use Gmail exclusively or even why I don’t use Google Calendar, Last.FM or Google Reader. it’s simple. I come from a background where everything is stored locally or at least its synchronized with the cloud on my computer so in the event that a service dies, is bought or suffers from a natural disaster, my data is still protected. I’ve never had to experience the horror of losing data because a web based service deleted it but today I did.

I was going to favorite a YouTube channel that I thought was pretty hilarious. I logged in to YouTube and received an error, “Account disabled, please use a different email.” That’s odd but I ignored it and spent the next 25 minutes, resetting account passwords with the thought that I had just forgotten my password. When I simply tried to go to my YouTube page directly (http://www.youtube.com/adamjackson1984). I received the notification embedded above. What?

For some reason, my YouTube account and channel was simply deleted. All of the videos I’ve edited and placed on YouTube or simple videos shot with my Qik camera and even things that were recorded directly to YouTube via my MacBook’s webcam were completely deleted. I even have Qik setup so when I stream from my iPhone, those are transferred to YouTube via the cloud automatically. Only 10 of my 40+ videos are saved locally because I trusted YouTube. Why would my videos suddenly vanish or be deleted and if I did do something that broke copyright, wouldn’t they simply remove that video?

I checked for any emails received from YouTube within my spam folder and saw nothing. This is incredibly frustrating because all of my comments, friends, uploads, favorite channels and more are just gone. I have all of my Flickr uploads stored locally and I even download all of my Twitter posts weekly to ensure I have every last one of them but the one service I trust just takes it all away.

My only guess is that one single video caused this problem. It was Twitter’s spot on Nightline and it was even embedded on this popular blog. The video was viewed nearly 7 thousand times and now it’s gone.

I’ve had a YouTube account since early 2006 and I’ve been linked to hundreds of times and now those links are broken. My page rank for “adamjackson1984” is also ruined.

I have a video where my friend consumed a gallon of milk and a 24oz. energy drink back in 2006. It amassed over 30K views and it’s gone as well.

Starting over on YouTube is going to be very challenging and I hope I can remember the dozens of subscriptions and hundreds of favorites that I’ve collected over the years. YouTube. Fuck you.

Two days in a row that I’ve spoken about this but a video today made by the crew at College Humor honestly upset me to the point where I have to link to it and once again state my case for the toilet bowl that is user generated content on the web.

This is going to get worse as more and more people join the web and contribute their anonymous crap. There are some amazing minds out there contribute great content to the web and sharing their videos, photos, life experiences and opinions and the majority of comments coming from anonymous cowards are completely negative and they lack grammar or common English principles.

The answer to this is requiring tools like Facebook Connect be used to ensure that people commenting are who they say they are. Today, add Disqus or Facebook Connect to your blog and force your readers to be human and be real. Your comments will improve, a community will thrive and you will get fair and respectful commentary instead of the shit that people exclaim without thinking.

If you need help, let me know and I’ll set it up for you. This has to be stopped and the answer is forcing people to be who they really are. If they won’t come out behind the curtain, you don’t want them commenting anyway.

I work in an office. It’s an office that encourages the reading of blogs. Well, encouraged in moderation of course. We’re a company that is keeping up to date with the latest trends and I subscribe to 29 RSS feeds which is nothing compared to most of you. These 29 feeds entertain, enlighten and educate me on current events in technology and web trends. However, they all use images in the blog posts that take up most of the screen. I’ve included some screen shots to showcase why I ABSOLUTELY HATE photos on every single blog entry.

See what I’m saying? So the issue is that I’m at work and I constantly catch people stopping to look at my web browser. I have a 24″ Monitor at work so it’s pretty decently sized and it’s just tiring. The same thing happens at coffee shops, libraries and even at home Laura is always looking over my shoulder. At home I have a 30″ computer monitor so I guess she can’t help it but it’s still something that I want to stop. The second issue is that it’s distracting. I really can’t focus on the text with “shock photos” there to distract me. Honestly, I don’t know what to do.

Maybe one day, John Gruber’s blog design will rub off on everyone. His site is perfect and flawless. Everyone else can suck it!

There are a few of things that I’d like to address. Don’t worry, this won’t be a boring blog entry and I think it will be very enlightening for anyone that takes the read it. Let’s break it down into sections.

1. Anonymity on The Internet: It’s over. Being anonymous is how things were done back 2004. It’s 2009 and the are standard authentication tools like OpenID, Google Friend Connect or Facebook Connect that allow users to login with their credentials and submit content to the web as a real human and not an alias. I hate aliases. I’ve had one other alias and the influential power of “macdaddy” just wasn’t working out so in 2003 I went with AdamJackson and never looked back. If you’re in social media and you’re commenting on TechCrunch as “yourmom1972″ then your time is over because it won’t be long before everyone agrees that authenticating with your real first and last name and a photo is the best way to collaborate.

On Friday, I was reading this post on TechCrunch and someone by the name of “AJ” without an Email Address or Web Address posts this

How much did Evan pay you to write this post?

I’ve seen comments all week from anonymous cowards and, in all honesty, the likelihood of seeing a healthy contributing comment from someone that posts anonymously is nearly zero. Those that login with Disqus, Facebook Connect or their Google Account generally have something more meaningful to say. By the way, the commentor is inferring that CEO of Twitter, Evan Williams paid TechCrunch Editor Michael Arrington to write this post. That’s the first reply to that post and it’s complete bullshit.

I kindly reply to his comment because enough is enough.

STFU. Use your real name, URL and email address or GTFO.

I’d love to debate Twitter with you all day but hiding behind cowardice as an anonymous commenter is petty and childish.

Michael. Can you please require Disqus and Facebook Connect comments ONLY? I’m tired of this anonymous commenter bullshit. SUBSTANCE is needed on TechCrunch and the comments get worse every day.

Michael Arrington replies back with, “i would have marked it as spam but you beat me to it.” So Michael indicates that I was in the right for replying to this and he didn’t reprimand me so I’m sure he agreed with me despite not publicly saying it. The conversation explodes though and suddenly anonymous commenters begin attacking ME for my “bitch session” claiming that I need to chill out and that anonymous commenting has its uses and that I’m completely wrong.

No problem and I replied a couple of times but basically ended it by saying that this conversation is against the scope of the post so it’s best that we just leave it alone. It didn’t end there and I popped in a couple of more times to see how the conversation is going but basically I’m wrong and they’re right.

After running AdamsBlock and using Twitter for 2 years, I’ve learned that spammers and trolls never go away. There are ways to prevent them. On Twitter, I block 5-10 people a day. Someone says something negative to me or a friend and I block them. I have the power to do that and on AdamsBlock the anonymity of that chat room caused all of the crazies to come out. Using Facebook Connect on everything is going to become my only choice for authentication. If you want to interact with me, login using Facebook. If you don’t like it, don’t comment or read my content. I’ve never seen a comment from an authenticated Facebook user be a negative comment without also being backed up with facts and written from a respectful point of view. It’s the anonymous commenters who say, “you’re wrong fuck you” and that’s it.

It’s not negative feedback that I hate, it’s the lack of rich and interesting feedback that comes from anonymity that I hate. When, “pimpdaddy72″ becomes John Smith, the Realtor from Ohio, the game changes and John is suddenly representing himself, his business and his family and the feedback from him is actual constructive feedback and not garbage that spurs from him having a stressful day.

You can read the entire TechCrunch Thread HERE.

2. I’m Adam Jackson NO not that Adam Jackson: Many of you may not know this but I moved to San Francisco and a month before moving I realized that another Adam Jackson lived here and was working in the same industry. Luckily, prior to my move I still dominated the page rank of Adam Jackson on Google and I had the LinkedIN profile of “AdamJackson” where I believe he is “AJackson”. Sharing my name with someone in the industry hasn’t affected me until Friday. To offer up a little background, the other Adam Jackson runs a website called DriverSide.com and he is one of the co-founders of that site. He loves cars, doesn’t go to tech parties, doesn’t Twitter (that much) and isn’t really a social media guy. Thank goodness because it has so far meant that no one confuses the two of us.

Here is a comment on the TechCrunch Thread I mentioned earlier:

Adam Jackson,

you have 40,000+ updates on twitter(do u ever do anything other than twittering … i hope your customers are aware of this fact) …. and only 2500+ odd follower … did u ever think y? coz your updates are crap, for example, ‘I’m at Westfield Center (865 Market St, 5th Street, SF) .’

you have your own website ‘Ideapply.com’ and this redirects users to your blogging website .. how amazing… least you could have developed an official website for your 10employee company ..

You also have a LinkedIn profile with 323 connections… oops! but you only have 2 people recommending you. Another strange fact…

I hope now you would realize how real name affect your personal and professional life …

Oh my god! I’m shaking this is so serious! Not really so let’s break it down. This guy who posted anonymously (of course) got it right when he noted my 40K updates. His attempt to take shots at me completely failed when he chose to not click the link in my Twitter profile but instead search “Adam Jackson” on LinkedIN. He failed a second time when he saw two Adam Jacksons in SF and didn’t click on the guy whose image matched the one on my Twitter profile but the other Adam. He then took shots at his blog (which I’m not a fan of the domain name) and the guy also failed to find a link to Adam’s DriveSide.com page. He then looked at Adam’s connections and noted a measly 2 people recommending him and says, “another strange fact”

So to be totally honest, neither me or the other Adam could give a fuck about this comment because the commenter is clearly a complete idiot who can’t navigate the web. Adam Jackson (the other guy) maybe didn’t make things completely clear on his LInkedIN page or Blog but I doubt it. What was interesting was that for the first time in 10 months, someone thought he and I were the same. That’s interesting and sadly unfortunate. Actually, Adam Jackson may be a terrific guy or he might be a complete dick. I have no clue and I’d like to meet him one day but I have a feeling as he and I continue our reach globally through the web, this identity confusion may become more apparent. I’m not budging though and taking a drastic move in changing my name and neither should he. Let’s just see how this plays out.

According to Wikipedia:

April 1st is a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1.

So why in the hell are we spreading foolish propaganda 7-10 days before the day? I have seen blog posts all week where commenters say, “is this an early April Fools Joke?” and the authors of the blogs admit it’s a joke and everyone has a laugh. NO THAT’S NOT HOW APRIL FOOLS DAY WORKS! April Fools Day is on April 1st and doesn’t fall on any other day. If it’s March 24th, that’s not the day that you post jokes. If you think it’s funny to trick your readers then go fucking trick your readers ON APRIL FOOLS DAY!

Let’s break this down for a moment. Imagine it’s October 15th and a kid in a Dracula costume knocks on your door and asks for candy; are you going to laugh or are you going to go, “oh it all makes sense because it’s October it must be halloween.” NO THE KID IS DUMB AND NEEDS TO GET HIS DATES RIGHT! That’s how you handle that. Or your wife freaks out because you didn’t get her a valentines day card on January 28th. OF COURSE YOU DIDN’T CAUSE VALENTINES DAY IS 2 WEEKS AWAY!

If someone in congress or Wikipedia wants to agree that it should be March-April Fools 2 Week Extravaganza and make it a law then I’ll be totally fine with this dimwitted holiday but until then, you’re all a bunch of idiots who can’t read a freaking calendar.

AND ANOTHER THING! If you are a company that makes real money and employs real people for which you pay then you aren’t allowed to make April Fools Jokes. YOU JUST CAN’T! Google, your stupidity on April 1st should be illegal. I honestly think stockholders should sue you for posting joke products on that day because your fake announcements are misleading and it’s the equivalent of lying about your earnings or lying about layoffs. People should be fired for lying at a publicly traded company.

Since this kind of joking has been going on for years now even by large companies like CNN, Google and Microsoft, I understand and my solution is to just turn of RSS, Twitter and my Cell Phone on April 1st because I know that everything is complete bullshit. However, what’s really pissing me off is this complete childish bullshit is leaking out into March and it’s wrong. I trust things that are posted on blogs with over 1 million monthly page views. I trust announcements from publicly traded companies and I understand that 4/1 isn’t the day to trust anyone but now that the last 2 weeks in March is full of lies, I don’t know who to trust.

One final thing. If you are going to do a “March-April Fools 2 Week Extravaganza” please have the fucking courtesy of putting up a blog post telling your readers what was actually fake and what was real over the past 2 weeks. Be responsible to your readers, advertisers and investors.

Thanks for reading.

Day after day on tech blogs I see comments like this:

OMG Another Twitter story! Slow news day? Seriously, I’m on Twitter but you guys post so much about this service. Seriously? It’s just text updates!!!!

I’m sure anyone reading any of the popular tech blogs can align with me on this. So I looked a few numbers from TechCrunch. They’re a popular site covering emerging Internet technologies, social media, Web 2.0 and other cool tech news. Here are the amount of posts dedicated to Twitter compared to other companies.

It’s not that Twitter is written about more but it looks like Twitter will soon surpass Myspace which has been around since 2003. Of course Myspace just isn’t as hot anymore in the eyes of TechCrunch whereas Facebook has a 230 post gain on Twitter and no one has complained about too many posts about Facebook. Oh and look at Google! Sure they’ve been around longer but TechCrunch hasn’t been around since 1997 so I assumed Google would be around the 500 posts range as well. The iPhone has only been out for 20+ months (a year less than Twitter) and it is only 100 posts short of what Twitter has.

What I’m trying to say is that it might seem that Twitter is getting tons of press by TechCrunch and other blogs but in actuality, it just seems that way and Twitter creates news for blogs like TechCrunch. Here’s an example.

Ashton Kutcher posts that he’s starting a new venture and he tweets it on Twitter. TechCrunch is a friend of Kutcher and they post a copy of that tweet on TechCrunch and talk about how Ashton used Twitter to break the news as a side note. Well that’s another post “about Twitter” despite not actually being a Twitter focused entry. Twitter is a medium for news, current events, social media and it is the darling of silicon valley just like Google was in 2001 after the first dot com bubble burst.

Just chill out guys. It’s inevitable that you’ll eventually join Twitter and when you do, it’ll be clear what you’ve been missing all of this time. I still think TechCrunch and other blogs should make RSS feeds that don’t include Twitter but until then I’ll just have to deal with comments full of complaints that they’re talking about Twitter way too much.