A Consuming Experience

To be retweeted: use URLs & hashtags? (PARC research)

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Add URLs as well as hashtags to your tweets to increase chances of being retweeted, the Xerox Parc team suggests (the full research paper doesn’t seem to be available online yet but should be here when it is).

They also found that, of the 74 million tweets they analysed over a 7-week period, fully 11.1% were retweets.

Here’s their top 10 most retweeted domains:

www.twitlonger.com
twitpic.com
myloc.me
www.youtube.com
www.facebook.com
tweetphoto.com
twitter.com
mashable.com
bit.ly
www.ustream.tv

(full details in their blog post).

Of course the most retweeted tweets may happen to contain certain URLs, but it seems to me that (as with tweeting or blathering online more often to increase popularity) it’s perhaps too simplistic to say, “Include more URLs and you’ll be retweeted more”. Correlation is not always causation, to coin a phrase.

Twitlonger URLs for instance only mean that the person who was retweeted has written a nice long tweet, which is in itself interesting and seems more indicative of the fact that it’s the longer tweets (even if you have to click thru to read them) which garner the most attention! Which may say more about the limitations of Twitter’s 140 character limit than anything else.

And most of the other top domains indicate that people like pics, location of people / events, and videos… and shortening long links to fit!

Still, it’s interesting to see their research. More info, stats, graphs etc in the blog post.

Labels: Twitter

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Zyb closing TODAY - save your contacts

Saturday, July 31, 2010

Online contacts backup & sync service Zyb is closing down today.

Zyb were taken over by Vodafone and unfortunately on their home page the URL of the new service is obscured in some browsers in some resolutions, see top right below! (nor is the info shown after you login):

So if you want to continue with Zyb here's the URL you need to register on (for free): www.360.com (actually http://www.vodafone360.com/). See Vodafone note on this.

If you don't want to sign up with Vodafone, here's a tip: as the zyb-import people (whose software enables Zyb contacts to be imported to Android mobile phones) kindly pointed out, my previous blog post has instructions on how to get your contacts into and, more importantly now, out of Zyb. My method's phone-agnostic, it's not just for Android cellphones.