The northlondonhippy

Archive for the ‘Twitter’ Category

I really did it, I spent the better part of yesterday trying to do good deeds on Twitter.

So how’d I do?

Well, I wouldn’t call it an unqualified success, but I wouldn’t count it as a failure either. I was able to give some genuine help to a handful of people, but I do feel like I could have done a lot more.

The hardest part was finding people in need of genuine help. I started by searching my own stream, ie people I follow, for questions or pleas for help – there weren’t many at all. So I switched to the public timeline and searched for “help me”.

Turns out, the only help most people on Twitter seek, falls into three categories:

- Help me get more followers
- Help me to get Justin Bieber to follow me
- Help me to get Miley Cyrus to follow me

I couldn’t help with any of those things, even if I tried. What this meant in real terms was that using the public timeline to find people in real need was like searching the proverbial haystack for the proverbial needle, and I don’t even shoot-up. I had to wade through literally thousands of tweets just to find one that was genuine.

So what did I actually help with? Here’s a rough list:

- I re-assured someone who was frightened by stormy weather
- I recommended the best places for a day of shopping in London
- I helped someone troubleshoot an iPhone/Twitter app
- I provided advice to someone looking to advertise adult education courses in the media
- I welcomed a new user to Twitter and gave them some basic advice

That’s just the highlights, I also retweeted loads of other people’s tweets and exchanged friendly tweets with loads of other people, including some I follow and some I don’t. Many of my #helpfulhippy tweets went ignored, but that’s to be expected. People are not accustom to strangers offering assistance without ulterior motives, especially online.

Overall, I found the entire experience provided me with a weird mix of frustration and satisfaction, much like real life. I was frustrated at how difficult it was to locate people I could help, but found it very satisfying when I was actually able to, in a very small way, make a difference to someone’s life.

I’ve come away from the day with the desire, not to do a #helpfulhippy day again, but to include this genuinely helpful approach into my life online on a more regular basis. It cost me nothing to help out strangers, my knowledge is free, so is my time frequently, so why not try to give something back all the time?

Life is indeed incredibly bleak, dreary and pointless, but it doesn’t take much to occasionally make it into something more, even in almost imperceptibly small ways. It felt good helping strangers and I’m going to try to do it more often.

So if there’s ever anything I can do online to help you, just ask. I might surprise you with the perfect answer. Or not.

I’ve just woken up, parked myself down in front of my desktop computer and I am ready to begin my experiment in social media engagement. I’m aiming help anyone online, in any way I can.

If you need anything today and you think I can help, just ask. I’m not long awake, so no heavy duty math-based equations for at least an hour, but anything else is cool.

Ladies, gentlemen and any one in between, welcome to #helpfulhippy day.

Go on, tweet me, I’m here to help.

Hello. My name is the northlondonhippy and I’m here to help.

As I mentioned a few days ago, on Weds 16th June, I will be mostly spending the day online, trying to offer help and assistance to as many people on Twitter as I can, whether its trying to answer questions, retweeting important and worthy messages, or, well, pretty much anything else I can think of that might help.

I’m calling it #helpfulhippy day and that will be the hashtag I use on all my attempts at being helpful. If you would like to play along at home, you can also tag things with #helpfulhippy or you can just tweet me old school-style to my Twitter name, @nthlondonhippy – either way, I’ll hopefully see it and respond quickly and helpfully.

I’m doing this because I want to give something back to Twitter because I get so much from it. I’m hoping that by trying to engage with people on a positive, life-affirming level will help alleviate my perceived debt to you all.

I’ll give you a small example. There are lots of people I follow on Twitter, who I think follow me, yet I’ve never (or rarely) tweeted them directly. That’s my fault, what with being a somewhat shy, withdrawn, socially awkward misanthrope, who lives in his own make-believe hippy world. On #helpfulhippy day, I hope to let these people know I enjoy following them. If I played along with #followfriday, I could have done it already, but I don’t, remember the whole misanthrope thing?

What I am not really aiming to do is exploit #helpfulhippy day as a way to raise my online profile or increase my followers. For a change this is not about shameless self promotion, its about genuinely helping others. If anything, I’ll probably lose followers because I plan on being a very full-on, #helpfulhippy – searching for unanswered questions and pleas for assistance.

Tomorrow’s the big day, I’ll either fall flat on my face or in some small way, I’ll make the world a better place for a short time. Either way, I’ll know I’ve tried my best to pay something back and maybe, just maybe I’ll despise myself just a little less.

Nah. Self-loathing is for life, you can’t shake it like you shake the common cold.

See ya on Weds!

This is a post mainly about Twitter.

I like Twitter, I find it incredibly useful. Its become my go-to source for current information and you’ll often find me getting my tweet-fix periodically throughout the day.

I’ve been using it that way for about 2 years, since I got my iPhone 3G and played around with the early Twitter clients available at the time. I had a different account back then, one that I subsequently deleted.

Why?

Because like many people, I really didn’t get Twitter at first. I didn’t know where to start. I tried to dive into the deep end, before even reading a pamphlet on how to swim. I expect this experience is not uncommon.

I did continue to flirt with Twitter, searching for topics of interest, or using the iPhone GPS to search for tweets local to me. It worked, to a point, but I really wasn’t that engaged or connected to any of it.

Around 6 months after my initial exploration, Twitter started to make more sense. It didn’t hurt that the mainstream media was starting to get on the Twitter bandwagon. I learned more about Twitter and it started to make sense to me and in January 2009, I signed up for another account, which is my current one: @nthlondonhippy

I now follow over 1,000 accounts. I thought about tweeting to mark this milestone, since people are always tweeting when they reach big round numbers of followers, I thought it would ironic and amusing to tweet the exact opposite by bragging about the number of accounts I follow. Its funny, because all numbers on Twitter are unimportant, how many followers you have, how many you follow, the number of tweets you’ve sent, it doesn’t matter.

What matters is what you get out of Twitter.

When people I know ask me about using Twitter, that’s usually my first question back to them: What do you want to get from Twitter? Most of them don’t know, because they don’t know what Twitter can offer.

It offers a lot, it offers everything. It offers far more than you could ever want or need and without some sort of focus on what you hope to gain, you’ll never get any where with it.

I take a lot from Twitter, but that which I take is willingly given. What I really mean by that is that many of the 1,000 plus accounts I follow belong to websites and are tweeted, not by people, but by services such as TwitterFeed.

When a website updates with a new story, or blog post, a tweet is generated by TwitterFeed via the website’s RSS feed. My website does this and these days most do. When I post this finely crafted and imminently relevant bit of copy to my website, it automatically updates its RSS feed, which is then picked up and tweeted within 15 minutes or less via my Twitter account. I’m not going to get any more technical than this, so don’t worry.

There is so much useful information available on Twitter, whatever your particular interest, its just a question of starting an account for yourself and looking for interesting sources to follow. This takes time and some perseverance, but the rewards are immense.

But Twitter’s not just about the latest news, its also about what real people, like you and me (I’m not actually real) had for breakfast. This is where I fail at Twitter.

I’m nowhere near as engaged with individuals on Twitter as I should be or as I would like to be. I’ve come to the conclusion that social media is just an extension of normal, real world society and if you are socially awkward in the real world, then you’re going to be socially awkward online.

I don’t mean I am some sort of unwashed pariah, farting and belching whenever I’m in the company of normal folk, I save that for when I’m in the company of supermodels. What I mean is, I’m quite a loner in real life, happy with my own company and the world inside my head. I only really have a few people close to me and that’s probably been true my whole life.

I don’t actively seek out individuals with similar interests to follow on Twitter, and I should. I would say most of the people I follow on Twitter, I didn’t find, they found me and I followed them back. I don’t actively look for people to follow with the same vigour I seek out news and information sources. I’m coming to realise this is a mistake.

By my own admission, I take a lot from Twitter, but now I would like to try to give something back.

Here’s my cunning plan:

On Weds 16 June 2010, I will be conducting the very first #helpfulhippy day. For the entire day, I will be available on Twitter to help other users in any way I can, whether they follow me or not. I will be actively, possibly even aggressively, searching for unanswered questions and other pleas for assistance and doing my best to help out.

I won’t be directly providing cash, drugs, hookers or anything else people really need, but it is my sincerest hope to, in whatever small ways, lend support, offer assistance, expertise and advice to anyone I can.

Maybe you need someone to retweet a charity plea because you’re looking for sponsors for your 10K run, or perhaps you’re struggling to remember the name of an actor from an obscure film you saw. Maybe you just need someone to tweet with you, I can do that. If its within my abilities and I can help via a tweet or two, I will.

I don’t know if this will be successful and at the point I’m not too worried about that, I am going to be here ready to help regardless of how it goes. I’m not going to be shy, either. I’m aiming for positive, life-affirming interactions with as many people as possible. I want to contribute something, I want to pay back something to Twitter, because I think my debt is too high.

Playing along at home couldn’t be easier, if you think I can help with something, tweet me (any time, not just next Weds) at @northlondonhippy and I’ll see it. Or you can use my special hashtag that I will be tagging all of my tweets that day with: #helpfulhippy

Think of this as not only me trying to give something back, but also an experiment in social engagement. If it does work, this won’t be the last time I attempt something like this.

So remember, this is happening next Wednesday, 16th June, from whenever I wake up, till whenever I go to bed, excluding breaks for the toilet and paying for take-away deliveries. You didn’t think I was going to cook too, did you?

That’s a fairly bold statement up there in the title. How will I ever live up to its promise?

Simple, its completely transformed how I interact with the internet. (And please note not “simples”. I am sick of that shit already).

Again, another fairly large claim about a “complete transformation” of my surfing habits.

I ain’t lyin’ neither.

In the old days, I used a browser to explore the internet. I’d plug something into a search engine and let it transport me to another site, which might then lead me to yet another site, and so on and so forth, until I returned to the search engine to start again. Of course, I bookmarked sites too, but the point is I had to think of a site I wished to check out, then navigate to it again.

Over time, I developed my own internet rituals, visiting my favourite sites on a regular or semi-regular basis, checking for new content. This style of surfing meant I would occasionally arrive at a site to discover it hadn’t changed since my last visit, but I wouldn’t find that out until the page loaded and wasted some of my valuable online time.

And then, I discovered RSS feeds and readers. Suddenly, I didn’t have to visit all of my favourite sites to check for anything, instead I waited for their headlines to arrive in my regularly refreshed RSS reader. If I wanted to explore the article further, I could click once and easily open the page in my browser.

But RSS readers don’t work in real time, there’s no push-type system to receive the headlines. Instead, they refresh automatically at a pre-defined interval or if you are a bit obsessive like me, manually refreshing every 10 seconds just in case. It worked, but it wasn’t perfect.

Then I discovered Twitter and Twitter clients. The “client” part is important, because if you’re accessing Twitter via your browser, you are missing out on some of its usefulness. I’ll come back to that.

Twitter is more than just reading about what people had for breakfast. There are other meals and snacks to read about too.

No, what I really mean is beyond following individuals, you can also follow websites. Websites with RSS feeds can marry them up with a service like TwitterFeed and auto-generate a tweet linking to new content published on their site.

I use TwitterFeed here on my site and it auto-generates a tweet to my Twitter account, @nthlondonhippy with the title & first line of the post, along with a shortened bit ly link to the full text.

Admittedly my site is not the busiest in the world, but if you are following me on Twitter, you will be alerted to any new content. Even if you are not following me, you still may discover the tweet and it might even be how you ended up here right now.

I would speculate that around a third of the accounts I follow on Twitter are auto-generated from websites I regularly visit. Headlines and links flow onto my computer’s desktop via my preferred Twitter client, which at present is TweetDeck.

I follow many news outlets, loads of the Guardian newspaper’s Twitter accounts, the New York Times, various Apple and gadget sites, celebrity news sites, conspiracy sites, all sorts really. My tastes are varied and diverse, but luckily so are the choices available to everyone on Twitter. If you’re interested in something, chances are there’s a Twitter feed (or 20!) that would cater to you.

Twitter is also a frightening good source for breaking news. As Twitter exists in the “nearly now” and moves in real time, when something happens anywhere in the world, it doesn’t take long for it to bubble up to the surface.

There’s an organisation that uses Twitter for just this purpose, @BreakingNews – BNO News, which is run by a 19 year-old in the Netherlands. They’re scary fast and often beat the more traditional old-style media outlets by 10-15 minutes. In the age of “now”, that’s quite an edge.

And yes, I do work in the old-media, but it doesn’t worry me. The smart old-media outfits will adapt and change with technology and most of them have started already. Twitter is re-writing the rules here too.

This is where a Twitter client really comes into its own. If you’re logging onto Twitter via their website, you are presented with a fairly usable interface, with one flaw, it doesn’t refresh automatically. To see new tweets, you must manually refresh the page. It works, but its not ideal.

A Twitter client is a stand-alone app, that sits independently on your desktop and they can refresh in real time or nearly. Many of them are feature-rich and allow you to do all sorts of cool things with Twitter, often with one-click.

I have been using TweetDeck for a while, but there are others available, most of them have free versions, so you can try them out and see if they work for you. I like TweetDeck because it is column based and is collapsable into a single column, which is how I run it most of the time.

With TweetDeck, you can have separate columns for your main feed, your mentions, your DMs plus you can create other columns to filter your stream even more. You can search with a hashtag and see real-time results and you can create groups from your main followers list too.

You can also do things like reply, send a DM or retweet with one click, as well as following and unfollowing with the same ease.

With it set up like this, a quick occasional glance keeps me up to date and can alert me to anything that might interest me, while I do other things on my computer. Like write this post.

While I’ve been working on this fine piece of Twitter related prose, I’ve helped someone with an iMovie ’09 question and replied to several tweets addressed directly to me. I don’t see it as a distraction, but rather it augments whatever I’m doing and in this case, actually informs and enriches it.

If I have any sort of question that I haven’t been able to answer with more traditional means, like search engines or forum posts, I’ll tweet it. Before long, an answer will come back, one that wouldn’t have been easy to find any other way. Call it the collective knowledge and experience of everyone interacting on Twitter at that moment, or the “hive mind” if you will, but whatever you call it, it is a quite powerful tool.

You can instantly collect opinions and reactions to something from a broad cross section of the planet, or find local knowledge of an event or situation right now.

Twitter has become my point of call for just about everything online. I use it to keep track of the news, of websites I like and subjects that matter to me. I engage in dialogue with other, like minded people, sharing my own knowledge while at the same time, benefiting from other’s.

More significantly, I don’t surf in the same way I used to; I don’t really browse using a browser any more. Instead of seeking out subjects of interest to me, I have them streamed onto my desktop continuously and in real-time, cherry picking the specific pages I want to see and only then opening them up in my browser.

Just as the internet has evolved in the last 10 years, from slow dial-up connections with mainly text-only pages to fast, always on-broadband and media-rich content, our ways of interacting with the internet have changed too.

Twitter has become my internet aggregator, my media and information filter. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Is it too soon to tell?

How about you?

Has Twitter changed your surfing habits? Do you use it as I do? Or have you found some other benefit I may be overlooking? I’d genuinely like to hear from anyone who might have any thoughts, so please feel free to tweet me and include my Twitter ID: @nthlondonhippy in your tweet, to make sure I see it and respond. Thanks!

I flirted with Twitter for around 6 months before I properly signed up and started tweeting. I didn’t really get it at first, which is not unusual, for it has become a virtual sub-culture on the internet, with its own rules and etiquette, that must be observed if you wish to play a part.

By rules, I don’t mean anything official, perhaps conventions or an informal code of practise would be more accurate, but for simplicities sake, I’ll stick to “rules”.

As I’ve used Twitter, I’ve developed my own set of rules, or rather they’ve evolved as I’ve learned bit by bit what works for me.

And that’s what I believe is the key to Twitter, learning what “works for you”. Different people use it in different ways and I’m going to share few things I’ve picked up since I started tweeting.

Following people:

At first, I really didn’t know who to follow beyond @wossy and @stephenfry and while they are both entertaining and prolific tweeters, it wasn’t enough to make Twitter worth my time. And its one thing following celebrities, they expect your attention and adoration, but how do you find other people to follow?

I was a bit shy about following people at first, after all you are choosing to learn a great deal about someone who is a random stranger on the internet, but I’m far less so now.

When I started, I only really followed people who followed me first. Silly, eh? Don’t be afraid to follow someone if you want to, even if their updates are protected with a padlock. Mostly, that’s to keep out spammers and pornbots, not genuine people like you. Occasionally, an account is truly private, but I’ve yet to personally encounter one.

Nearly all of us are on Twitter because we want to be followed. And who wouldn’t want some cool rockin’ hippy like me trailing them in cyberspace? Now tell me, what colour is your thong today?

Unfollowing:

Occasionally, I unfollow someone and if it is you I unfollowed, I don’t mean any disrespect. The biggest reason I unfollow people is they tweet too often and its meaningless crap – and that’s my job on Twitter!

Recently, I’ve unfollowed people because of the content of their tweets. I’m rarely offended, so if you managed to offend me, you’ve said something extremely loathsome. And I’ve unfollowed people who’ve signed up for advertising tweets – I don’t want your stream to be interrupted by a word from YOUR sponsor. It reduces Twitter’s value for everyone.

Followers:

Its not a numbers game. Don’t be suckered into thinking that it is.

At first, I was concerned about how many followers I had, and what people would think of me, if I didn’t have many. I soon learned the number of people following you doesn’t matter as much as the quality of your followers. And if the quality of your tweets is high, you will attract followers soon enough.

If you have a smaller number of like-minded people following you, that beats millions of random followers any day.

If I cared about the numbers, I’d let all the spammers and marketeers continue to follow me, but I don’t – I block them. If I did leave them in place, it would probably double my number of followers.

If you follow me, I won’t automatically follow you back. I might follow you, but only after I’ve had a look at your profile to see if your style of tweets would be interesting to me. If I don’t follow you, please don’t be offended. I only take a quick look and then make a snap decision. Sometimes I get it wrong.

And if you want me to follow you, just send me an @ message and I will. There are too many “online marketing specialists” who can help me make money on Twitter trying to follow me, or girls who want to show me their sexy private pictures, for it to be sensible to automatically follow back.

Finding people:

I stumble upon new people all the time, in many different ways.

Sometimes, someone using a hashtag I’m tracking will catch my attention.

I often look at who other people are following or followed by as well. And on occasion, I see someone I’m following exchanging @ messages with someone and while following the conversation thread, the new person catches my attention.

A lot of people think #followfriday is another good way to find new people, as its the day to recommend new people for you to follow. I have to be honest, I still don’t really get the etiquette of the whole thing. To me, every one of the nearly 500 accounts I’m following are worth it, or I wouldn’t be following them. So I choose people to recommend, knowing I’ve probably unintentionally left someone very worthy out, or I’ve embarrassed someone by recommending them. Clearly, I’m too neurotic to be playing in public with strangers.

My tweets:

I make a lot of jokes, or at least I try to, but some fall flat on their faces. I am occasionally serious, sincere, angry (more than occasionally), but mostly I am sarcastic with a dash of irony.

I tend to treat Twitter like one giant open-mike night and let my inner-comedian run wild. If you worked with me or hung out with me in person, it wouldn’t be much different, only I would type less.

The important thing is I don’t tweet anything that I would be embarrassed or ashamed of later. I’m polite and friendly to others, but most importantly I am true to myself.

It helps that I’ve blogged a long time and have learned how much of myself to share with the wider world. Too fucking much!

DM’s and @ messages:

I try to reply to all I receive, as long as you are not offering me a free MacBook Air or telling me how to get 16K followers in a week, and make money doing it!

If I haven’t replied to your message, its because I probably missed it. And Twitter’s not perfect, as some messages and tweets get missed out from client to client. I know this because I use a variety of methods to read my tweets and messages and I can see that sometimes things aren’t exactly the same from client to client or device to device.

Twitter is fast moving plus I keep weird hours most of the time so I do occasionally miss things.

If its important, message me again – I’d rather have your message twice, then have you think I was ignoring you.

I’m happy to hear from anyone, especially if you’re in Nigeria or a member of the US military in Iraq and looking to transfer large sums of cash into my bank account.

Invest time

You need to properly invest time interacting on Twitter. You can’t just send the same tweet over and over, selling your product or service. People won’t pay attention, they’ll classify you as noise.

Start out slowly, gradually building your network. Give more than you receive on Twitter, if you can answer someone’s question accurately, then do it. Don’t be self-centred or self-serving – people can smell it a mile off and will avoid you.

Know what you want from Twitter:

This is the best advice I’ve found on using Twitter, so I will pass it along. Think about what you want to get out of Twitter and be focused on that.

If you want to extend your social network, or use it to promote a product or service, go for it, but do it well. There are many guides available on how best to use Twitter for your business. Heed their advice.

I won’t lie, I joined to promote my website and “brand”. Are you shocked? Saddened? Will you not look upon me with the same adoration you had for me yesterday? I’m crushed.

Its worked, I’ve seen a dramatic upward spike in visitors to my site since I started tweeting regularly.

What I didn’t expect but found anyway, is a community of extremely nice, kind, helpful, genuine people.

I’m quite reclusive by nature and more than a bit of a loner, but I find myself exchanging @ messages with people quite frequently. Its an unanticipated, yet welcome benefit of being a member of the Twitter community.

Now, I wonder how many of them would loan me some money? I don’t need a lot, just a few grand to get this shylock off my back. You don’t want to see a certain north London based hippy with shattered knee-caps, do you?

I haven’t put anything new up here in a couple of weeks, so I guess I should just post something.

This is that something, or rather it will be when I finish it.

I’ve only just started and I don’t know where this is going, so how will I know when its finished?

I’m still not feeling 100%, so this could turn into a hippy health bulletin. There’s a little bit to report.

After countless treatments with my chiropractor, my back is now 99.9% pain free. I’m sleeping well and moving well.

I’m still feeling listless and occasionally a bit breathless, but I saw an endocrinologist this week who explained why and made a recommendation that should help.

With thyroid problems, like my Hashimoto’s Disease, your blood is tested for two things, your T4 levels, which is the actual thyroid hormone and your TSH, which is Thyroid Stimulating Hormone and made by your pituitary gland.

While my T4 level was good, my TSH level is still on the high side and should be lower. Lowering it involves increasing my dose of medication again and another blood test in a month or so. I’m going to go see my GP next week to sort all that out and hopefully I’l be feeling some benefits in a couple of weeks.

That wasn’t much of an update, was it?

How about an update on my site?

If you haven’t noticed, even when I’m not putting new posts up here, I am still adding quality content…well quality if you are interested in my musical tastes or what I had for breakfast. I’m talking about my Last FM playlist and my most recent Tweets.

The Last FM widget on the right, shows you the last handful of songs I’ve listened to from my home media centre, my iMac and my iPhone. It also tells you when I was listening, so you can keep up with it in real time. I don’t know why you would want to, but you can if you like.

I’m still enjoying Twitter and I do tweet a fair amount daily, often at weird times, like the middle of the night or early morning. I’m sometimes around during the day and at night, it depends on my weird schedule. I tweet all sort of random crap, from interesting links to odd and surreal jokes.

Today, just for fun, I started using a hashtag for a virtual Glastonbury festival online – #virtualglasto – for people like me who will watch from my sofa, shielded from the elements and poorly cooked veggie burgers. I’m actually looking forward to Springsteen on Saturday night and I hope the BBC don’t fuck me over and only show a couple of songs. We want the whole goddamn set, goddamn it!

Mainly, I’m posting today because I’ve been getting so many new visitors. I’ve had another significant rise.

This is to let all you new visitors know that I’m alive and well and living in north London, just like always. Keep bookmarking me or grabbing the RSS feed and before you know it, I’ll post something amazing that will inform, entertain and amuse.

Just not today.

I think I’m finished now.

This is a little warning from your friendly, neighbour hippy.

Do you tweet from your iPhone? Are you broadcasting your location with every tweet when you are at home? Do you know what I am talking about?

If you answered “yes” to any of those questions, especially that last one, you really need to pay attention to this.

Your iPhone is location-aware, so to an extent is your iPod touch. You probably know this already. It means it can work out your location using GPS, wi-fi and/or cell phone tower information to a reasonably accurate degree. That feature is built right into the core architecture of your iPhone.

Having that information at the core, means applications like many iPhone Twitter clients, can magically grab your exact location (expressed in latitude and longitude) and attach it to your tweets and Twitter account.

If you look at people’s Twitter profiles, occasionally you will see two sets of numbers where their city would normally be…if you cut and paste those numbers into Google Maps, it shows you their exact location.

Perhaps there are times when you want to broadcast your location, for example, you are visiting a famous landmark and want your tweets to reflect that. Or maybe you are out on a Saturday night and you want your friends to easily be able to find you, because its your round. That’s all cool.

But what if you are at home, merrily tweeting away about your two-week holiday abroad that starts tomorrow and you’re not aware you’re sending out your home address with every message? Suppose you have a photo of yourself on your account, or hundreds of them on your linked Facebook page.

What would it take for some enterprising criminal to park up on your street and watch for you to leave, knowing your flat will be empty for a fortnight?

Very little.

Think I’m being paranoid? Think again, because something like this happened recently in Arizona. Here, check out this local report.

So what can you do to avoid this happening to you?

Simple, become more aware of location awareness.

If you tweet from your iPhone (or iPod Touch, or any other location aware device, if one exists), go into the settings of your preferred Twitter client and turn off location services. The setting is someplace different in every app, and if you can’t find it in the app, look on the main settings section from your home screen.

When the app asks you to turn them on again, like it did the first time you used the app, say “no”, unless you want to broadcast your location. And if you are home, or where you work, this should probably always be “no”.

You can re-enable this feature if you do want to use it, when you are out and about, but I really recommend keeping it switched off as your default setting.

Also, check your own Twitter profile, to see what you have listed as your location. You might discover a little surprise.

If you wish to change it, log into your account from the web and go to Settings, then find the little box for location and type something suitably vague. Mine says: “north London, UK, Earth”, in case anyone confuses it with the Venusian version.

There’s one more simple thing you can do to protect yourself, when you send tweets, don’t give out too many specific track-able, real-world details about yourself.

I realise if you are tweeting under your own name, and can be found by directory enquiries or (gasp) in the white pages, it may already be too late, but if you are at all privacy minded, neither of those things will be true of you. They are certainly not true of me, but I am extremely protective of my privacy online and off.

If you’re someone who didn’t realise you’ve been practically attaching your home address to every tweet sent from your iPhone, this advice is especially for you. Just send me what you saved in the increase to your home contents insurance post-burglary and we’ll call it even.

I’ve been trying to get my head around the steady, constant stream of followers who come and go like the tides. It seems I’m just about gaining and losing them in equal numbers and its all rather random.

I’ve been looking at the data compiled at TweetEffect.Com, which cross-references your tweets with the gains and loses in your followers. In looking at my data, it seems the same tweets attract and repel at the same time.

Confusing!

It got me to thinking about the best ways to instantly attract a following on Twitter. I came up with ten ideas that I thought I would share:

1) Be famous already – If you are already famous, you have an established fan base and an instant following. Of course, if you’re already famous you don’t need my help.

2) Imitate a celebrity – This is surprisingly effective, but can be short lived. Oh and pointless, now that @Valebrity and @CelebsWhoTwitter are making efforts to verify them. That said, a fake Tina Fey has over 100,000 followers, you could just change the account name and sell it on eBay for heaps of cash.

3) Get endorsed by @wossy or @stephenfry – Your Twitter name mentioned or recommended by either of them, or any other celebrity with a large following will attract scores of new followers. Whether or not they remain loyal to you is another question.

4) Take a photo of a commercial airliner in the Hudson River or of one crashing near Amsterdam – If fate puts you someplace where something significant is happening, document it as best you can. Take photos if you have a cameraphone and tweet them, tweet about what you see. If it is important enough and you are there soon enough, everyone will want to see what you capture next.

5) Follow everyone and hope a large percentage follow u back – This is the equivalent of throwing as much shit as you can at a wall and hoping some of it sticks. And like shit and desperation, this one smells bad too, don’t bother.

6) Swear profusely – Thanks to CurseBird.Com, the more you use bad language, the higher your rank on that website. I like it.

7) Require a rescue – This one would be good as long as you survive, but if you don’t, its a bit pointless. Hope you’re never in a position to find out!

8) Offer people a free laptop – I don’t know if this works, but I do seem to get followed by a lot of people who want to give me a free MacBook Air.

9) Offer to tweet your credit cards numbers if u hit 1,000 followers – Guilty! Yes this one’s from me. I’ve still got a long way to go.

10) Be refreshingly original & entertaining – it couldn’t hurt!

Having a somewhat pointlessly devious mind means you occasionally spot things that are meant to be used one way, but can just as easily be exploited to be used another way.

Every user account on Twitter offers you the chance to receive the tweets it generates via an RSS feed.

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, click right here.

If you have either your browser or a newsreader app configured to deal with RSS feeds, all you need to do is click on the RSS link and its magically added to your subscriptions list.

The link on Twitter profiles is easy to find, its just below the thumbnail photos of the people being followed:

Once you’ve added the link to your RSS reader, every time you refresh it, you will receive the tweets from the selected feeds, assuming they’ve sent anything since the last time you updated.

All that’s fair enough, but what if you wanted to follow someone without them knowing you’re following them. Perhaps an ex-partner, maybe even your current one or your boss or your best friend or your worst enemy, whoever?

You can use this method to accomplish just that, stalking with stealth on Twitter.

If you follow someone’s tweets via your RSS reader, you won’t appear in their followers list. You won’t appear anywhere and only you will know you’re receiving them.

Sneaky and cool, eh?

Now, I know there are people out there who might use this relatively simple technique for nefarious purposes, but I’m sure you’re not one of them. Right?