My Twitter Refollow Policy & Other Odds and Ends

Hard on the heels of @RayBeckerman‘s Twitter refollow policy, I’ve decided to pen my own. Twitter is a great tool for spreading information in short bursts but its been hampered by the large amount of marketing, self-promotion, bots, and adult-content promoters. The fact is I have a finite amount of time per day and any extra time spent in one area means making a sacrifice somewhere else. As it is, I’m slow to respond to most people (my apologies) and have resorted to scheduling my tweets for the day either the night before or in the morning. Anyway, here are my rules (apologies to Ray for stealing most of them) on how to not be refollowed:

  1. Your Twitter account is primarily about selling products (teeth whitening, car insurance, real estate, SEO, etc.), promoting yourself, promoting your business, promoting your products, or promoting your religion (with the expectation that I become a convert).
  2. Your Twitter account is primarily used for company PR that manned by an employee or an automated bot. I don’t have a problem if you’re providing another means for customers to provide feedback or to help use your business services but if you’re advertising then I’m not interested. If you SPAM me (adult-content promoters especially) then I’ll report you to @SPAM so you’re account is terminated.
  3. You want to be my savior, life coach, or show me the path to spiritual redemption.
  4. A majority of your tweets come from a client called “API” (meaning you’re a bot), you steal other people’s tweets in an attempt to make your account look legitimate, or you are trying to make money by allowing business to advertise to your followers. We call this SPAM.
  5. You follow my account with multiple fake accounts with the same basic naming rules (i.e. firstname_lastnameXXX where XXX is a set of numbers) in the hopes of amassing a large following. I do not auto-refollow.
  6. You don’t have a real Twitter picture of your face, you don’t link to a blog or a homepage that you run or have contributed to, or your description is generic. If I can’t identify that you are a real person then chances are I won’t be following you.
  7. I’m not interested in adult-content. If your picture is not something I’d feel comfortable showing to my 5 year old cousin then I won’t follow you. If a majority of links on your page are to an adult site then again I won’t be following you.
  8. Your account has tons and tons of #followfriday (#ff) tweets with nothing more than a list of people’s @ nicknames. I’m not interested in sorting through such tweets. Giving your readers a recommendation for a person is just as important as to why you’ve suggested them. This is why #followfriday was created. Also, please don’t retweet another person’s #ff tweet. It’s tacky.
  9. You tweet frequently about how to make money, get more followers, or achieve as much success as you. I’m South Asian so (like most South Asians) my parents will serve in that role in some way for a long time whether I ask for it or not. Love you mom and dad!
  10. Your account has only a couple of tweets but you’re following several hundred (or thousand) people and are slowly collecting followers (aka disproportionate follow/followers ratio). Chances are you’re a bot or a company planning on spamming people. (Thanks to @plasticmadness for this rule. She’s someone I follow on Twitter.)
  11. You follow a hit-and-run policy where you follow a ton of people, collect followers, and then unfollow everyone following at some later point to make yourself look like a popular celeb with a very high follow/followers ratio.

Read more

Popularity: 1% [?]

August 26, 2009 | Filed Under General | 4 Comments 

Designing a Proper Home Media System

Over the last couple of days I’ve had a lot of time to think about the design goals for a home media system. I firmly believe we possess all the technological bits and pieces to make this system a reality but I have yet to find anyone having published an article describing a real-world implementation.

The design goals are:

  1. I want to be able to view live and recorded HD cable (including premium channels) via a CableCard box on every TV in the house. I’d also like to be able to switch to satellite or OTA HDTV if I choose in the future.
  2. I want to be able to set up recording timers from any TV, computer, or device in the house. I’d also like to be able to do this remotely via the internet or telephone.
  3. I want to be able to share recorded programs between TVs. For example, if I record CNBC’s “Mad Money” from my office then I’d like to be able to watch the recording on another TV upstairs in the evening. I’d also be able to record a movie off HBO-HD in my family room and be able to watch the recording later in my home theater.
  4. I don’t want stacks of equipment next to every TV. Instead I want a client/server architecture (or more appropriately extender/media-center/storage-server architecture) and put it as much as possible in an equipment room.
  5. I’d like access to my entire library of CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray titles instaneously on any device in the house without loss of quality. If displayed on a smartphone then I’m happy to have it transcoded to a lower bitrate.
  6. I’d like to be able to view pictures, movies (regardless of codec), music (regardless of codec), and other content stored on a storage server on any display in the house. Adding content should be easy.
  7. I’d like to be able to pause a show/movie/music (either live, recorded, or stored media, internet TV, and HD/XM/internet/regular radio) on any playback device in the home and pick up from where I left off on another playback device.
  8. I’d like to be able to send recorded shows to my smartphone, portable music/video player, or laptop for viewing at another time. I’d to the player to know how far I was into the show just like a car CD player begins playing a song from where it left off when I turn off the ignition. When I return the device to the home network it should sync playback info so I can pick-up for where I left off again.
  9. I’d like to be able to view all of the content (live TV, recorded TV, movies, music, media files, internet TV, and HD/XM/internet/regular radio) anywhere I have an internet connection.
  10. I’d like to be able to burn and/or archive the shows onto another storage media as I determine.
  11. I’d like to be able to easily mirror the video content on either a subset or all of the displays in the house.
  12. I’d like to be able to easily mirror the audio content on either a subset or all of the multi-room speakers and audio systems in the house.
  13. I’d like to able to control this system via a home automation system (Crestron) and remotely when I’m not on the premises.
  14. I’d like to be able to selectively display caller-ID, weather, smarthome statistics, security camera feeds (triggered by a doorbell for example), and any other info on a display-by-display basis based on any triggering criteria desired. I’d also like these triggers to be able to lower the volume or perform other actions.
  15. I’d like the less technically inclined people to be able to run the system without supervision or fear of ruining the system itself.

I think this would satisfy my requirements but I’m sure there are things missing. Is there anything else you’d add or remove from this list? Let me know in the comments below.

Popularity: 1% [?]

August 5, 2009 | Filed Under General, Tech/Gadgets | 2 Comments 

Hotmail POP3 Access

Microsoft’s Hotmail webmail service has finally enabled worldwide POP access so people can use the Outlook, Thunderbird, and iPhones of the world to grab their email. While this move is a little late it is still welcome. At the moment many people in my immediate tech circle use their Hotmail address because of Microsoft’s tight integration with other services like MSN (Windows Live) Messenger and XBox Live. Microsoft needs to allow IMAP access in the near future and shore up its spam filtering if it hopes to regain many of the people they’ve lost to other email services. Here are the settings for Hotmail POP access:

POP Server: pop3.live.com
POP Port: 995
POP SSL Required? Yes
User Name: Windows Live ID
Password: Windows Live ID Password
SMTP Server: smtp.live.com
SMTP Port: 25
Authentication Required? Yes
TLS/SSL Required? Yes

Maybe Yahoo will follow suit now so I can stop using FreePOPS.

Popularity: 1% [?]

March 14, 2009 | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

Next Page →