Twitter’s RT vs everything else

Well here is my little dime on the subject. As you all must have noticed, Twitter adopted the RT trend. This actually originally started as a need of the community to share tweets that they like without removing the attribute from the original poster, instead referring to him.

All the programs that actually supported it, what they did was pretty simple. They copy the original tweet adding the “@” reference in the beginning and maybe an RT at the very start (or “Retweet” for a couple of programs). This had it’s drawback. First of all it’s duplication of content. So if, for instance, one 160 character tweet get’s retweeted 50 times (which is a fair amount for a viral tweet) then the storage required for the same piece of information is 5 times higher. Now, you noticed that i said “piece of information” and not tweet. I did that because the tweet might vary a bit with abbreviations that the RTer might have introduced in order to make it shorter. So it’s the same info but in various formats and taking much larger space.

One more problem that a user faces is most of the times having to shrink the original tweet in order to be able to retweet. If you think of it, out of the 160 characters 2 are for the RT and then an average of 5-15 are needed for the original poster. Things are worst if you need to RT another RT… That is a problem i have faced a lot and found it inconvenient.

You can imagine how happy i was to see the feature actually implemented by Twitter. This method requires no extra characters and it takes no more space than the original tweet. It’s like a link. I only have one problem with this method. If i want to comment on a tweet i want to retweet, for instance “LOL this is so funny“, i can’t do it. I know it’s kinda hard to keep everybody happy plus implementing something like that would inherit the problems of the originally used RT but if Twitter was to think of a solution that would be great (maybe threaded tweets or something).

One last thought i’d like to share is with the vendors of the popular desktop applications. I think that they should change the retweet way to the new one instead of the original copy-paste. To be honest, i don’t know if the API supports it yet but this is one thing i’d like to see on a desktop twitter application.

Stop joining spam meaningless Facebook groups

I’ve seen this trend taking off the last year or so. Every spammer out there has included Facebook in their plans. Here is how it works:

1. I have a stupid site i want to promote or a stupid product or anything that you wouldn’t actually even pay attention to.
2. I go to Facebook and create a new group. I give it a smart, funny, witty, inviting name such as “I am always right and when i’m not i’m rightfully wrong”. How funny.
3. I spam invite all my friends to join. They find it funny enough and do join.
4. The group shows up in their “Info” box.
5. More users notice it and join. Moreover users that already join suggest to their friends to join as well.
6. The group shows up slowly in many walls as “Dumbass join the group “I’m always right and when i’m not i’m rightfully wrong”“.
7. Facebook also starts suggesting it to other users because people in their contact list are member. You must have seen them “”I’m always right and when i’m not i’m rightfully wrong” Dumbass is a fan. Become a fan.“
8. In no time this shitty thing goes viral. Thousands of users actually are members of the group in a matter of days/weeks.

Now one would ask “Why is that spam? It’s fun!”. Ok count with me:

• The group administrator, a very clever spammer if i might add, has indirect access to our timeline. This means that whatever he posts on the group’s wall, ends up in our timeline. Thus, we are actually subjected to “free ads” if i might use the term.
• Since Facebook will list this in your Info box and moreover suggest it to your friends (if you haven’t done that already) it will just keep on going viral. Which means even more free advertising.

In most cases those groups promote or will try to promote something at some point or the other. The thing is why should you join? You like a quote? Freakin post it on your wall as a quote. Don’t join the stupid group so i can be bugged as well. You need to consider two things:

1. Facebook groups were created to group people and their activities. You like a blog? Join their group. You are in a community (for instance your local basketball team)? Join the group. That’s the idea. RTFM!
2. In Facebook we are a network. That’s the original idea. Which means that if you’re my friend i get all your posts on my timeline. Don’t spam me!

And since i’m in the topic, as a side note, i want to say this. Stop freakin posting your farmville, mafia wars or any other stupid game’s achievements  on your wall. Lord! Do i really need to know that you found a stupid virtual cow in your so called farm?

That’s it. I vented. Thanks for listening and God bless

The all wrong story about comments

It’s been a seriously long time since i wrote here. But i can’t remember the last time i felt this urge, this itch to write about something. All this time that i haven’t updated my blog and i seldom comment on blogs i haven’t been all away. I’ve been reading the usual blogs i always read. Then why didn’t i comment? Because i had nothing to say!

One would ask, why do i say this? Well, i am sick of reading blog posts saying “how commenting can improve your traffic”, or “comment on do-follow blogs” and the such. You won’t believe how much annoyed i am when i read those kind of posts. Just today i read this post where someone was explaining what makes him comment or stops him from commenting on a blog. None of the reasons he mentioned was about the content and the article he was actually reading! This tipped me of. I wanted to write this a long time ago but this just made the cut.

What he basically said was that if it doesn’t have commentluv, it is a do-follow blog or it has a CAPTCHA, it doesn’t make him want to comment. And here is what i say. Commentluv, in my humble opinion, is one of the worst plugins out there. Why? Because an article on your blog has links to other articles on other blogs that are irrelevant with that content you are writing about! They call this link love. It’s all bullshit! Why? Because it would be link love if you posted in your article “blah blah blah here is an excellent example of what i am talking about [link] blah blah blah”. That is link love. On the other hand this:

SomeStupidPrick wrote:

Man this is a great article!

SomeStupidPrick’s latest blog post “How to have an irrelevant link on someone else’s blog”

This is not link love. It’s disguised spam comment.

Now, i don’t want to be unfair. I know a lot of my readers who have blogs, are commentluv enabled and i still like their blogs. But, i believe, they have been tricked into some stupid marketing useless idea. And let me put it this way. If you will comment only if i am commentluv enabled then guess what. Get the heck out! (besides i don’t have commentluv and i appreciate people leaving comments just for the pure purpose of it).

On the do-follow part. Things are pretty much the same as above. The purpose search engines rank your content in a certain way is to make it easier to be discoverable on relevant search queries. If you go ahead on a spree and start planting your link everywhere you will definitely get results but they won’t be quality results. Think as a user for crying out loud! How many times have you been searching for something and you stumble on completely irrelevant posts just because of these kind of stuff? So, once more, if you comment here after checking if this is a do-follow blog, get the heck out!

Finally, once and for all, let’s tackle the CAPTCHA thing. I want to make things easier to my readers to drop a line. On the other hand i want to make things easier for me to moderate. I hate all this wise-ass people/bots trying to plant their links on my blog. So, if this is what i have to do then i’ll do it. Besides, you fill up so many CAPTCHA’s a day for useless things and registration forms, and you are too lazy to fill an easy one here ti have your say? Get the heck out!

And what do i mean by “The all wrong story about comments”? Well, comments where named comments and not “advertise here”, because they are intended to serve as a way to give feedback or thank someone. They where not intended to boost or promote your own stuff.

I know that after a long time, writing with such hatred is not such a good idea. On the other hand, i think it perfectly explains my absence. The blogosphere has been contaminated with people trying to make money writing crappy blogs. I fear that that will drive quality blogging to a halt.

I have been disappointed on the majority of the content posted these days. So little things are informative or worth a read. Most of the stuff are junk. And don’t get me wrong here loyal readers. I love your blogs. I have been following you and “you” know who you are.

The VPS neighborhood

The past couple of days i’ve been bugged with an idea. I saw a new hosting company come around called “EcVPS”. They offer VPS plans for very low, and extremely affordable prices. I know that there has always been a gap between shared hosting, which is as low as $3/month, to the next step for a blog / site, the VPS hosting starting at $10-15/month. I know that many people decide to go on with it, and in my opinion they make a very good decision. But there are always people that are not comfortable administering their own boxes. Then they have two options, stick with shared or pay extra for managed hosting. Fortunately, nowadays, hosting is not expensive, even managed. But, still, jumping from $40 a year to, more or less, $120, is something that boggles.

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Efficient or non-efficient?

All of you out there that know me, know that i am an efficiency freak. Most of the times, when someone flashes a plugin to me, i stop and say “is that really necessary?” instead of “this looks cool!”. I know, it’s mostly annoying but you got to admit, i have a point. But, first things first. I will concentrate on WordPress, since, most of my readers are bloggers using the platform and many don’t really get why i nag all the time about performance and plugins. To give you a good taste of the complexity here is a small diagram.

This actually is a rough representation of what’s going on when a client request on your blog is in progress. Let’s take it one step at a time:

1. A client makes a request on your blog. This starts on the Apache level.
2. Apache realizes that it’s a php script that has to be executed (index.php).
3. Gives the PHP module the script as a parameter and kicks it off.
4. Then, it’s WordPress’s time. It starts loading the core.
5. On various steps of the process of rendering the requested page the plugins are loaded.
6. Just like a special plugin, the theme of the site is loaded as well. WordPress decides if it needs to load single.php for instance (when rendering a single post) or index.php (when rendering the homepage) etc.
7. Each time a plugin or a theme wants to make a query it uses the wpdb global variable. This actually channels the query through WordPress, which channels it to the PHP module, which channels it to the PHP MySQL module, which channels it to MySQL server, which runs the query and creates the result set, which is finally channeled back all the way to the plugin.

Do you see how painful it is to make a query? Now take that and multiply it by 50-60 which is the average query count on a WordPress blog (not the default installation but an established one). You can see now how your memory and CPU get clogged up when a few requests come along together.

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