Archives for July 23, 2009

Trying to rank “the best” Twitter posts… sorry, but I have to jump on this one as to me it seems simply crazy! I’m into contests and marketing etc… (heck, who doesn’t dig free stuff?)  but the idea of trying to decide which tweet out of thousands is the best is a little crazy in my mind. I guess I’ll give APB some credit for trying to grab some attention from the popular #ESRIUC twitter stream but I’d have to say the efforts could be in vain… kudos on them for offering up some nice prizes to people who tweeted from the conference though!

I’m a steadfast believer that there really isn’t any right or wrong way to tweet (although there are acceptable practices evolving) and it often irks me when I hear or see people writing about how to properly tweet or how to do it right… come on, its a Tweet.. you have a140 characters to say what’s on your mind. If I happen to get a tweet from a conference organizer reminding me that a session is starting in 10 minutes and I forgot about it well, that’s a great tweet. If I’m walking the Gaslamp and get a tweet telling me about a great party at Dick’s with free beer and free grub, hell, that’s a great tweet; if I’m a mobile GIS geek and I hear about ArcPad 8 features that include real-time connect to the GeoDatabase, hell, that’s a great Tweet.

The publication (I’m sorry but I’m not permitted to actually say the name here) and their  blog did indeed encourage people to tweet for cash, however, I’d have to say that they may have missed out on a few good Tweets for some prizes! Kudos to everyone on the #ESRIUC hashtag that had something interesting (and even not interesting) to say and no dis-respect meant to any of the contest winners at all (I actually follow them!) As for ranking tweets, realistically, I’d have to think the only way you could qualify a tweet would be to perhaps look at the amount of Re-Tweets, any other way of judging them will likely result in some TwitterFail backlash! Another lesson learned I guess.