Posts Tagged ‘experiment’
The Auto-Update Experiment
I hate most sites/programs that auto-update twitter or Facebook.
I mentioned this briefly in my foursquare rules post, but seriously. If I want to know about what game you’re playing or if you’ve gone to lunch, I will check in at Raptr or foursquare. I am following you on twitter because I want to hear your commentary, not which videos you love on youtube.
Facebook has dealt with this issue in an intelligent, if not clunky, fashion. If there is an application that is spamming your friends feed, you simply hide it. The other person doesn’t need to know that you’ve hidden the princess look-a-like test and you don’t have to see it. The only annoying part is that you have to hide every single program that appears instead of having a global “don’t show me applications,” but at least I can hide Farmville and Mafia Wars (I do play both of these, but I don’t want the updates cluttering up my pages).
There is no way to block these things on twitter.
I have decided that it is time to review how annoying auto-updating twitter can be.
Scientific Method Time!
Since this is an experiment, I figure I’ll throw back to the old eight step process (Wikipedia):
- Define the question
- Gather information and resources (observe)
- Form hypothesis
- Perform experiment and collect data
- Analyze data
- Interpret data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting point for new hypothesis
- Publish results
- Retest (frequently done by other scientists)
Define the Question:
What is the highest post per day I can get from just auto-updating services?
Gather Information and Resources:
This is a call to arms – I’m trying to find any service that I can use that will auto-update twitter. I use a BlackBerry, not an iPhone, so that limits me in some regard. I’ve already switched over my foursquare and raptr accounts and will be digging through to find other services.
Hypothesis:
Auto-updating services can outpost me any day of the week. I also believe that I will be followed by a ridiculous amount of twitter spammers.
And beyond
This is just the beginning of the experimentation phase. I plan on having a detailed list of all of the service that I’m using as well as my post per day. I am actually excited about this in a very silly way.