Toms Skyline Design » money

Harvard, Twitter and the Pareto Principle

skyline — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 08:38:10 +0000

A Harvard Business School study, as reported by Reuters, raises a serious question on the value of Twitter for businesses. Relying upon research by Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, results show greater than 50% of Twitter users will tweet less than one time every ten to eleven weeks. Along with that, many have witnessed Twitter struggling to keep their system running, due to an overload of tweets, apparently by 10% of all Twitter users; who are responsible for blasting out 90% of all tweets. What an interesting twist on the Pareto principle.

Fail Whale says Twitter is Over Capacity

Notwithstanding there are some companies utilizing the social value of Twitter, one would have to question whether or not tweeting holds much value for smaller companies. The Harvard study seems to indicate that of all Twitter users they will tweet on average only once during their Twitter lifetime.

What do the ten percent that are responsible for 90% of the tweeting, tweet about? Although there are some tweets about news events, there are also some who simply troll for followers, by repeatedly tweeting a rotated set of keywords. However, the bulk of the tweets I have seen are MLM related, or attempting to sell their information or services. The same tweets are repeated over and over again; many of which, are too incredible to be true. Obviously, all of the people who say they are making twenty gazillion dollars per month; or who can show you how to get 50,000 followers in 90 days on autopilot, are not making the money they say, nor is it possible to build these empires on autopilot. It is, however, possible to send out thousands of tweets making these claims.

Twitter needs to figure out a way to minimize the SPAM that is flowing in the tweets; otherwise the value to businesses and to individuals will quickly diminish; and the only sustainability will be the smell of Hormel on Pareto;s plate.

Joomla Community News Updates

skyline — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:01:17 +0000

Last week Joomla celebrated a milestone … Ten Million Downloads. Congrats Joomla!! That’s a lot of downloads. Are there 10 million Joomla sites? I really doubt that there. But, Joomla continues to be one of the most popular content management systems; continuing to duke it out with Drupal and their loyal community. Joomla also released their latest stable version 1.5.11; which I already commented on last week.

If you are familiar with Joomla then you are probably also familiar with Community Builder; a highly favored extension by thousands, to the Joomla CMS. I received word from the Joomlapolis Security Team that Joomlapolitan has advised anyone still using CB 1.1 to immediately update to 1.2.1 for security reasons. If you are running CB 1.1 make sure to update A.S.A.P.

For Joomla site owners and developers that are looking for a classified ad solution, JoomClan Classified Listings component has just released news of several fixes, including:

Fixes that address the following:

‘uddstart’ is undefined and other errors in IE8
Unable to select my PayPal account
Drop Down Select Option
Free Ad Post Issue

I purchased and downloaded this component not too long back. I think it had the potential to be one of the best, if not the best classified listings component that runs native on Joomla 1.5.10 rather than the legacy Joomla. However, when I downloaded it (I believe it was their beta version, it still was a bit buggy) there were issues with that version that made in unworkable for my application at that time. I removed the application and they refunded my money promptly. There are only a small handful of options for classified ad extensions to Joomla. The JoomClan component, in my opinion, has the most to offer in its environment.

With that said, I have already downloaded the newly released version of Joomla; and I believe I will go ahead and get it setup and give it a test run on another site.

Twitter Ad Sites: Who Makes the Money?

skyline — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:17:21 +0000

There are some brokers on Twitter that will charge an advertiser for exposure on Twitter. Then they find publishers (Twitter users) that will allow the ads or links to be displayed on their respective Twitter page(s). I have seen one or more of these broker sites that do not say what they pay the publishers (or if they do, it is difficult information to locate) … I suppose you find out after you sign up. In my research I stumbled across one of these broker sites that had cultivated about 1,000 followers and with their related traffic they were able make a case for selling the domain. They ended up selling the domain to someone at auction, for $6,000. Actually, they sold it early with a Buy-It-Now-Bid. There’s another idea there. What I found interesting about this particular Twitter business sales pitch, were some of the comments they made about the site, the revenues and the payouts, during their attempt to sell it.

They tell the potential buyer that with their traffic that the new owner should be able to bring in $10,000 a month, but rarely ever have to pay anything out to the publishers, due to the $20 threshold and the CPC rate of $.025 (50% split of the amount charged). So I clicked on the link to this Twitter Ads site; and it took me to a page with a couple of banner ads; giving another page to follow to. When I clicked on that link and went to the new site, I discovered that yes it was a Twitter Ad Broker Site and guess what? This site listed a $.04 CPC and had the $20 monthly threshold policy for publishers, too. It sounds like they are following the same pattern.

This is another program on Twitter to make money, but I have to ask myself, “Is is a good one?” One thing I have seen with these sites is that I may see advertiser testimonials, but do not see any publisher testimonials. You do the research and see what you think. Caveat Emptor seems to be appropriate here.