This pursuit was of course assisted by Google itself. It has a nifty advanced search feature where you can specify a date range for the results. Unfortunately the algorithm for assigning dates to pages seems really buggy, and you end up with a lot of false positives for the date range you specify. For example, Google was being talked about in 1973?

I was able to find some interesting newsgroup postings from Sergey in 1994. On August 18, 1994, he sought advice about booking air travel from San Francisco to Baltimore. In 2010, this conversation would almost certainly not happen, as any number of powerful airfare search engines crunch the numbers and compare rates across carriers, dates, and airports.

But even more interesting to me is a math question posed in 1994 about the Karhunen-Loeve theorem:

Hi,

I ran across a reference to a Karhunen-Loeve transform in a paper I was reading and from the brief mention it seems that it is relevant to my research.  However, there is no pointer to where I could find more information.

Could someone let me know what a good reference for the Karhunen-Loeve transform would be?

thanx
–sergey

Today you just type “Karhunen-Loeve” into Google to get the answer.

I participate extensively on Twitter with my personal account: @danielpunkass, and my company account: @redsweater. One of my applications, @marsedit, also tweets with a mind of its own.

I have strong opinions about what works well on Twitter, and what doesn’t. I decided I would start writing down these opinions so that I can easily reference them in the future. This advice is as much a memorandum to myself as to any readers who might feel that I am preaching to them. I violate most of these recommendations on a regular basis, but I hope that writing this guide helps me to do so less often.

Tweet Anatomy

For such a simple format, there is an incredible complexity to the variety of tweets, and the metadata that go along with them. In this section I will identify all of the standard tweet forms and many conventional metadata forms, and how they should be used.

Mentions

When referring to any person, product, or company that has an official presence on Twitter, include their @username organically in the content of your tweet. By including their @username, you provide a canonical link to their presence on Twitter, and make it easy for them to take notice of your comments, if they choose to. If it’s important to include the proper name as well, then include the Twitter name in parentheses:

Never start a tweet with a @username, unless that Tweet is a reply to the user. Placing the @username at the beginning of the tweet will mark it as a reply, preventing it from being seen by members of your audience who don’t also follow the user:

@danielpunkass was at the meeting last night, and he told me some juicy gossip about @marsedit.

Twitter claims that this should not show up as a reply, but in practice it seems to happen more often than not. Perhaps it is because Twitter clients set the “reply” flag on tweets that are written this way, even if they shouldn’t. To be safe, edit the format of your tweet so that the @username shows up elsewhere in the content:

I met Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) last night. He told me some juicy gossip about the next release of @marsedit!

Because @username mentions will draw the attention of the user you are tweeting about, don’t overuse a particular user’s name in your tweets. You will irritate them and they may choose to block you.

Replies

Replies are a special form of mention that indicates your tweet is addressed specifically to the attention of another user. Reply directly to another tweet by using the reply feature of the web site or your Twitter client. This will ensure that the reply intent, and conversation flow is tracked appropriately inside Twitter.

In general you should not edit the standard formatting for replies, which include the @username of the user you are replying to at the beginning of the tweet. Deviating from this format will cause your reply to be visible to all of your followers, instead of just the ones who follow both you and your recipient.

Some users abuse this fact by adding an arbitrary character before the username, so that all of their followers see the reply:

.@danielpunkass I think you’re full of crap, and everybody knows it.

If it’s imperative to share a reply with your entire audience, be respectful and edit your tweet to adopt the format of a mention, so your audience knows you are not abusing the reply format:

I think @danielpunkass is full of crap, and everybody knows it.

You can address a tweet to more than one person by including multiple space-separated @usernames at the beginning of the tweet. Always list the primary target as the first name in the list.

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgement is a special form of mention where the @username does not show up organically in the content of the tweet. Use acknowledgements to credit other users as the source of content. Add acknowledgements to the end of your tweet, in parentheses if possible, and include shorthand citation language such as “via” or “thx” to clarify the kind of acknowledgement. Sometimes it is appropriate to use the shorthand “/cc” to indicate that you only mean to ensure these users are aware of the content of your Tweet:

Oops. Turns out I was totally wrong about Macworld’s editorial policy. Check this out: http://example.com/ (thx @danielpunkass, /cc @jsnell)

When you share information with your audience, always acknowledge the source of that information unless the source has explicitly requested to remain anonymous.

Tagging

Add tags to a tweet by adding a space-separated list of words at the end of the tweet, with a hash character before each word. These units are referred to as hashtags:

I don’t even like hashtags, but I guess I’ll use them just to make a point. #hashtags #twitterstyle #uglytweets

Use tags when you want your tweet, regardless of content, to be locatable as part of a larger trend or standardized category of tweet. For example, some people use the #fb tag to tag tweets that should automatically be copied to Facebook, or #ff to indicate that the tweet is a list of @usernames somebody recommends you follow as part of the “Follow Friday” meme.

Retweets

When you want to share another user’s tweet with all of your followers, use the retweet feature of the web site or your Twitter client. If your client does not include a retweet feature, adopt standard “organic” retweeting notation:

RT @danielpunkass Everybody should download MarsEdit today.

It’s highly preferable to use standard retweet features where available, because they store intent about the retweet into Twitter, and allow for more advanced filtering and searching by your audience. Using the standard retweet feature also eliminates the need to edit the original tweet to make room for the “RT @username” notation.

If you copy the contents of another user’s tweet without using the retweet feature or standard RT notation, you must put that content into quotation marks, and clearly cite the original author:

“Everybody should download MarsEdit today.” — Whoo hoo, @danielpunkass is right about that.

Failure to do this leads to confusion about whether you, or the person you are citing, is the original author of the content.

Direct Messages

When you wish to communicate privately with another Twitter user who follows you, use the direct message feature of the web site or your Twitter client. If your client does not support a direct message feature, or the user in question does not follow you, there is no way to communicate privately with them via Twitter.

You should never use replies to highlight the fact that you can’t direct message a user. This is a rude implication that the other user should be following you, when it’s every user’s prerogative to manage their following list as they see fit.

If you need to get in touch with somebody privately, and you can’t find contact information for them on their personal blog, web site or by other means, request their attention tastefully with a reply tweet:

@danielpunkass I’m trying to get in touch with you privately about something. It’s important. Can you direct-message me your contact info?

Before writing such a tweet, make sure you are following the person so that their gracious attempt to contact you with a direct message will succeed.

Write For The Medium

Twitter’s 140 character limitation beguiles and infuriates its users. At its best, it forces users to come up with the most concise, purest of language expressions for their thoughts. At its worst, it leaves users “just a few characters shy” of pure genius. The advice in this section is intended to clarify how you can best embrace these constraints: work with them and not against them, and your audience will thank you.

Avoid Abbreviation

Brevity is an art, and Twitter’s 140 character limit encourages it. Don’t compress more than 140 characters worth of thought by using abbreviations, or worse, non-grammatical fragments. If u try 2 hard to fit yr thoughts, it duz not work. You just sound like a moron.

Exceptions: some shorthand notation has become so commonplace on Twitter that you should use it in favor of longer-form words. For example, never spell out “RETWEET” in your efforts to retweet another user. Also, abbreviations are acceptable inside acknowledgements, because this language is not considered part of the language of your tweet.

One Tweet Per Thought

When an expression doesn’t fit in 140 characters, don’t spread it out over multiple tweets. Instead, switch to a longer form medium such as a blog and write as extensively as you wish on the subject. Then, summarize your long-form post in a single tweet and link to the longer-form content.

Never “Tweet-longer.”

Using services such as Twitlonger achieves the goal of limiting yourself to one tweet per thought, but it does so in a sloppy way that does not inspire confidence among your audience. They want to hear your thoughts, carefully edited for consumption, not vomited out onto the table.

Identify Linked Content

A tweet should stand on its own, and should not require outside resources to be understood. This problem is exacerbated on Twitter, where the destination of a link is often masked by the use of a URL shortening service.

Never post bare URLs, or URLs with a meaningless description. It’s insulting to your audience and doesn’t fulfill the value of Twitter as a content vehicle:

This is hilarious! http://bit.ly/4Wm7cs

Instead, include a meaningful comment that makes it clear what your audience will find when they click the link, and helps them decide whether they want to or not:

It’s going to be hilarious when you click this link and find out it’s Rick Astley: http://bit.ly/4Wm7cs

Write For Your Audience

Because there are few explicit rules to what you may use Twitter for, there are a variety of interesting uses that don’t map directly to “a person’s identity.” For example, companies, products, even news sources and aggregators use Twitter as a means of publicizing information in short bursts of text.

In any case, every Twitter account publishes content that is directed towards an intended audience. This audience may include your close circle of friends, your customers, professional peers, or a combination of all these and more.

You know your audience best, so speak to them in ways that make sense. The more diverse your audience is, the harder it is to refine content to their taste. The advice in this section is intended to help you limit widely-offensive behavior in your tweets.

Write Every Tweet By Hand

Never let a service automate tweets on your behalf. Unless your audience expects the content of your tweets to be machine-made, make the effort to editorialize everything you share. Users who follow you expect to see original content, not the mechanized ramblings of location-aware services, or the spam-like news of your progress in an online game. Even the seemingly innocuous plugins that tweet about updates to your blog are transparently automated, and take away from the human aspect of your account. Write those tweets by hand, as well.

Avoid Ideological Hotspots

Unless your audience shares you political or religious views, resist the temptation to rant about your ideological beliefs. As satisfying as this can be, it alienates many of your readers and gives the impression that you lack the discipline to avoid obviously provocative topics.

Complain Constructively

Nobody cares to hear about the subtle inequities of your daily life:

Grr, I wish that newspaper boy would FREAKING learn how to get the paper onto the porch!

It may feel good to get it off your chest, but it’s boring to the rest of us. Even if we happen to commiserate with you, it’s a useless tweet. Instead, channel your frustration into valuable content:

I wrote a blog post: 10 tips for getting the newspaper boy to do his job better.

While it may be meaningless to some of your audience, at least it offers constructive content for those who are interested.

Be Yourself, Only Better

Twitter is your opportunity to show off your best attributes. Some people will defend rude or tactless behavior on Twitter by quipping, “I’m just being myself.” It’s true, but you’re also just being yourself when you’re using the toilet. Don’t share every little facet of your life, only the charming parts.

Don’t Pick Fights

If you disagree with something another user has said, offer thoughtful evidence that they may be wrong, without resorting to snide or sarcastic language. Don’t assume that the only way to attract the attention of another user is to provoke them to angry debate. This kind of personality defect is easy to detect, and if you persist in picking fights, your targets will block you, and your followers will abandon you.

Take It Outside

When Twitter replies start to resemble chat, the interchange can be joyous for the people taking part, but tedious for those followers who are forced to watch. Unless the content of a discussion is of particular interest to a wide audience, it should be taken to a private medium such as direct messages, chat, or email. This is doubly true for any discussion that has the hallmark tones of argument.

In Summary

Twitter is a powerful vehicle for sharing our thoughts with the world. Used appropriately, we maximize this power and encourage others to respect and applaud us. Used carelessly or with sinister motivations, we simply beg to be ignored.

I hope this collection of advice helps you maximize the power of your tweets. Those of you who also have strong opinions, what did I leave out? What did I get completely wrong? Let me know in the comments so I can consider revising this as a living reference for using Twitter correctly.

Be gracious. Be thoughtful of other peoples’ interests. Don’t be a whiner. Be generous. Be inclusive. Pay it forward… you get the picture.

Have you ever noticed this phenomenon of the internet? As the ultimate reference archive, it reveals the most arcane and lesser-known facts of science, art, and trivia. It teaches us about the world. But as the ultimate social connector, it teaches us about people, how we do or don’t, and how we should or shouldn’t get along with each other.

I experienced this the other day when I was tweeting enthusiastically about Tweetie for the Mac and how I might be interested in taking the product over if it doesn’t fit into Twitter’s plans for the app. In the excitement, I not only violated one of the social rules of politeness by filling my followers’ Twitter screens to the brim, but I made the mistake of taking a stab at a company called Brizzly.

See, my friends Buzz and Neven built a wonderful iPhone Twitter app called Birdfeed. A few months ago, Brizzly acquired Birdfeed from my friends, and revamped the user interface a bit to match their style. I’m not a fan of these revisions, and I have stuck with the original Birdfeed app on my phone. But I used this distaste for the UI changes to fuel a less constructive tweet that I would characterize as a “low blow” against Brizzly. I have since deleted the original tweet, but it prompted a response from Brizzly’s CEO:

@phopkins He may be hella cool but does he realize that smacking Brizzly isn’t going to get him anywhere?

I immediately had one of those wake-up-call feelings where you realize that what was just mindless banter at “somebody else’s” expense was actually at the expense of somebody very particular. Yes, I reminded myself, there are actually people on the internet:

I should know this by now: there are people behind products. Ashamed of my tasteless treatment of Brizzly, and by extension, @shellen.

Some people who don’t know me very well assume that because my Twitter name, @danielpunkass, is a bit crass, that I must be a provocative and thoughtless person. They are surprised to meet me in person and find out that I’m actually pretty nice.

What my Twitter name represents to me is my willingness to be the cheeky one. To defy the standards and be a bit of a jerk when it’s called for, but only when it’s called for. Sometimes, the most unexpected, uncalled for, provocative, defiant move you can make is to be nicer than people expected you to be.

1. An increase in conversational, challenging, and defensive tweets.
2. The use of tweets to mass-distribute unoriginal ideas and propaganda.

Conversational Tweets

I wasn’t among the earliest adopters of Twitter, but I’ve been a member long enough to remember the days when you were more or less likely to know everybody you followed, and vice-versa. In this environment, Twitter’s concept of a “reply tweet” was ideal, facilitating a mix of public statements and conversation among friends.

As the Twitter ranks grew, it became more common to stumble upon people we don’t know, but whose work we admire, or whose thoughts are original and worth reading. I follow a number of people whose reputation is well known to me, and they have no idea who I am. This is fine, because I am getting something of value from their tweets, while my quiet observation is generally of no bother to them.

But Twitter’s egalitarian implementation of reply tweets allows responses to tweets even from somebody you don’t follow. This has many positive effects, because a genuinely helpful or insightful person can respond intelligently to a tweet, and have a fair amount of confidence that the original author will receive their feedback. In short, Twitter replies enable the masses come to your aid, sing your praises, or perhaps less conveniently, to call you on your bullshit.

Calling bullshit can be a useful service, but on the internet it tends to become a pathological blood sport. Some members of internet society become so invigorated by the opportunity to prove somebody wrong, that they’ll stop at nothing to quench their thirst for victory. They stretch facts, bend logic, and insinuate false intentions for the chance at glory. The chance to prove you wrong on Twitter.

So here we have a system on which millions of users stake their personal reputation, and where some significant percentage of users makes a pathological game of trying to assassinate those reputations. The more followers you have, the greater the number of idea assassins you have at your quite unfortunate beck and call. When even the most innocuous of statements invites pointless scrutiny, the original author is bound to get defensive. This leads to an unfortunate and noisy interchange that looks something like this:

• MacLover: Man, these new MacBooks looks awesome, but I don’t think I can buy one unless they put Firewire ports back on them.
• Apple4Ever: @MacLover If you hate Macs, you should just buy a PC. There’s no point in complaining about it. Just buy a PC if that’s what you want.
• MacLover: @Apple4Ever What are you talking about? My freaking name is MacLover. Of course I love Macs. I was just making an observation about the new
• MacLover: @Apple4Ever MacBooks, they’re sooo close to being perfect. I wish they would make a MacBook that is as fine-tuned as the old PowerBook 12″.
• Apple4Ever: So buy a PowerBook 12″.
• * MacLover Head Asplode *

This conversation is agonizing enough for the people involved, but the poor followers of MacLover and Apple4Ever had to follow along, utterly disinterested (unless they turned on “Only show me @replies to people I follow,” which can be a good idea). In this scenario, Apple4Ever is assassinating MacLover’s ideas, scraping the bottom of the barrel for any controversy that could possibly lure MacLover into a personal dialogue.

People in MacLover’s position would do well to ignore such bait, but it’s not always clear cut. The 140 character limit in Twitter makes it difficult to completely express a thought without ambiguity. Conversational moods such as sarcasm and irony are hard to convey, and the audience is filled with people who are chronically deaf to such tones.

So Twitter is filled with people who care that their thoughts be expressed with accuracy and meaning. And it’s also filled with people who, because of boredom or lack of attention, are hell-bent on causing rifts that invite confrontational interchange. This is a recipe for lots of misunderstandings and escalating hostility. It sucks, man.

To improve the quality of conversational tweets, I propose a little more consideration on both sides of such conversations:

1. To the would-be idea assassin: take a step back and examine the tweet you’re responding to. Does it actually say what you’re alleging it says? Are you making a leap of logic to start an argument, just because you’re in the mood for a debate?
2. To the would-be defensive tweeter: breathe. The person egging you on is one drop in a puddle next to a lake abutting an ocean. Their provocative tweet is only visible to you and some subset of their followers. Chances are, most people will never see it.

I’d like to think I’m never the idea assassin myself, but I am sure we all have the tendency sometimes. As for the defensive tweeting, I’m positive that I do it to a fault. So I’ll be trying especially hard to take my own advice #2 above.

Tweet Propaganda

Twitter connects a hell of a lot of people. The idea that a simple viral tweet message could prompt others to act in a manner that itself perpetuated further tweets, is irresistible to commercial marketers and internet stuntmen. The simplest form of viral propaganda on Twitter is the simple word-of-mouth repetition of ideas in an author’s own voice. I wrote about Word Of Tweet Marketing just over a year ago, after being impressed by the growing impact Twitter was having on my own company’s sales and reputation.

As people recognize the power of word-of-mouth dissipation, it becomes tempting to spread every good idea that comes along. Every funny joke. Every classic YouTube video. Every friend worth following. Since people are lazy, and rephrasing an idea in one’s own voice takes time, the phenomenon of the “retweet” emerged. People annotate a tweet with “RT @whoever”, implying that the contents are being more or less repeated verbatim. Great for the spread of ideas, terrible for the individual personality of a Twitter account.

But even a retweet involves some personal involvement by the account owner. More and more, we’re seeing examples of tweet propaganda where the contents of the tweet are entirely machine made. A classic example occurred a few weeks ago, when a steady flow of “Don’t click this URL” messages began pouring into peoples’ tweets.

The gist of this prank was that clicking the URL took you to a page where, if you clicked another URL after being warned not to, it would submit a tweet to Twitter under your logged in account name. A classic example of the power of reverse psychology.

There was no financial gain for the perpetrators of this idea virus. Just the satisfaction of Twitter being virtually painted, for a few hours, with identical tweets from thousands of different accounts. People who fell for the trick were embarrassed and apologetic, recognizing that the tweet was not only of no value to their followers, but also posed the risk of snaring them into the same gag.

In other cases, the propaganda is voluntarily added to a person’s twitter stream. Some vanity services, for example, will do an analysis of your twitter account and tweet the results with your permission. Often, the permission is thinly veiled or questionable, and users end up apologizing that they “didn’t realize it was going to tweet that.”

Tweet propaganda is still young, and people are still grappling with where to draw the line. By engaging in a viral process of any kind on Twitter, you’re trading your originality to be part of a larger scheme. Depending on the terms of the scheme, it could be beneficial to you and your followers, or it could be annoying and embarrassing.

Just a few days ago, a controversial form of tweet propaganda came by way of the MacHeist promotion. Their so-called TweetBlast rewards buyers of their bargain software bundle with extra software if they agree to let their Twitter account be used to promote the bundle. If you follow more than a few Mac users, you’ve no doubt seen the tweets by now:

One of the nice things people like to do is share information about great deals. This makes viral marketing a natural avenue for sales and bargain discounts. But there’s a distinction between a person, writing in their own voice to endorse a sale, and a mechanized robot puking thousands of tweets into the system on behalf of users looking for a freebie.

Michael Lopp recently wrote about The Art Of The Tweet, and touched upon something that I think is important and appropriate for this discussion. In a section titled “Add a Bit of Yourself”, he discourages the excessive use of re-tweeting, and opens with a bold rationale for this discipline: Twitter is you.

More Of You, Less Of Them

Ultimately, the quality of tweets is closely related to how much of you there is in them. When you forfeit your individuality to a commercial promotion, or to the vain attempt to either defend your own honor or assassinate somebody else’s, you compromise your own tweet quality.

Whenever anybody complains about some aspect of Twitter, a fair number of people like to respond reflexively: “If you don’t like something, don’t follow them.” This advice is fine, but apply it to the other fine things in life, and you quickly find that it leads to stasis, a situation where the state of the art does not advance for lack of iteration and refinement. If nobody reviews and offers opinions on books, movies, fine arts, poetry, etc., then they are all liable to degrade in quality over time.

My intentions in being critical of Twitter and the state of declining tweet quality is not to bask in my own whining or seek consolation or apology. I honestly think that by rethinking the situation, we’ll decide what kinds of tweets are of best service to us all.

Certainly, different subsets of Twitter will have differing standards. There is room enough in Twitter for all attitudes and priorites, but I’ll be filling my follow list with the people who put the “you” into Twitter.

Michael Tsai, developer of SpamSieve, is the man I trust for all things spam. He says bouncing is useless, and may be dangerous. So that settles it.

Speaking of SpamSieve, I should read the manual one of these days. You install it, you train it, and then it basically just works. So it’s easy to forget about it and never bother really exploring all of its features. I recently discovered that SpamSieve logs every decision it makes along with some pretty interesting information about why it made it. So if you ever spot a misjudged spam or ham message, take a look at the log message for some interesting details about why it may have happened. (Then train it so SpamSieve learns how to remedy its error).

PS SpamSieve satellite tool for UNIX servers pretty please. If I could run SpamSieve on the server, and administer the corpus remotely from my Mac, I’d be an extremely happy camper. This would also be a killer feature for many iPhone owners.

Update: Michael is on a tear today with good SpamSieve tips. His note about spam forged from “me” may be inspired by a question I asked him a few days ago, where spam was being automatically let through from one of my many business addresses. Simply adding the address to the “Me” card in Address Book fixed the problem!