Written on April 28, 2008 – 8:13 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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While in San Francisco I had the chance to meet and interview someone who most people won’t ever meet. And if they do, they might not talk about it publicly. The person I interviewed is known to most people only as ‘Fille deLouer’. She is an active blogger (http://filledeloyer.wordpress.com/), twitter-er (http://twitter.com/fillealouer), works in the tech industry AND as an elite escort.
Yep, an elite escort.
She has paid sex with men.
There are lots of reasons to blog and twitter and one important one is to strengthen your online presence and do a little self-promotion. This surely can’t be the case with ‘Fille aLouer’ who is very strict about her privacy and doesn’t want to get known. So why does she do it? Why do people twitter in general? I wanted to find out.
I spent some time setting up a meeting with Fille but she refused to do so in order to protect her privacy. I did end up meeting her but will only tell you about that at the end of this story. First the interview:
My first question: are you real or just a blogger having fun with an alternate identity?
hello, Boris. Before I answer your first question I’d like to clear something up. It is very important for me to safeguard my identity but I actually do use twitter to promote my blog. I don’t think “self promotion” is a dirty word. And I don’t believe for a minute that most people who twitter aren’t using it as some form of self promotion. Nobody is that interested in status updates. I mean c’mon. Do I care if someone tweets that they can’t decide what shoes to wear? Not really. I do like knowing that someone’s put up a new post on their blog though. And I like being directed to a cool article or video or product review.
So, back to your original question: am I real. I don’t think some random blogger could make up half of the things I’ve experienced and talk about on my blog. I am, in fact, very real. But having been a part of the tech industry for the last several years I’m not surprised by this question. Skepticism seems to be endemic in the community. Whether it’s a healthy skepticism I don’t know. Sometimes it’s just annoying. I’ve gotten this question a lot.
Ok, can you tell me how you got started with this? (more…)
Written on April 23, 2008 – 10:49 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
During the “Short Attention Span Theater: The Birth of Microblogging & Micromedia” Web 2.0 Expo session, attendees were able to ask questions by sending a Twitter message to @micromedia2. As you can imagine, updates like “the man next to me smells a bit” and “Thank god Scoble isn’t in the room..” appeared on the two screens. Yet some folks of the audience managed to influence the topics Gregarious Narain (Blue Whale Labs), Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Stowe Boyd and Brian Solis discussed. They asked for some business insights, and they got it. So gentlemen, how CAN we use Twitter for business?
Brian Solis praised Dell. The computer company follows the Twitter conversations by using Tweetscan and reacts when (potential) customers ask questions or complain about the Dell products. Forrester research does the same thing. “We listen to what people are saying and usually engage in the conversation when we notice one. Other companies like Jetblue, Marketingprofs, Zappos and Comcast do the same thing”, Owyang said. “That’s the immediate benefit”, Boyd said, “Yet the big picture here is that streaming services like Twitter are potentially very big for enterprises. People can follow projects or other companies by having things streamed to them. They don’t have to look it up anymore”.
But what if companies don’t keep an eye on Twittter, like the majority does now. What will they loose? Solis: “The conversations will take place anyway. With or without you. And hopefully, the Twitter conversations might become even more more substantial. When you ignore questions then, especially the one full of hate, you leave the answers to other people.”
Stowe Boyd pitched a pitch concept of his own: TwitPitch. The amount of emails from start-ups who wanted his attention drove Boyd mad, so he came up with a short ‘n’ sweet Twitter format. Now start-ups can pitch to Boyd with one update. That saves him time, and he actually noticed some good ones which he then retweets. “It’s very interesting, the whole pitching process is now in the open discourse. Followers are getting to see the pitches, it’s more of a performance now. We took pitching out of the smoky black room that is email”.
Written on February 17, 2008 – 2:16 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Are you a Twitter-user and fond of Shakespeare? Start following @billionmonkeys . Behind this account, @bopp and @jadwigo have instructed a monkey to post an update every once in a while. What does the monkey say? So far it has mentioned 14,481 lines from almost three Shakespeare books. The little creature has just finished @Romeo’s and @Juliet’s love story. Its instructors were inspired by the famous quote:
“Given enough time, an infinite amount of monkeys will reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare”
It’s not right there yet, but @billionmonkeys has already surpassed some of the most famous twitter-users in the number of updates. That makes you think about the value of this number. In the lively Dutch Twitter scene it’s pretty important how much you’ve updated. When Hollands no 1 Twitter-user @erwblo reached his 20,000th update, it was a really big thing.
I think it’s better to focus on quality instead of quantity. I’m not saying that Erwin Blom aims for updating as much as possible, he has just started early. No, I’m talking about people who mention they just ‘finished first cup of coffee’ or ‘waiting in line for the ATM’.
In an email conversation I had with Reinier Ladan from Digital Energy, we discussed this phenomenon. . Reinier came up with the following calculation:
Let’s say you start ‘twittering’ today in order to reach the magical 20k as well. Imagine you’re updating every minute. That’s pretty fast, I know, but it’s worth trying. It will cost you 320 hours of twittering, that’s 40 working days. Yeah, you’ve read it right, this comes down to 8 weeks of working. Think about that, next time you want to aim for that update no 20,000.
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