On Helping Others Find Sites

I was recently reading yet another article on how a site's livelihood - in this case, MetaFilter's - was threatened because a search engine - in this case, Google - made a secret change to its secret algorithms.  Every once in a while, an article like this crosses my path, though I have to wonder how many I don't see because I don't see the tweet, or because nobody in my timeline tweeted or retweeted it because they didn't know about it because it doesn't show up on search engines.  Also, even though I said "search engine" twice, this also applies to social networking sites, though in different ways.  On the one hand, I'm glad that my livelihood doesn't depend on a website (I'm not even currently running any), but on the other hand, it's because of that that it's easy to forget how big of a deal this is to some people. 
I recently tweeted that people should use at least three search engines - unless they can get exactly half of their searches into each of two - and the point of this, really, is to avoid letting anyone get a monopoly.  Google has a higher "household name" stat than anyone else.  Bing is getting traffic from people too lazy to use anything other than IE.  Yahoo is now getting traffic from people comfortable with using FireFox's default engine.  Last I checked, Ask.com was still trying to trick people installing Java or Flash or something into changing their browser's default to Ask.com.  Even this trickery is understandable, given how much sway Google holds, but even if some other search engine takes the lead, that just changes who the default is.  Ever since search engines got good - prioritizing sites by relevance instead of just listing them - our behavior has changed. 
Search engines, ads, and social media sites are said to "drive traffic" - or not, as the case may be - to any given site.  However, this is sometimes fraught with pitfalls, too, as is the case with facebook.  I'll recap, for those who haven't heard:  A while ago (last year or the year before, I forget), it was revealed that facebook was sometimes hiding updates by people/groups/pages from people who followed those people/groups/pages, unless those people/groups/pages paid money to make sure that all of their followers got to see it.  Of course, since facebook is charging the content creators, most users don't know that stuff is being hidden from them; they're not told that there's a missing update, so they don't know that there's a hole in their timelines.  As it happens, just the other day, someone made a comic summarizing this topic again. 
People have been communicating with each other over the internet for as long as it has existed - that's kind of the point of it, after all.  Social networking sites have been around longer than the name, and even longer than really old ones like friendster, but they were called "forums".  Even before that, though, there were instant messaging services, chatrooms, and even Usenet groups.  Websites exited, too, once they were invented, but the most common ways that people found out about sites was by being told about them, either by their fellow users (even, believe it or not, offline) or by other sites.  (This is back when webrings were still seen on a regular basis.) 
I think that we need to make a point of doing this more, as it has waned.  That's not to say that we need to sign up for Usenet groups or idle in chatrooms all day, but we should make a point of telling each other about good sites, and asking each other instead of relying on search engines.  I don't know exactly the best way to do it, but here are some tips: 

• Don't assume that someone interested in a topic already knows about <site>.  
• If someone asks you about good sites/the best site for something, don't tell them to <search engine> it.  
• Every now and then, <search engine> for <topic>, then skip the first three pages of results, and see if you find any diamonds in the rough.  (If you do, then tell people about them.)
• Every now and then, go through your bookmarks and see if there's a site that you haven't visited in a while.  If it's still there and still good, then tell people about it.  
• It's going to be a very long time before people get weaned off of search engines.  Be patient with this. 

As for my part, I'm going to try to occasionally tweet about random good sites when I get a chance.  I'll let you know if I think of anything better.  

Twitter: It's Over Five Thousand!

As I'm writing this, I'm about to hit 5,000 tweets on my twitter account. According to http://howlonghaveyoubeentweeting.com/, I've been tweeting for 1 year, 9 months, 2 weeks, 5 days, and some change. I started on March 23, 2008. It's not quite two years. Now, I'm fairly certain that the utility either checks when the account was made or checks when the first tweet was tweeted, so there's little regard for frequency, so you'll have to just trust that I've been tweeting mostly at a steady rate ever since I got the account. Anyway, I'm writing this post about my experiences with and on twitter.
Initially, the concept seemed quite useful. Twitter asks "What are you doing?" as its proposed question, and one answers in 140 characters or less. Applications using twitter were in development (and new ones continue to be produced), so my plan was to get onto twitter, wait for things that would allow my twitter account to interact with AIM/MSNIM/YIM/Gmail Chat/Pidgin, and interface them so that I'd have a one-stop shop for my current status, rather than having to edit my status on each of those things separately.
Well, for various reasons, that didn't quite work out. Among them was that twitter has become a social network of sorts. I can follow people, basically saying that I'm a fan of theirs or that I consider them my friends. People can follow me, saying that they're fans of mine or that they consider me their friends. And, of course, mutual following amounts to mutual fandom or friendship. For those who don't know, on twitter, one's main page has a feed of one's own tweets plus tweets from those that one follows, lined up in temporal order. Unfortunately, if I want "mentions" of me, including those from people that I don't follow, I have to go to a separate thing. It's easy to miss communications that way, but I'm in the habit of, rather than refreshing the page, clicking the replies link, then clicking the home link again, to check both.
As I'm writing this, I'm following 108 people and I have 140 followers. Also, to the best of my knowledge, I've only been blocked by one user, for reasons unknown. Wait, I'm following 108 people? That sounds like a lot. On reviewing that list, though, I see a few things. First of all, accounts can belong to companies and organizations, so I'm following, for instance, @CERN and @diradio (belonging to CERN and www.di.fm, respectively). Also, some people don't tweet that often, so following them doesn't clutter up my feed that much.
Some features have been added to twitter since I signed on. For one, retweeting has been quite popular, where one says "ReTweet @UserName ", or "RT @UserName " for short. However, that only works for tweets that are shorter than [135 - [UserName.length]] characters long. To "solve" this dilemma, twitter itself added a "ReTweet" feature, which works alright, except that it doesn't allow the addition of comments to the ReTweet, which was one of the advantages of the old way with very short original tweets. The other notable new feature is lists. I follow various people for various reasons. Now, I can sort them into lists, if I wish to look at a specific topic for some reason. Also, other people can follow these lists to follow a whole group of people at once. Among other things, I have lists on the topics of atheism, steampunk, conventions, and scifi. I will say, though, that I have yet to follow someone else's list. I've seen only a few, and they generally either include people that I don't want in my feed or include so many people that I fear an overcrowding of my feed. Also, I've just checked, and all of my lists are followed by either 0 or 1 users. I'm also on 9 lists, but 4 of those are my own.
Of course, the question is also begged: How did I get 139 followers? Well, I'll admit that several of them are spam accounts. I stopped bothering to remove them a while back. Basically, I think that they follow people in the hopes of getting followed back so that they can direct message them. (Direct messaging is only available between people who follow each other.) So, they don't actually hurt me, and I don't feel like culling my followers regularly. Of course, plenty of my followers are legitimate accounts who follow me because... actually, I don't know why. I guess that they just like what they see.
I've followed people and I've been followed, sometimes by the same people and sometimes not. I've made lists and I'm on lists. I've met people and people have met me. I've entertained people and I've been entertained. Overall, this twitter thing has been a positive experience, even if it didn't work out for my original plans.
I'm planning to announce this blog post for tweet number 5000.