All Posts by Paul

5 ways to get more followers in Twitter

Paul

I’ve been doing something different in Twitter and I would like to talk about it.   I have learned so much today it and yet after the end of the day I’ve gotten even more followers.   I’ve gained over 123 so far today alone and I want to share with you some ways to increase your followers.

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  1. Provide Great Value — This one I learned today finding some great articles and retweeting the good articles.  This is essential Twitter tactics.   If you don’t do this your just going to be keep who you have and not grow.

  2. Be Funny — Don’t be funny just to be a class clown, that will draw followers but it can also hinder your likely hood of engaging in good conversation.   Twitter is a stream of Conversations that doesn’t do well with constant funniness  and if your always being the class clown, you will have a hard time keeping a conversation.   Now that being said it doesn’t mean to not be funny but to be funny in your way.  People like to laugh people are drawn to people who want to communicate about the topics at hand.

  3. Ask Others question — This is important because if you ask people question that means you want to start a dialog and will grow to understand how people react.   Sometimes it is good just to ask something provocative and see what your followers have to say about it.  This gives your followers a chance to feel like they are important and gives you a chance to learn something new today.

  4. Retweet Other’s People stuff —  This is sometimes the most obvious but if you retweet others stuff they will reciprocate and thank you.  In turn their followers will see what you did and maybe want to start receiving your updates.  All you have to do is add “RT @Username” and then the message.  This makes those users feel important and helps provide great value to others.

  5. Answer people questions — Just like asking if you know something that will provide value to a user this will get them to notice you and follow you.   I have some search terms up and running in Tweetdeck in case someone tweets something that I can answer.  This will provide those followers who are interested in stuff you are interested in.  Also it helps create a connection with that user and also opens up a dialog for even more great stuff.

This isn’t even hitting the mark but is a good starting point.   Now I want to talk about some good tools to help you manage your newly joined followers.   These tools will help trim and help you find those who might be of interest to you:

  • Huitter — Is good for following everyone or unfollowing those who aren’t following you back.  You can also unfollow all if you like.   This is good for those accounts that aren’t following you back or if you have a bunch of people who are following you and you don’t have time to go through and follow them manually.  This little tool will help automate the follow process for you.

  • FriendOrFollow — This is good to sort through the number of followers who you aren’t followering.  This little will show the number of Fans, Friends and Followers.  You can use this to find those inactive accounts by sorting through there last tweet.   You can also figure out who you want to follower or who your want to unfollow.   There are so many good uses for this that you will just have to play with it to find all the good stuff.

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  • Mr. Tweet — This one is one of my favorites because it will find those recommendations based on your friends response to people in there group.   If you have someone who you talk to alot this will help you find out who else talks to this someone and gives you a chance to follow them.  This will help you find relavant Twitter users to follow and gives you a chance to offer recommendations to your followers.  This is great for the power user because it shows who has recommended who and why.   You can do so much with little tool.

  • We Follow —  This isn’t really a tool you can use but is one of those you should put your name in because it allows people to find other people who are interested in what they are interested.  You only can put up 3 tags but this is really to allow people to find you so they can follow you.

I am sure someone else can come up with others but these tips and tools will help you develop those followers who have so much in common with your ways.  If you follow these suggestions you will start to grow you Twitter account to even more.  I am going to keep doing what I am have done today to see how fast this will grow my account but only time will tell.   If you like what you’ve seen hear please tell people about this post and encourage them to visit.

Service Pack 2 For Vista is out — Working good on the Cricket Broadband A600

Paul

Microsoft has sent out Service pack 2 for Vista, and so I installed it on my machine to see what happens with the [intlink id=”3479″ type=”post”]Cricket Modem[/intlink].  The Files Microsoft are letting people download are:

All of these are KB948465 and will be released on June 30, 2009 via Automatic updates.   I also tested it out and I have a 32 bit system.   I am unsure as to the other systems if the Cricket Broadband works or not on the [intlink id=”1936″ type=”post”]UM100 Modem.[/intlink]  I have the [intlink id=”3059″ type=”post”]A600 Cricket Broadband modem[/intlink] and it installed without a hitch.

According to Ars technica this Service Pack has over 800 hot fixes and have fixed several things that Microsoft did wrong with Service Pack 1.  If you have the Beta version you will have to unistall it before you install this service pack.  I would love to hear of any problems with Cricket Broadband from others in the forums.   If you have problems let me know and I’ll  do my best to help you out.

If you want to find out some of the fixes Microsoft sent out in this service pack you can see some of the updates on the Ars Technica article about what they fixed or changed.   That list isn’t a complete list but it highlights some of them.  If you haven’t installed [intlink id=”843″ type=”post”]Service Pack 1[/intlink], you will need to install that before you can install Service pack 2.

Twitter and the Acai Berry Spammers

Paul2 Replies

Well According to Sopho’s There seems to have been some hacking going on for the Acai Berry spam. Some of the messages were:

acaiberrytwitterspam1It seems to be a random http://random.CN domain but we’ve talked about this in the past.  Sopho’s isn’t sure how this happen but I have a suspicion that it was a Phishing attack done on the facebook users recent weeks that have the hackers going to other social sites and trying those passwords.

[ad]Although I agree with Sopho’s on making sure not to have a dictionary word, I also think users should take care of all your online accounts.   As most people will become aware of is most users use only one password for all their accounts online or only have 3 different passwords for 20 different sites.  This is something that needs to change and you can do that with [intlink id=”2646″ type=”post”]Roboform[/intlink] to keep your passwords safe and also to make sure they can’t guessed.

If you have been compromised on t witter and only use one password, you can bet all you other accounts have been compromised as well.  You should change your passwords as soon as possible.   You should also make sure in the future not to be tricked into giving out your password which is called Phishing, in which a site with a different url is made to look like Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace log in page.

New Facebook Phishing campaign!

Paul

According to Sans Internet Storm,  They have seen some signs of a new Phishing campaign like the[intlink id=”3419″ type=”post”] Look at this Phishing campaign[/intlink] that went through a few weeks ago.  At the time of writing that report they weren’t being resolved they now are being resolved making you look like you are logging into Facebook:

Phishing look a like!! Phishing look a like!!

[ad]Sites that are hosting these are in Belgium and are Redbuddy.be, Redfriend.be, and picoband.be.     If you recieve this with these urls you best thing you can do is just to delete them.   Some people have said it is using the term “look at this” I am unsure as to is or not but you can usually tell because of the the URL and if it isn’t Http://www.facebook.com or Https://www.facebook.com then you aren’t logging into Facebook but are logging into a fake site.

We’ve talked about [intlink id=”2644″ type=”post”]why criminals want to use your account and why they need to get your passwords[/intlink].  I know they want to take control of your account for one reason or another but that is where the Facebook users need to keep watch on the URLS being displayed when you log into Facebook.    If you did that then you are one step ahead of the nefarious criminals and can be at peace.  Just like the Look at this campaign if you did visit those sites and given out your password it is strongly recommended to reset your password.

Update #1 — More Domains have been created areps.at, greenbuddy.be, vispace.be, whiteflash.be, and bestspace .be . All these domains resolve to 211.95.78.98 And can be determined by going to Http://www.dns.be or http://www.dns.at  .   It looks like the server is hosted in China.  I wouldn’t be surprised if t here were even more domains going to be regestered that were in Belgium!!  On a Side note it seems all these have a malicious hidden iframe in them so “DON”T Visit them unless you know what your doing“.   I suspect that is how they are keep having people post to Facebook about these but that is only my theory!!  (Thanks Sans Internet Storm for all those updates)

Getting Twitter on your Cricket QA30 Hint Phone!!

Paul4 Replies

So you want to use [intlink id=”3222″ type=”post”]Twitter with Cricket Phones[/intlink]. I have found a few ways to post to Twitter with http://Identi.ca . I can post to twitter with emails going to Identi.ca.  They give you a unique email address that you can use to post and You can receive twitter like sms through them.  They do have an options for Cricket but again you would have to use email to post but you can receive through text messaging without a problem.

This Phone comes with it’s own Email application so you would just use the phone to do the emailing. I’ve not gotten this phone just yet because Cricket won’t let me test it out but I am going to assume that with this phone having email capabilities, you can get around the twitter problem very easily.  You can use Twittermail to send and receive through your email application.   You can receive replies to your email address almost instantly.

Unlike Identi.ca, you can only send to Twitter but can’t receive any updates on twitter.   You could however start using Identi.ca exclusively but that would be torture because most of your friends are using Twitter. I wish Cricket would let me test this phone out and find out other secrets for my users.

The Motorola Evoke QA4 has an Email application on it too but right now it is $279 and is on pre order.  I am expecting this to also be able to send and receive email just like the QA30 Hint from Cricket.  If anyone wants to submit a review on either phone just [intlink id=”995″ type=”page”]email me or contact me through other services[/intlink] and I’ll give your credit to the review.

*update*

Looks like Cricket Wireless is providing use with a twitter app call Twit Twit. I haven’t played with it but I find it is at least a nice gesture on their part. If anyone has played with this application, I would like to hear how well this does!!