Why I left, and the reason for my return

I pretty much left Twitter - and my blog - in 2013. Whereas I usually quit cold turkey, this time I lingered a bit, publishing a handful of blog posts in 2013, even one in 2014, and I'm sure that my Twitter activity followed much the same pattern; I've always said that the combination of the two is what upholds my 'Circle of Inspiration'.
Why did I leave? I became increasingly aggravated with the downsides of Twitter's going mainstream, and after 4-5 years on Twitter I also was fed up with all the 'social advocates', the 'social business revolutionaries'; evangelists in general who were little less than nobodies last week, likely fired yesterday, and today suddenly found themselves a new stage where they could proclaim whatever they wanted and thought that would sell - or at least would chime in with the hype(s) of the day

So. What has happened in the past 5 years? A lot, most of which is private stuff, involving parents, Alzheimer's disease, and a lot of less pleasant stuff that simply is in the small print that you ignore when you sign the Contract of Life. It is what it is.
My dad died November 2014, fortunately, after 1.5 years in a nursing home. The good news is that, while he had to relive the war on his way down to the very depths of Mr. Alzheimer's pits, when he came out as a blank slate he was a very pleasant blank slate. While there is immense sadness and powerlessness in watching your beloved go down the Dementia Drain, it was comforting to see that the new Dad who was reborn (or is that de-dualised?) was a friendly, kind, happy chappy. He would talk for minutes or hours, to anyone or anything (he seemed to have a fondness for the curtains in the hallway), and while he did have a few moments of rage early on in the nursing home, those turned out to just be part of the deal.
It all changed when he got pneumonia. He was visibly in pain (I won't have to explain that communication had become impossible a long time ago, and had reached the level of general sympathy and empathy only), and it was terrible. Two weeks afterwards he got a 'mini' stroke, and became half-paralysed and confined to bed. There was little to no hope of him moving back to mobility, and we were all glad when a few weeks after that he finally died

The funeral was great, as he had been a teacher for his entire working life, and many people showed up (newspapers do have purpose sometimes) to say goodbye and tell their story of him - every single one saying how he had made a great positive impact to their life, and how they never forgot about him

So. After that there was still Mom, all alone in the house, fairly advanced in the barbs of Mr Alzheimer already, and the biweekly visits became weekly, the communication with the neighbours and community care almost daily, and it wasn't until 2017 that we managed to get her removed from the house with a court order - just like Dad. The first nursing home was hell, and we moved her to The Hague in the Summer. After a few months that appeared to work out well, and I directed my attention towards the house: neglected for 10-30 years depending on which aspects you look at. Ten cubic metres of clothes, 10 cubic metres of trash-worthy furniture, and 10 cubic metres of hoarding stuff like plastic cups, 'useful things for later', and so on. It took me hundreds of hours to remove all that, and then there was the garden, with trees and bushes 4-5 metres high just adjacent to the house. Mom would go nuts if we only looked at them, so we were somewhat glad that our agenda didn't have to make room for yet another topic related to the place where we grew up. Yes, I say 'we' sometimes, I have a brother. He was pretty useful for sharing the visits at first, utterly useless for cleaning out the house - it is what it is.
December 2018 is when the house got sold, and that was a fine excuse to also quit the job that I had gotten around there 2.5 years earlier, for obvious reasons - on both occassions

This year I've taken a break, bummed out, spent to my own. I did have some odd errants (which made me decide to edit my LinkedIn and state that I only do audits - no consulting - for companies under 1,000 FTE), yet am back to full-time consulting since a month or so.
I have also started picking up my interest in the so-called gospel of Thomas again, published a few papers on it, and as it goes, whenever I have an appetite for something, I bite - and don't let go while still hungry.
This time, it seems that my plate simpy has no end to it, and while reading the so-called gospel of Thomas, for every bite I take two or three new spoonfulls are dumped onto it. I have made great and ground-breaking discoveries, published those among academics, and they are completely ignored. Knowing me, you might suspect that they're slightly out of the ordinary, and I can guarantee you that they are. And while you may have admiration or respect for scholars, academics, and more like those, I can tell that my experiences with biblical scholars in general are quite disappointing.
Of course I know, and understand, the principles of 'not invented here', but one would expect at least some interest out of supposedly 'brainy' people like scholars.
Well, tell you the truth, scholars are ruminants, and quite useless ones too. They either mindlessly parrot what the top shots say, or keep silent. Even when you poke them a little, and even when I poke them quite a little. It's turned out to be a no-go, everything moves at turtle space there, and given the six decades of useless non-research done on the gospel of Thomas by professors of Christianity, Theology, Egyptology and whatnot, it will take at least fifty years before mine kicks in - and it probably never will, because it stands squarely opposite to every single find on Thomas that the allegedly esteemed professors have made.
I have found that even all translations of Thomas are corrupt and bogus, and am now reading the original Coptic of the only extant copy known to mankind. Yes, this time I certainly have gotten myself into a wasp's nest

Hence, drum roll, my return to Twitter - and oh boy was that a mistake! It took me a week or so, but the audience I have here doesn't give a damn about my findings, and, truth be told, neither should it, given the interaction in the five years that I was active.
So, here I am: come back to Twitter for the wrong reason, failing to apply the goal I had in mind, and even blogging again as if I don't have a pile of research to finish, papers to publish, and books to finish writing

But I thought I owed you the story, so here it is. I think I'll stick around for a while, we'll see.
And I'll be my usual old me, and try not to bore you with Thomas, Coptic Greek, and predictions about how my novel will set the entire world on fire for decades, perhaps even centuries

Influence tools: the devil is in the details

For those of you who haven't heard of Klout, let me give you a brief history: they started back in 2009 with a lot of marketing, a so-so product and non-existent service. They had two ways of handling criticism: either shower the critic in increased Klout score, or ignore him (or her).
With criticism multiplying as Klout was not willing or able to tackle it, Klout decided to take away the cause for it: detailed data on the components making up the Klout score. If you look now, Klout consists of a single score - just a number. Surprisingly, Tweetlevel has travelled the other way - or have they?

The business case for obfuscating Klout details is strong: not anymore will I be able to prove that their figures are statistically impossible:

The above pics show Klout's former marketing manager Megan Berry's @mention count and people mentioning her for a 30-day straight period: every single day the exact same number

The two pics above show Megan's friend count according to Klout, and according to Twittercounter. I'm sure you can see a striking resemblance - between the 3 Klout pics.

That was back in October-November 2010. I notified Klout of my post, several times, but never got a reaction. It wasn't long after that when Klout decided to not show these stats anymore, and just put out a single number for "all-time" RT's, mentions, etc:

That was back in May 2011. You can see the poor attempt at incorporating Facebook into their stats as well, but the most important point is that you can't spot a rotten trend anymore - or can you? I found it odd to notice that no two daily scores ever were the same exactly, but maybe Klout did improve the quality of their code?

Fast forward 4 months, when I investigate the so-called True Reach and find that it's basically your Twitter follower count multiplied by 2.6, give or take 10%:

Within a month, Klout decided to recalibrate True Reach into something even I couldn't recalculate, and eliminate all other subscores except "Amplification" and "Network", which resulted in dramatic increases but mostly drops for pretty much everyone they kept a record on. Soon after, popular opinion forced Klout to enable opt-out for everyone which resulted in a Klout o' Calypse where 2.5 million people opted out of Klout within a month.

Today, Klout is one measly single score without anything below to find out what it's made up of (see the picture at the top of this post). Now, on to Edelman's Tweetlevel: I've always liked their service. They only had one single number with 3 subscores (yes, I know!) and those were steady. They revealed their scoring mechanism to a good detail and appeared to be a roch in the rough sea of Online Influence. Until November 2012, when they revamped the layout and look of it:

That's my Word Cloud right there, plus some stats. The quick stats seem accurate-ish, but the Word Cloud certainly isn't. Thanks to Twitter allowing users to archive their tweets, I can guarantee you that I used the hashtag #Irene 5 times, the last one dating back to August 28 2011. Needless to say, #e20 hasn't been on top of my tweets since roughly then either.
I contacted Johnny Bentwood of Edelman about this and other inconsistencies, and his complete response was:

Thanks – as we are in beta, we are implementing many code fixes so that would explain your 440 errors, please try again later

I'd say he's following Klout tactics there. For completeness' sake, that conversation took place almost a year ago, and this is today's picture...
So I notice that I'm not that happy about Tweetlevel anymore, simply because I witness that part of the data used is over 2 years old - so how can the rest be even close to accurate?

I wonder whether or when Tweetlevel decides to pull detailed sub scores like Klout did, in order to evade simple questions that have no pleasant simple answer. Looking at the buzz around both, however, I'm pleased to see that Tweetlevel is flatlining and not even Microsoft pumping money into Klout raised any eyebrows whatsoever, with Klout attention being back to the same level when they still showed detailed subscores, no matter how ridiculously flawed they were.

The lesson learned? We're still very far away from measuring "online influence" or even Twitter use, and as long as we don't fully master semantics (perfect translation machines would be a proper indication of that), in stead of quality only quantity of interaction can be measured - and as far as we can check, both Klout as well as Tweetlevel stink at even that

On the insignificance of (Re)tweets to a post

In a discussion about blindly ReTweeting yesterday, I remembered that I once did a short analysis on auto-tweets.
An auto-tweet is a schedule you set up against an RSS-feed or any other trigger, which tweets the URL with a title, some of the post itself, a fixed word or hashtag, etc. Some "thought-leaders" use it to ditch all attribution and pretend the tweet originated from themselves. Usually, their Twitter bio then also says "I tweet interesting links" - well, now you know how they do it and how original and carefully curated these are...

I wondered about the current state of affairs - and did a deep analysis this time, the results of which are depicted above

Why TwentyFeet is Total Twash

Yet another Twitter analytic tool has made it into the spotlights: Twentyfeet
Like most if not all other tools that try to measure Twitter stats (Klout, Tweetlevel), it horribly fails. Apparently it's too much work or money to actually measure all tweets, and do they take a sample and extrapolate - or rather, sugguestimate - the rest

That, or they really just can't count

The thin line between transparency and vanity

I had an interesting discussion with Joseph Jude on the share buttons on my blog. In short, his opinion was:

@martijnlinssen I don't c transparency in tat number. Just a ego push for author. Btw, u shd hv a share btn. Just not the numbers. No value
— Joseph Jude (@jjude) November 24, 2012

which doesn't leave much room for interpretation, fortunately. I agree, and don't agree, as the bandwidth for numbers is so very, very wide: most numbers are meaningless as mere numbers

Read before you share - otherwise it's gossip

A rubbish post by business insider titled "This Survey Is Devastating For Microsoft: 42% Of Windows Users Plan To Switch To Apple" and a very dubious post by the New York Times titled "The Tablet Market Grows Cluttered" drew my attention today - the latter claimed that

About 98 percent of Web traffic from tablets comes from iPads, according to Onswipe, a digital publishing company

The answer to the first riddle lies in the post itself, the other answer is just a few clicks away. The verdict: bogus anal-ysis. Which doesn't matter to the authors, because the shares came in by the hundreds of course. Amazing facts!

Twitter is what you make it

Following up on a challenging post by Luis Suarez, let me jot down my thoughts on what Twitter is, has become, and will be.
The word "dead" is cunningly avoided after all these years that certain things have come to be claimed dead, dying, or extinguishing - and rightfully so. If anything, any new thing is born, and at the very moment of that wonderful occasion, it's dying at the same time. We humans, plants, rocks, stars, galaxies, universes - we all are born, and destined to die. As the black-and-white vision on that is not up for debate, we all must agree that the only thing worth discussing, preferably dialoguing, is the pace at which what happens, and the achievements in between

People can achieve wonders, miracles, magicious accomplishments in a lifetime or even less. So can plants, trees, vulcanoes, stars, galaxies, etcetera. we all are witnesses at best to 99.999% of whatever happens in our life, and only control our own feelings and emotions - at best, at the very, very best

Twitter is NOT where the party is at

You couldn't possible have missed the messy story around NBC and Twitter, resulting in suspension of Guy Adams' Twitter account. Guy's latest reaction on that is here, and contains the concise version.

Update July 31st 21:15 GMT+2: Guy Adam's account has been unsuspended:

Oh. My Twitter account appears to have been un-suspended. Did I miss much while I was away?
— Guy Adams (@guyadams) July 31, 2012

I do have to say that "which is widely listed online" is an exaggeration for sure, as it's only to be found on one site

I remember that it was also in a comment to a 2008 post on that same site, but can't possibly find that anymore now the web has been littered with Gary Zenkel's email address. In an action that started 10 hours ago, people have been tweeting and blogging the email address and since then it's been mentioned over a thousand times on Twitter, and if you Google for it you'll currently get close to ten thousand results

How Dachis failed the Social Business test

[Image by Pablo X]

My post the other day on Dachis deleting blog posts of employees who left has led to quite a bit of Twitter conversations - not all of them equally pleasant nor a true example of Social (Business). I feel that this extra post is needed to bring some closure, and achieve some lessons learned. I'll show how the story has unfolded, and also

I wrote Is Dachis rewriting its own history because at that point I had found that certain blog posts were no longer present, and Dachis (Dave Gray, informed by Peter Kim) ensured me that no blog posts had been removed.
In the light of those contradicting facts, writing the post was inevitable

Is Dachis rewriting its own history?

David Terrar and I were discussing his post on Social Business in which he takes a trip down memory lane back to even before the coming of E2.0 as we knew it, and I was pointing him to my Redefining the meaning and goal of Social .
I clicked the link to David Armano's post Tweeting at the speed of scale on Dachis' Collaboraty, to find out it was a dead link. Odd

Avoid dashes and fancy quotes in blog titles

John Reed pointed me to a post by Jeremiah Owyang, which I failed to retrieve on my phone:

Coping With Twitter’s Unfollow Bug bit.ly/H6rUUz - by @jowyang (via @jonerp) #ensw
— Jon Reed (@jonerpnewsfeed) maart 31, 2012

Ironic as it may seem, this is due to another bug which doesn't have clear ownership: let's call it the character translation bug (sorry non-IT folks)

Why API's suck, and what they lack

The Social Media Movement is slowly moving towards monetisation. Social Business, yes even Social Enterprise, is nigh.
Infographics bite the dust in an ever-increasing frenzy to prove that social is here to stay, to rule, to conquer the world!
And as yet another evidence of that, API's are brought forward - by the hundreds, no the thousands - to prove that the Brave New Open World has finally (yeah, really finally this time, right?) come

Well, I don't think so. API's suck - big time

How Klout could make Twitter a better place

I've written my fair share of posts on Klout. 1.5 years ago I started off with a mild post called "Why I have doubt about @Klout"

At the beginning of that I stated

First of all, I highly appreciate the service

- and I ended with

11 extra Klout points in 12 days on the one hand comforts me, and on the other makes me think about the stability and value of it all...

Since then, I've become increasingly weary of the product, especially because of the consistently incosnsistent quality of the product, its lack of service, and its continuous drumming on the marketing machine nonetheless - no wonder 2.5 million people instantly killed their Klout profile as soon as they finally got the chance to do so

Today, I present a way for Klout to actually create some goodwill on Twitter

tibbr 3.5 turns the world into interactive post-its

Tibbr released version 3.5 to the public today in Palo Alto California, 9 AM Pacific time. I got a solo preview yesterday and I was impressed by it - as usual I'd say.
"In twelve months since launch, tibbr has been deployed to hundreds of thousands of employees across global enterprises, who can now use tibbr to unify people, data and businesses processes to get work done"

A clear message: ...to get work done. In my opinion, tibbr dramatically reduces unnecessary human intervention in the workplace, thereby making work less unpleasant while freeing up resources for the really interesting work.
Not the greatest nor shortest sales pitch - but then I'm not selling anything here

The evangalyst: preaching to the converted

There are definite signs of evolution in social media. Where I saw some issues around mainstream adoption over a year ago, I can now rest assured.
Dozens of "priests and monks" have arisen all over the world to further aid the conversion towards social; Social Business now is the way to go and according to most InfoGraphics over 3/4 of all businesses all over the globe have either implemented social media or are very happy with it, or both

Twitter needs a radical change of security NOW

I wrote a post a while back titled Your Twitter security is an egg, not an onion, explaining how Twitter only has one front door, like your house, and if you let people in, you let them in - after which they have access to everything, including your Direct Messages.
A few months after that, Twitter finally changed its security model and now it makes a distinction between complete access, or access to the account without Direct Messages

A little bit better, but still a major failure - as just got proven by spammers

Klout 'o Calypse: 2.5 million people can't be wrong

I wrote an initial post on people killing their Klout on the very same day that Klout enabled them to do so. I took tweets as a basis for my testset, and it appeared that 20% of (the 300) people tweeting about being able to delete your Klout profile, also had actually done so.
Two weeks after that, this percentage had grown to 25%: of those initial 300 people, 75 had deleted their Klout profile. Wow!
Then I read an interview by Rohn Jay Miller with Klout's CEO Joe Fernandez, who stated that less than 0.01% of users have deleted their Klout profile

25% on my side, 0.01% on Joe's - that gap definitely deserves closer investigation. How many people have deleted their Klout profile? The answer is right here

Flout.me is fun, but should be flogged and reported

I did what I guess most of you did when you saw the first entry of flout.me in your Twitter timeline: frown. Then I saw another one. And another one. And smiled. I clicked the URL, authorised the app, then laughed out loud

Looks familiar? Well, there's more to it than that: Flout is a Klout superstar!

Once bitten, twice shy? Klout scores get clouted again

Almost 1.5 years ago I showed how very, very flawed Klout's actually is. I made some nice screenshots and illustrated how Klout's scoring is statistically impossible, and how they magically manage to present you with two scores at the same time.
Today, history repeats itself, proving that Klout is still just as immature a product as they were in June 2010. Apparently, some need to fail more than once in order to learn something

The initial KloutoCalypse: how big is it?

In my last post I showed how to remove your Klout profile from the public eye, without waiting for Klout to take 24-48 hours to do so. As I get impatient every now and then, I decided to take the first 500 tweets containing Klout and delete after I published it. I ignored all the tweets that said something like "Gee I wish I could delete my Klout profile" and only kept those that showed knowledge of being able to delete their Klout account with a few simple clicks.

Out of the 500 tweets, 337 remained. I filtered those for unique users, and stuck to 293 (sorry, said 296 before) unique Twitter users who knew how to delete their Klout profile.
For every single one of those, I checked their Klout profile to see if it still existed.