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It’s no secret that Google will auto complete a result for each individual letter of the alphabet. This kind of suggests that whatever the return is might be the most important thing online to start with that letter. For instance if you type “s” you get “sean bonner” right away. I’m just kidding, you get “sears” - but you get the idea. Single letters have been gaining in popularity on twitter too, with many folks scrambling to get those highly desirable one letter usernames - there’s only 26 of them after all. Plus, in a format where you are limited to 140 characters including a username, a single letter name could have it’s advantages. So who are the lucky folks that make up the alphabet on twitter? It’s gotta be the most elite of the elite, right? I thought I’d check that, and the results were kind of surprising - full alphabet after the jump. [Read more]

Because I’ve been flying them for years and have platinum status I end up on a lot of American Airlines flights. I check in online and print my own boarding passes from their site to save myself the hassle of lines at the airport. As you might recall many airlines implemented ‘print at home’ passes in the last few years to help cut costs on their end and it’s a good idea. Last weekend I printed a pass and got this:

Click through to the photo for additional notes and a larger version. When I clicked print boarding pass I didn’t just get my boarding pass as you can see. I also got a short list of suggestions of things to do in the city I was flying to and a bunch of ads. A bunch of full color ads. A bunch of full color ads that mostly indicate I should click them. Yes, this is annoying and stupid.

Here’s why:

• I have pay to print the ads. If they were in black and white that would be one thing, but they are full color and color ink isn’t cheap. This is totally inconsiderate that AA is making money by selling an ad that I then have to pay to produce.
• The ads are useless to the advertiser. As you can see in the larger version of the pic, most of the ads are for something online - requiring you to click them to gain any benefit to the advertiser. Basically they bought and ad that can’t be used in it’s intended format. Maybe you could argue some name recognition, but is annoyance what they want to be associated with?
• The ads are useless to me. Since I can’t click an ad on a printed page it’s a 100% waste for me. If the ad was a coupon I could take somewhere for a discount that might provide some value. As it stands, that isn’t the case.
• Travel guide also fails. Since AA doesn’t know anything about me, the suggestions as to what I might enjoy doing in the city are worthless. If they’d partnered with some other site that knew what kind of things I’m into that might be cool. Again, since they don’t the suggestions are things like “Golden Gate Bridge” or names of people who I suspect might be performing or talking or something but I have no context for who they are. Of course, many of these suggestions are links, which again are useless once printed.

The bullshit of all this is that this company Sojern, that handles the ads is scamming everyone. They’ve convinced the airlines that this is useful their customers - it isn’t. They’ve convinced the advertisers that this will bring them some business - it won’t. And they’ve offloaded the cost to people who gain nothing from the whole situation.

This is so disappointing because again it’s a sign of major companies completely missing it. This had potential to be cool. Partnering with a site that knows something more about me could make the suggestions somewhat useful, or a quick glance at their previous records to see if I’ve been to that city before might help tailor it a bit more. If I’m flying to a city that I’m in 20 times a year, the most obvious tourist suggestions might not be fitting for me. The ads could be coupons. Give me a $1 off a coffee at the Starbucks at the airport, or 10% off at one of the airport shops. That would be useful and have value to me. Ads that I can’t click from a printed piece of paper don’t. If they have to have something online with links, promote it as that - after I print my pass give me an option to check out a page with this info full of links and ads. Then I can at least use them.

Very early on in my Twitter usage I turned off all notices from the site. The problem was I that I was getting duplicate messages on several devices and most of the info wasn’t useful for me. This keeps the site in a mode where I need to actively check it to see what is new, if I’ve gotten messages or anything. I like that because it’s not interrupting me. Another result is I don’t really know who is following me on any given day. This if fine too, I don’t know who is reading my blog or looking at my flickr stream, no need for me to know who is reading my tweets. The other day I changed that after reading another approach and it’s been wild.

I don’t pay much attention to how many people are following me usually, I know there’s a lot and that’s about it. Turning on these notices has made it something I’m much more aware of. I did a little tracking and it looks like I have a net gain of about 5 followers a day. I’d assumed that was because 3-4 new people followed me each day, but actually there’s a ton more flux than that. Judging by the notices I started getting from Twitter it looks like between 10-15 new people follow me each day, which means 5-10 people are dropping me each day too. I don’t know if I should be flattered or offended, so I’m just sticking with neither.

That’s interesting, but even more so is the simple act of turning on these notices made me start thinking about something I don’t care about at all and something that really makes no difference. It’s mildly interesting from an informational standpoint, but on a bigger picture it’s kinda cruft. For me at least. I think I’ll be turning them back off shortly, but it was an interesting experiment for sure.

Just logged into facebook and was greeted with approx 150 friend requests which was just too much to deal with so I blanket ignored all of them. If I do I actually know you and you sent a request recently please resend it and I’ll try to be more on top of it. I’m kinda weird about it though and for the most part I try to only be “friends” with people I’m actually friends with, and generally won’t approve someone I’ve never met or talked to just because we have X number of mutual friends. That said, if we are working on similar stuff or interests, just include a note with the request that that will help a lot. Also, just a heads up in efforts to get more use out of the site I will probably be trimming down folks who I don’t know that well who flood me with invites to events (especially ones in cities I’m not in) or groups. Please don’t take this personally, it’s really just trying to get a better grasp on the signal to noise.

I’m a little obsessed with twitter. So is Tara. You might have noticed. We use it all the time but we also look at how other people are using it. It’s really interesting to start seeing the trends develop. One thing that we noticed was that people were using twitter a lot to point out things they think are cool and are lusting after, especially things they have just stumbled across. Things they want. This got us thinking.

When someone you are friends with points out something they think is cool there’s a good chance you’ll dig it too. But this stuff existed before your friends found it, so maybe there’s a way to find this stuff earlier. We started noticing people were posting links to this stuff and decided to try to isolate those tweets. We messed around with the twitter API and after a week or two we’re psyched to launch tweetwants!

It’s pretty simple and straightforward for the most part. If you post on twitter and say that you want something, with a URL immediately following the word “want” it’ll get pulled for tweetwants. It’s not 100% perfect, but it works pretty well. We’ve also set up @tweetwants on twitter where we’ll be posting news, as well as trends we notice. We’re doing it by hand at the moment so no promises, but so far it’s been exciting to see something new pop up and then people from all over catch on and repost it. We even have a “retweet” option on the site so if you see something you also want, you can tweet it with one click.

We got that together and assumed when it launched it would be a massive hit. Legendary even. And everyone knows the best way to capitalize on a success is with a follow up while it’s still fresh on people’s minds. So obviously the best time would be at the same time. So we tweeked the images and code and birthed the step sister site - tweetfails. This site, as you might have guessed, tracks things people think are fails. Fails actually show up more often than wants, but it’s equally interesting and amusing. We think so anyway, and hope you will to. If nothing else both sites were super fun to build.

We’ve got a few other ideas kicking around, but in the meantime I’d love to hear what you think of these.