Just landed on a couple articles concerning a bit of a sneaky move from social bookmarking giant Digg here and here. While I don't think this directly affects any links I've posted on Twitter, it could have a massive effect on some people and on how Digg users view the company from now on.

photo credit: hmvh

Basically what they've done here was to get people to use the Digg url shortening service to shorten links for use in Twitter (twitter only allows 140 characters per tweet hence the need to shorten urls). The normal behaviour was that the Digg shortened url pointed to the original link when someone clicked on it, but now unless the person clicking the link is logged in to Digg, the link gets hijacked and redirects directly to Digg.com giving the site itself lots of backlinks. I'm sure a lot of people who have used the Digg url shortening service through whatever means will not be happy about this. Imagine you have 1,000 people clicking your twitter links and landing on the Digg.com homepage. Another thing to consider is that never mind not being logged in to Digg, lot's of people clicking these links won't even have a Digg account. This just doesn't look good for the original Tweeters who supplied the links. My own opinion is that it's bad practice and a mistake from Digg. What do you think?

One solution to this before another url shortening service does the same kind of thing is to buy a short domain name and develop your own url shortening service!

I previously posted my thoughts on who to follow on Twitter and came up with the following rules:

Here's my rules for who to follow:
1. I'm gonna follow anyone that follows me and if I don't like what they are saying I'll drop them like a bad habit in a new year's resolution.
2. Anyone that even has a hint of pushing advertising or marketing material in my face that I don't like they're gone too!
3. Anyone who doesn't share common interests with me or is in anyway abusive in their tweets, see ya later!

DId they work? In a word, No! I suppose it's my own fault for not really watching my Twitter account closely enough and not using Twitter enough. To be perfectly honest I'm not sure I really get it! I suppose for marketing campaigns it's a way of potentially getting a message out to your followers, but are people really following you? I know there's lots of people who are very active on Twitter and probably get lots out of it. It's a handy medium for keeping in touch with short, sharp messages but so is instant messaging! I'm not giving up on Twitter and infact I'm probably gonna get set up so I watch it more closely! I've recently installed TweetDeck to do this. When looking at my activity in Tweet Deck I was trying to see what benefits I get from Twitter and I don't see a whole lot (yet). I normally Tweet every time I post a new blog entry but the traffic from Twitter to this blog is minimal.

photo credit: mangee

Anyway, it's not all bad, I'm just trying to understand how to use it better! I've taken the following actions to clean up my account and had a rethink about using Twitter from now on:

Anyway, that's just some of the decisions I've made and stuff I did to make my account more manageable. I'm now only following 56 people as opposed to 125 and I'm even thinking of cutting this further. I'm not sure if I'm that interested in seeing the same people saying good morning every day and telling me what they're having for dinner (maybe if I knew them personally it wouldn't bother me as much). I'm much more interested in using Twitter to track people who are doing stuff that I'm really interested in and I'm not sure it's possible to follow 1000's of people anyway and get any value out of it! Maybe I'm wrong and I just don't get Twitter but these are the revised tactics I'm using on Twitter going ahead.