webrampage

It feels like I’m just a bit late to be blogging about Tumblr and its future. Nevertheless, Tumblr has dipped a its toes into the mainstream media, but still stands at a very shaky position. It could either rise to glory or just fade away like most fads.

Now if I remember clearly, back in 2008 a few Twitter clones came out. One was Rejaw (its closed now) which had Tumblr-like abilities to post audio, video and images via posts which allowed 1000 characters instead of Twitter’s 140 character limit. Another competitor was Plurk. Plurk is still in the game, but unfortunately they have lost despite having a such unique features like threaded conversations and horizontally scrolling timelines.

As you can see, social networking sites come and go. Some of them do have very nifty features, but it still becomes a challenge to stay in business. Rejaw was a lot like Tumblr. I’m not sure if I should say that Tumblr has taken some of its concept from Rejaw; just instead of micro-updates, its micro-blogging. But, lets not worry too much about that.

The big question remains: Is Tumblr just another fad? Will be able to stay strong like Twitter and Facebook? Sure they have over a billion pageviews per month. But, a lot of the previous sites that mentioned had similar or almost similar traffic results at one point or another. But, now they are nowhere to be found in the mainstream. Another great example would be Pownce which was a mix of Twitter, chat and file sharing.

My gut feelings tell me Tumblr will be a hit with a certain part of the demography: hipster teens, young adults and marketers who are looking forward to stealing some traffic. And eventually the number of active users might start to slowly fall as more and more marketers start to play with it for their own selfish reasons.

Enough about what I think. What do YOU think? Fad or not?

I’m sorry but there are simply some stuff that tick me off and make me not wanna follow you on Twitter… ever. I probably wouldn’t care how entertaining and useful your tweets are. I wouldn’t care if you’ve got more followers than Justin Bieber. I wouldn’t even care if you tweet like your life depends on it.

1. Your username; not cool.

You seriously want me to follow you when your username is @iFl00dtimelines0 or @LordBieber? That’s a good indicator of what’s going to happen to my precious timeline after I start following you. No, thank you.

Your username tells a lot about you and your interests on Twitter. The best would be if you chose your real name as your username. That just tells me that you’re a real genuine person (not a robot) that I can interact with.

Now I know that I use @momosuxx (which is partly inspired by @keshasuxx and GTA: Vice City), but it makes sense to me. Momo is my real nickname (my friends call me that) and “suxx” is just me being humble about my awesomeness. And I am using my full name and real picture on my profile. Brownie points.

2. You hardly interact

Oh boy. I’m not on Twitter to watch someone talk to the wall and just ignore the rest of humanity. Like c’mon, I tweeted you something (a few times) and you never replied back? Rude. Alright I’ll unfollow and let you continue with whatever you were doing.

I like to find interesting people and building little networks with them. I’m not here to just tweet about my pet turtle. And with a user like that, its just not gonna work (no matter how good his/her tweets are).

3. All you do is post links

Whoa okay. Spam much? I don’t care how helpful your links are; all you do is tweet links 24/7. What are you a robot? I’m out. I like to keep my timeline neat. A few links (which are worth sharing) here and there are fine. Actually I would even thank you by retweeting it if I found it entertaining or useful.

4. You don’t follow anyone back

Are you a celebrity? Oh right you were on that TV show. And I don’t think you follow anyone back (or even read your timeline). So, I’ll be stuck here reading your lousy tweets all day. Sorry I gotta say bye, but great acting though.

Oh and if you’re not a celeb, and you’re putting up an act like this then I hate you. No, I will never follow you. And your tweets… disaster. No room for a second thought. Sure call me hater.

5. TMI – Too much information

Did you just seriously tweet “BRB”? Why in the world would I wanna know that?

I don’t need you to spam my timeline with every single detail of your life. When Twitter says ,”What’s happening?”  they don’t literally mean it. You don’t need to attempt to create a reality show via tweets. We have MTV for that.

Oh and BTW, Twitter is not a chat. Go on messenger, please.

I like to stay on top of things. I wanna know everything I could possibly know about my followers, my tweets, my profile and how its affecting my Twitter account in general. There’s a lot of sites and tools you could use to stay updated, but these are the few that I use on a daily basis.

1. Twitalyzer

Twitalyzer tells you everything that you possibly need to know about your account. I don’t even know where to start. These are seriously detailed analytics for social media experts.

Twitalyzer connects with your account (don’t worry, it’s safe) and then starts analyzing how you and your followers are engaging. It gives you a 30 day average of these following stats: Impact, Engagement, Influence, Clout, Generosity, Velocity, Signal, Klout Score, Retweeted, Retweeting, Retweets, Retweet Ratio, Referenced, Referencing, References, Reference Ratio, Followers, Following, Lists and Updates.

And there’s just way more. It tells you a bit about your tweeting personality, makes recommendations to you, allows you to create goals for yourself, and lets you explore your network with a visual map. Definitely give this tool a shot.

2. ReFollow

I like to keep my timeline as clean and as helpful as possible. That means I’m always following and unfollowing. It sometimes just gets very difficult to keep track of. But, that’s where Refollow comes in. They call it the “Twitter relationship manager.”

I hate following inactive accounts, accounts without a profile picture and accounts that mass follow back. With the help of Refollow I can point out those accounts and easily unfollow them with a few clicks. And what I love most about this tool is the bulk follow or unfollow capability. (Unfollow all of them ungrateful people.)

3. Twitter Counter

Twitter Counter isn’t something that is essential for your Twitter analytics, but its sort of a fun tool to play with. It graphs out your number of followers (or following or tweets or even all) over a period of one week, one month or 3 months. It also predicts the number of followers you would have in X number of days, and sometimes the predictions do come true. Weird.

4. TweetEffect

Ever wondered what kinda tweets are working with your followers? Well TweetEffect will pass that info along to you. It lists all your recent tweets and shows which ones caused you to gain or lose followers.

And before you start using TweetEffect, please do keep in mind that it is still in its beta stages and I am not quite sure how effective this tool is.

5. Twit Cleaner

There’s the user who’s constantly trying to sell something, the user who’s always doing shoutouts, the user who’s tweeting nothing but links, the user who hasn’t posted in ages and the user who hardly interacts. I wanna unfollow all of them! Thank you, Twit Cleaner.

Did I forget one?

Did I forget to mention a site that you love with all your heart? Well please do feel free to share it with us by dropping the link off in the comments section and telling us a little about it.