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Thoughtpick: A unique perspective of the Web and social media...
A unique perspective of the Web and social media...

January 1, 2010

Happy New Year – From Thoughtpick Team

Goodbye 2009!

Goodbye 2009!

The Thoughtpick team would like to extend their greetings and wishes for a happy 2010 to all of you tweeple, bloggers, Facebook lovers, Mixxers, Diggers, Redditors and other faithful social media users :)We hope this year will bring you more love, smiles, knowledge and new unique experiences!

We’d like to thank you for being loyal readers and followers to our blog and main contributors to the success we have managed to achieve up until now.

In return, and for 2010, we promise to bring you more and more:

  1. Great web & social media news: to enrich your knowledge base.
  2. Fun & humor-loaded posts: to brighten up your days.
  3. Hacks & workarounds: to help you be in charge of your web usage.
  4. Controversial picks: to engage you in our thoughts about social media and its use.
  5. Research-based topics: to share all that we learn from the web with you!

Stay tuned with us and see if we fulfill our promise to you :)

Kindly except our warmest regards,

The Toughtpick Team.

Filed under: ThoughtPick News — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Beirut @ 5:18 pm

December 2, 2009

Tweepi Gets New Features: Manage Your Twitter Followers with Stats

When we first started Thoughtpick earlier this year, we had so many ideas for simple web applications that would make a difference and add value to all web users alike. Besides this blog, which has been our main – successful -communication tool, we had the challenge of picking up one of our many ideas to develop and launch as Thoughtpick’s first product.

The importance of Twitter paved the way for Tweepi

Tweepi Logo

Tweepi Logo

Our realization of the importance of Twitter for marketing and communication came naturally and instantly thus we opted to build up a Twitter community of tweeps who share the same interests – social media and web applications -.  Building a Twitter community is not as simple as it sounds to be, we tried using the available Twitter management tools at that time first, including Flash Tweet, Twitter Karma, and Tweet Later, and in no time we realized that we need something different, something that is simple, fast, and more efficient. We identified our needs, brainstormed our ideas, and came up with Tweepi!

[read full article >>]

Filed under: ThoughtPick News — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Fadi @ 10:26 pm

July 16, 2009

20,000 visitors in 3 hours – The Ashton Kutcher Effect @aplusk ! [video]

About 8 hours ago, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) tweeted about my post entitled “Reclaiming the Longest Tweet in History at 250 characters!”. I noticed a spike immediately, and the highest number of concurrent users surfing the site was 3000 users! This post is dedicated to show you what you can expect when someone as popular as @aplusk tweets about you.

Ashton Kutcher #1 on Twitter according to wefollow.com

Ashton Kutcher #1 on Twitter according to wefollow.com

Note: at the time of writing, Kutcher was the #1 on twitter.com based on the number of users following him: 2,780,274 followers.

45 minutes after the tweet…

As soon as I was able to think again, it occurred to me, with GetClicky, I can use the “Spy” mode to see how many visitors are surfing the blog in real-time. I was shocked to see that about 10 people where accessing the site per second! The concurrent number of visitors at this point was about 1500!

To share this experience, I took a video screen capture. Watch it below:

The stats 8 hours later…

As expected from a real-time messaging platform like Twitter, the life span of a tweet is not too long. The good thing about twitter is that people Retweet what they like, that definitely gave the traffic a bump up and kept the traffic coming for a longer time.

Within these first hours, the post got about 200 retweets according to BackTweets, and more than 30,000 bit.ly clicks overall!

That’s how the number of uniques go:

  • Hour 1: 10,847 unique users
  • Hour 2: 6,357 unique users
  • Hour 3: 3,475 unique users
  • Hour 4: 2,225 unique users
  • Hour 5: 1,586 unique users
  • Hour 6: 878 unique users
  • Hour 7: 632 unique users
  • Hour 8: 407 unique users

What did we learn? Things to keep in mind…

Twitter drives large numbers of mobile users!

Twitter drives large numbers of mobile users!

If you have a self-hosted blog and you’re trying to get loads of traffic via Digg, Reddit, Twitter or any other social medium, you need to make sure your blog can survive the spike in traffic. In our case, we got 2% failure rate due to database configuration issues (see #3 below):

  1. Make sure you have a powerful server hosting your blog – I’m using MediaTemple Grid Service, it’s quite good in handling traffic, but gives me some weird glitches every once in a while. Upgrading to a dedicated server soon!
  2. Make sure you have the WP Super Cache plugin installed. This plugin serves static copies of your posts without running PHP or connecting to the database, in turn saving your precious CPU cycles and memory usage.
  3. Make sure you have the MySQL my.cnf file variable “max_connections” set to 100 or more. We had it set to 60, but that was not enough!
  4. Consider testing how your blog loads on iPhone, Blackberry, iPod, Android and other phones. We received 12% of the traffic from mobile users!
  5. I’m now considering using CSS Sprites for the blog, which reduces load on the Apache server by delivering all the small images in one image file.
  6. Make sure you have a big and clear retweet button. I don’t need to explain why that’s important. Wordpress blog administrators have 2 options that I’m aware of: TweetMeme or BackType Tweetcount.
  7. Always keep an eye on your log files!

 

Did I miss any points for surviving The Kuther Effect? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.

Ashton Kutcher's Tweet linking to Thoughtpick

Ashton Kutcher's Tweet linking to Thoughtpick

Filed under: ThoughtPick News — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Amer Kawar @ 6:14 am

July 15, 2009

Introducing Tweepi – A geekier, faster way to manage Twitter followers

A few months ago, “Thoughtpick” the company was established with our main objectives being to blog, be active in social media channels and then create mini (or “scrappy”) Web projects.

  • Our first task – from a development perspective – was the design of the blog, its installation and tweaking.
  • The second development to-do item was the Thoughtpick.com site, which still has a few bugs, but all in all is working well.
  • This brings us to Tweepi, the third and latest project and a refresher to my PHP, server management and CSS skills. :)
Tweepi.com Logo

Tweepi.com Logo

Tweepi is a simple collection of Twitter tools; each tool is designed to make a certain aspect of your Twitter experience and interactions simpler and more enjoyable!

We created Tweepi out of our own need for some of these scripts. We’re constantly looking to follow quality tweeples, and trying to unfollow deadbeat users. We simply want to do more on Twitter in less time!

Tweepi has 4 tools so far, with more to come:

1. Geeky Follow Utility: follow active and sociable users with the same interests as yourself

There are too many people out there using Twitter for an infinite variety of reasons and to share a wide collection of topics ranging from business, to cooking, dancing, technology and so on. The most common way to find and add people with the same interests as you, is to find a popular tweeple within your area of interest, say “@mashable” or “@techcrunch” for technology news, and add people who follow these known users.

This tool helps you filter these people - the geeky way, with numbers in a table – based on their activity and sociability, and follow only quality twitterers.

Tweepi.com Geeky Follow Tool

Tweepi.com Geeky Follow Tool

[read full article >>]

Filed under: ThoughtPick News — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Amer Kawar @ 11:09 am

May 7, 2009

We’ve just moved. Come have a look!

Note to our Blogger followers: Please remove the ‘blogspot.com’ blog from your follow list, and follow this new blog.

We just finished the final touches, and the new Wordpress blog is now up and running. All old links are now permanently redirected to their respective URLs on this new blog. I’m hoping that all our readers will be able to easily find our new blog.

We just moved from Blogger to Wordpress!

We just moved from Blogger to Wordpress!

If you are reading this via a RSS feed subscription, click through and come have a look, we’d like to hear your opinion about our new design and blog features. Let us know if we missed anything :).

Notice the new features:

  • The ‘ReTweet This’ button of TweetMeme next to each post
  • The DISQUS comments – if you commented and haven’t claimed your comments, try it out.
  • Because we are using DISQUS now, you can subscribe to any person’s comments all over the Web. Just click on any user’s comment image, surf to his/her profile, and subscribe to the feeds.
  • The new design and layout, of course.
  • We have trackbacks enabled now!
  • You can subscribe via FeedBurner to all comments, as well as the same link to the posts feeds.
  • An many more tiny features here and there…

Stay tune for more great articles from Fadi and Beirut…

Filed under: ThoughtPick News — Tags: , , , — Amer Kawar @ 5:14 am
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