Social Media News: Twitter to add new features?

UPDATE: Apparently, @twitteronnotice is not what many have thought it was supposed to be...back to Louis Gray for the answers:

My late-night speculation on Twitter readying a new feature uncovered not a new way for users to send notices to others on the site, but instead, one of the multiple internal-only accounts used to raise company morale and togetherness.

Definitely go to Gray's blog for the hilarious explanation from Twitter.




Twitter has you on notice. Compared to Facebook, Twitter is still a pretty small company with a tiny support team.  With it's explosion of users over the past year or so, this team has been overwhelmed trying to keep up with spam accusations, suspension of accounts, abusive behaviour - you know, your regular mixed cocktail of internet social norms.  According to Louis Gray, respected tech blogger, Twitter might be giving some support to their, ummm, support team.

A new account, called @twitteronnotice, says cryptically "You're On Notice!", featuring an avatar of Uncle Sam glaringly pointing his finger in your direction. The account even calls itself "Minus One", a common Internet tally for somebody or something being modded down by the community. (e.g. +1 and -1)

Get enough negative karma associated with your account, and you might see your account go on notice. While no public details are yet available for this private account, it could be a way for the company to try and avoid user attrition through aggressive account deletions, and put accounts in something of a holding pattern for violating the terms of service.

To add more credence to this rumour, the account is only being followed by a select group of Twitter staff members.  Finally, as many already know, it's impossible to create a Twitter account with the word "Twitter" in it - unless you work for the company, of course.  So it's pretty much guaranteed that Twitter is working on something here.

In other Twitter account news.  Are you an active participant in #FollowFriday?  Twitter might be attempting to make it easier for you to get the word out about your favourite tweeps. The account @TwitterShoutout has also been discovered by Louis Gray, suggesting that the account will be used as a new action to promote your favourite people on Twitter.  Gray speculates that a new list may appear in your profile that keeps track of all the tweeps who give you a "shout out", kind of like recommendations in LinkedIn.  One of Twitter's goals with the explosion of users in the last while has been to promote ways for discovering people as Twitter get's pretty boring if you don't have anyone interesting to follow.

Cereal Milk and Other Glorious Inventions

I wouldn't say that I'm some crazed inventor or anything, but I do have a few ideas percolating up in the old noggin.  The first from my stockpile of million dollar ideas came about during my second last year of high school.  With the success of ebay, I started thinking of different ways the internet could be used to buy and sell.  My idea was an online marketplace that we would call ibuy.com.  It was basically the opposite of ebay: someone who is looking to purchase a specific item would post on this site describing what they were looking for.  Others who had a good or service that fit this description would reply with a price they would sell it at.  If someone else also had the good or service, they could offer it at a lower price - simple reverse auction.  I was pretty excited about it at the time and even had a teacher willing to invest until I did a bit more research and found out that there was a site similar to this idea.  Obviously it hasn't been too successful as I can't even remember what the company's name was.  Oh well, I was not deterred in my inventiveness.

The next idea hasn't been figured out by anyone else yet as far as I know, but I'm pretty confident that it's not something I'm ever going to follow through with - so, internet...here's a present for you.  I never came up with a better name, but I call it Cereal Milk.

Reader: Huh?  
Me: Let me explain.

As a child, my favourite part of breakfast was finishing the bowl of cereal and being left with the most sugary, the most sweet, the most tasty part of the whole breakfast...the leftover milk.  MMMmmmmm!  Now this might sound disgusting at first, but you put sugar in anything and kids will eat it, amirite??

In my first year of university, on a whim, I decided to try and replicate that sweet nectar.  I put a bit of sugar in a glass of milk.  It was...ok.  Being the brilliant person I am, I decided to take the Tim Allen approach - more power!! Ar Ar Ar!  So I dumped a whole whack of sugar in there.  The result: O.M.G. (with an F in there if you like)!!!1! - yeah, it was in the middle of the MSN days and internet abbrevs were all the rage.  In any case, it tasted just like the milk after finishing a bowl of cereal.  I suddenly had an epiphany.  Imagine selling this stuff through companies like General Mills or Post as if it was one of their cereal brands?  Like Trix Cereal Milk or Count Chocula (my personal fave) Cereal Milk??  You change the flavour slightly for each brand, market it like cereal, have a few toy freebies attached every now and then BAM! you're selling this stuff like hotcakes.  I mean, this right here is genius - health trends be damned.  But I was never one too interested in being a food product manager for a Proctor Gamble et al.  Alas, the dream remains elusive.  But someone really needs to do this...like now.  Seriously.  I'll buy a case a month.

My next idea is really a good one, but pretty boring as well.  As our society continues to be ever more reliant on electronic devices, we seem to be going through a whole heck of a lot power bars.  And damn those engineers that came up with those stupid super fat plugs that take up like 2 or 3 other outlet slots when plugged in.  Enter the "Outlet Extender" - yeah I know, I need to really work on these product names.  The Outlet Extender is a very simple device.  It's basically, umm, well...easier to explain in pictures:

The giant plugs that don't fit plug into the Outlet Extender which in turn plugs into the power bar, freeing up the two outlets that would normally be covered by the giant plug when plugged it into the middle outlet.  An elegant solution for a more civilized age.  But it's just too boring for me to be bothered with.

So there you go, internet.  Gift wrapped just for you.