In its weekly email to subscribers, Social Media Today has launched a campaign in celebration of the Twitter retweet, pointing to a May 27 post by Jill Kurtz, SMT announces it has:

“taken … (its) comment and voting buttons to the next level of approval rating–the Retweet.  Retweeting a post is the ultimate comment.  It says not only that you liked but that you want to share it with others. (In a post on the topic, Jill Kurtz)… did great job crunching the numbers to give everybody a better understanding on how retweeting can help bloggers get visitors, marketers get more viral and personal brand builders add equity to their image.”

Retweeting is part of the latest trend in social media, social competition, which we will have more on in the coming weeks.  We welcome all community members to offers some posts on this emerging theme.  Meanwhile, we urge you to hit your retweet buttons early and hit them often.”

There is so much that I disagree with here that I don’t know where to start. The Twitter retweet is anathema. The idea behind the retweet is spot on, but the execution is awful. Until Twitter implements a structured retweet function, which produces an uneditable tweet, the retweet is not only a mess of @’s, RTs and vias, it is subject to abuse.

I documented for example on April 30 how Twitter users, through a retweet, accidentally fabricated a tweet from @GMVolt to make it appear that the GM spokesperson had attacked competitor Tesla: “RT @GMVolt GM has a lot of problems, but it HAS sold more EV’s and hybrids than the carnival barker who runs Tesla.” @GMVolt never tweeted this, and the users involved quickly owned up to the error, which was not malicious.

Earlier this month, Mari Smith wrote on her blog about “Retweet Hijacking” after the owner of a web site selling flowers changed a link in one of Mari’s tweets to deceive users into thinking Mari had endorsed his site, thereby diverting traffic to it.

Using the retweet for “social competition” is just one more indicator that people have forgotten the importance of attracting site visitors with originality, considered thought, valuable information and analysis, and are instead gaming the system to generate visits to their blogs and websites. It’s insane how much time is spent asking for Diggs, Stumbles, Likes and retweets.

Kurtz offers a list 12 reasons why requests for retweets fail, borrowed from Rodney Rumford’s excellent Twitter as a Business Tool. You shouldn’t ask for retweets. It’s implied that you are tweeting something of value. If you are, it will get retweeted. Late in the list, Rumford offers what I think are some of the most important ways to get retweeted:

“Give people lots of great content that is not self-serving…Creating relationships with the people that you interact with is critical. The content needs to be interesting to your target market in order for it to spread.”

The final issue with SMT’s campaign is the “Retweet” button the site has added to every article. When a person visits a site other than Twitter, reads an article and decides to share it on Twitter, it’s a tweet, not a retweet. The addition of the “RT” and Twitter user name in this context is totally misleading. It creates the impression that the person saw the link on Twitter and decided to pass it on. This may or may not have happened. Please don’t misunderstand. This is a very useful feature, but I think the implementation is a little off.

There are many advocates of the retweet as an important measure of a person’s influence on Twitter, but as long as retweets have no integrity, and people are begging for retweets to juice their numbers, the retweet is of questionable worth.

Tags: RT, SMT, Social Media Today, retweet, Rodney Rumford, Jill Kurtz, Mari Smith, hijacking, Twitter

I was both amused and slightly nauseated by a CNN report yesterday that Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore are “threatening” to close their Twitter accounts, to which I can only respond, “Promises, promises!”

I’m sure many fans are pleading with the highly engaged and highly engaging Kutcher to reconsider, given the potential loss to the world of this truly unique voice. Nah, I’m kidding, made ya look. He’s one of the most boring and banal people on Twitter. I’d follow a multi-level marketer or someone selling colon cleanser or poke my eyes out with hot needles before reading Kutcher’s timeline. In fact, I follow people meeting both those descriptions, but not Kutcher.

Seriously, Ashton, go away. Cancel your Twitter account. I’m not sure what kind of workload your one million-plus followers places on Twitter’s servers, but please, free up some processing power and space in Twitter’s database because your participation is entirely without substance or value to the community.

Tags: aplusk, Ashton Kutcher, Twitter, threatens, account, CNN

The iPhone has emerged as the prototypical Mobile Web 3.0 platform, and, along with the Google Android, is driving developers to redefine end user mobile computing.

Fueled by rumors of new capabilities soon to be available with the iPhone, developers are becoming particularly excited about applications in the emerging field of Augmented Reality. Augmented Reality, as Google Android Developer Enkin explains it, “bridges the gap between reality and classic map-like representations, (and) combines GPS, orientation sensors, 3D graphics, live video, several web services, and a novel user interface into an intuitive and light navigation system for mobile devices.” Simply put, Augmented Reality combines realtime information, like video input to an iPhone or Android, and adds to it computer-generated information for relevance, context, user guidance, etc.

As long as you have a properly equipped iPhone or Android, you can find your way out

The applications for Augmented Reality are truly limitless. Augmented Reality would take applications that were once based on “coarse” GPS data (maybe as precise as a particular street address), and allow the delivery of services that better understand the location and orientation of the mobile device, and supplement realtime data, to allow a user to do incredibly precise things. An Augmented Reality application could visually guide a tourist to the nearest train station; help a shopper walk to a specific item in a store; or superimpose property lines on a live video image.

This is not sci-fi. Enkin and others have demonstrated persuasive AR proofs-of-concept. As Chris Grayson points out on his GigantiCo blog, “Every piece of this technology already exists in the wild. This is not a great technological leap. This is merely smart convergence.” (Chris’s post is where I first learned about Augmented Reality, and is well worth a read.)

As with all technological developments, some people are responding with skepticism. As an inventor, I know a little bit about combining existing technologies to create new devices and applications that really challenge our thinking. Augmented Reality seems to me a very interesting development, and one that has the potential to change our world.

Tags: iPhone, Google Android, Augmented Reality, Enkin, Mobile Web 3.0, convergence

Twitter, with its 140-character update window and lack of support for images, videos and files, has spawned an “ecosystem” of supporting sites and services. Highly popular among these are services like bit.ly and cli.gs that make lengthy URLs shorter.

URL shorteners are very handy for getting character counts down to fit into the small space of a Twitter update, IM, etc. They’re also nice for creating URLs that don’t “break” when emailed. (Large URLs often become corrupted when split from one line to another in email.)

Let’s say you’re heading off to school and you want to ask mom and dad for an HP Pavilion dv4t Special Edition netbook. Just copy the URL from HPShopping.com into an email and send it to the folks:

http://www.shopping.hp.com/webapp/shopping/computer_series.do?storeName=computer_store&category=notebooks&series_name=dv4tse_series&a1=Category&v1=Ultra-Portable

Problem is, it’s 165 characters. It will be unreadable in many email clients. And it’s too long to tweet or DM on Twitter. The solution is to shorten it. There are dozens of URL shortening services available. Some merely make a shorter URL. Others, like bit.ly or cli.gs, add metrics (information on how often the URL has been clicked and other data), tools for managing URLs, and “vanity” URLs which can end in short English-language words instead of seemingly random strings like gh56he6.

As intriguing as it might seem, makemyurlshorter.com probably does not make your URL shorter. The shortest URLs I know of are generated by four-letter domain URL shorteners. I use is.gd, which creates 17-character URLs, if brevity is the primary goal. Otherwise, I use cli.gs. Bit.ly is the currently the most popular.

A not-so-short list of shorteners

If you’re shopping for a URL shortener, there is a list of (ironically) 196 of them (so far) on the Go2.me blog

Security risks of URL shorteners

There are many risks associated with URL shorteners that affect both business and personal users. Principal among these is that shortened URLs mask the source of the original link, so that they might point to content that is pornographic, violent, racist or other otherwise inappropriate. This is worrisome to both personal users who don’t want to view this material and especially don’t want their children to be exposed to it, and to business users who don’t want employees viewing it and don’t want their company associated with it.

This presents a challenge for businesses that choose to block inappropriate sites and content. Since shortened URLs mask the originating site, and most firewall software blocks by domain or IP address, corporate IT people are forced to either block all shortened URLs, or adopt solutions that decode URLs on the fly and test against a list of approved and banned domains. This is one more burden corporate IT departments don’t need, and a problem services like Twitter need to respond to if they are to be taken seriously as business communications tools.

Jennifer Leggio, in a post on her ZDNet blog, quotes online security expert Dragos Ruiu:

“The negative part of this ’shortification’ comes from the obscuring the visibility to the text of the URL before it gets sent to your browser — it’s a possible injection vector for direct browser URL exploits, of which there have been lots of varieties, and a way to send them to people without having the URL be inspected or visible. Or possibly just a way to send people to sketchy domains with worse hosted documents.”

If the service you are using folds, or is unavailable due to IT outages, these shortened URLs will all be rendered useless on your blog, web site, Twitter/FriendFeed stream, etc. For this reason, most businesses are better off hosting their own shortened URLs in the form of “vanity” URLs, like http://www.hp.com/netbook, which are more secure, less prone to interruption of service, and more memorable to users. (It’s often not possible to keep URLs this simple on shopping sites that use URLs to track complex transactional data, but other, more consumer- and communications-friendly approaches are needed.)

Yet another drawback of shortened URLs is the impact on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Because shortened URLs mask the source site, analytics for that site may not factor traffic from these abbreviated URLs.

URL lengtheners

As I mentioned earlier, one solution to the problem of shortened URLs is to expand them before sending them to a browser. Services that do this, like Untiny.me have started to show up. There is an Untiny toolbar app, and Untiny’s API lets developers include this capability in other programs and environments, so it’s only a matter of time before this is built in to popular sites and services.

Responsibility of service providers

Service providers need to take an active role in preventing the use of shortened URLs to mask inappropriate content. Many sites take the attitude that they are merely tools, or a means by which people can communicate anything they’d like to, and that breaches are policed by “the community.” More often than not this approach leads to a form of anarchy, unhappy users and migration to other sites. To maintain a safe environment for users, and one in which businesses can feel comfortable, site owners need to do more. Every URL shortener should have a Terms of Service (TOS) prohibiting these questionable uses, and defining penalties (deletion of URLs, banishment) for offenders.

This morning I was complaining on Twitter about the proliferation of spam followers and bogus URLs. I clicked on one TinyURL, and was pleased to see the company (one of the earliest URL shorteners) has a TOS and is enforcing it:

The company states in its brief Terms of Use “TinyURL was created as a free service to make posting long URLs easier, and may only be used for actual URLs. Using it for spamming or illegal purposes is forbidden and any such use will result in the TinyURL being disabled and you may be reported to all ISPs involved and to the proper governmental agencies.”

So, if your business or personal use requires shortened URLs, factor the benefits and the risks of shortened URLs. And if someone emails you or tweets you a shortened link, as in all things connected with information, consider the source before clicking.

Tags: URL shorteners, URL lengtheners, URL expanders, risk, security, corporate IT, bit.ly, go2.me, cli.gs, Twitter, TinyURL

I had the pleasure of speaking with Joanne Kisling and a group of Sun people this morning about my book SocialCorp. Joanne asked me about the barriers to corporate social media adoption and how communicators can help overcome resistance from company gatekeepers. Give it a listen over on Sun.com or download the MP3!

Tags: SocialCorp, social media adoption