Conservative Leader David Cameron on Twitter; ‘too many twits might make a twat’

July 29, 2009 By

UK Conservative leader David Cameron has created a storm in the mainstream media and on Twitter following an on-air interview on the Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show on Absolute Radio (disclosure: I’m Digital Marketing Manager at Absolute Radio).

In the interview he was asked about his views on Twitter, and responded with the view that ‘ too many twits might make a twat’ – due to the instantaneousness of microblogging, and the need for politicians to think about what they were saying.

See the original interview:

The main response in the mainstream media has been based on the swearing during a live broadcast – Cameron used both the term ‘twat’, and the term ‘pissed off’. Meanwhile on  Twitter, many messages show that users are presuming Cameron in fact called Twitter users ‘twats’.
Cameron has now apologised for his use of swearing during the interview.

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Interviewing the real MrTweet – Steve Ng Ming Yeow

December 8, 2008 By
One of the Twitter applications which has received a lot of responses is MrTweet, billed as ‘Your Personal Networking Assistant’. Follow @MrTweet and you’ll get a direct message when he’s ready to help. And you’ll then get a list of the followers you should really have followed back, but may have missed – and a list of people outside of your network who are relevant and worth following – and you also get a character profile with information on each person to help you decide.
I got in touch with @MIngYeow – one of the duo behind MrTweet, along with @ambivalence, to find out more, particularly as the service received a lot of negative comments about some functionality which initially required submitting your Twitter username – there’s no need to submit your username for the applications now!
What inspired you to create MrTweet? Is it just one part of your social start-up?
You know you need a personal assistant when you are spending more time searching for the right people, as opposed to being able to build effective relationships through sharing and communicating.
The simplicity and openness of Twitter has become a limiting factor, as sheer information overload overwhelms users. In many cases, folks resorted to randomly surfing and adding.
Based on these needs and existing behaviors, rose the inspiration of Mr. Tweet – a personal assistant of helping users find good people to connect to easily.
Mr. Tweet is a first step of our social startup, which hopefully you will hear a lot more about in time to come.
Was it a reaction to directory-based services like Twellow, Twitterpacks or TwitDir?
Nope, we respect what they do a lot. Frankly speaking, we serve very different needs. We are focused on “personalization”. which is a completely different ball game from directories

You seemed to have been singled out from all of the applications that require a user’s Twitter login – why is that? And how did you feel about being the one service singled out for the criticism, when so many have been accepted without question?

Well, we only require the user’s password if he wants to follow people through our interface, and there really is no alternative there.
To answer your question, I actually feel that it is great that we are stirring up discussion on this very important topic. Twitterrank started the buzz with their demonstration app. and we followed right after them.
The open authentication (OAuth, OpenID) has been pushing Twitter to use OAuth for a while now, and it looks like it might really happen.

The About page for the company you’ve started behind MrTweet, Discover.io mentions a Facebook application, Fluidity, rather than MrTweet – did your plans change to focus on Twitter first, and was there a reason for that?


Yup, we did. Facebook is a great platform, but apps that focus on value add rather than “social for the sake of social’ do not do well there.
Twitter users have a far far higher appreciation for apps that are trying too add value.

You (Ming) have experience in Venture Capital and Product Management – does this mean you have a business strategy behind MrTweet specifically? Will it always remain a free service for users?

It will always remain a free service. We will be implementing more and more ways of delivering continuous value to users, and make it into a sustainable business at some point.

Initially there was a bug with people with over 500 followers (Or was it following over 500?). Has this now been solved?
Yuppy. Although significant problems remain in keeping following lists 100% synchronized.

Have there been any other issues so far which have surprised you?


I hate to say this, but I do wish that the Twitter platform can be slightly more stable. Obviously I love them, but minor glitches on their end can throw our plans off.
Oh, anything. Robert Scoble crashing us. We still cannot take him

You’ve said on the MrTweet blog there have been a lot of suggestions for more features e.g. user statistics, or UI improvements – are there any more you can reveal will be implemented in the short term?

UI and performance issues will be worked on in the short term. Also working on ranking improvements based on feedback.

You’ve also revealed on the blog that you’ve spent a week focusing on scaling the service – how effectively is word of MrTweet spreading? Have you publicised it anywhere other than within Twitter?

WOM has been extremely effective.  It is our sole form of marketing. There has been about 30 blog postings on Mr Tweet done so far, and those drove users as well.

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Chatting with the man behind Twilert – the new Twitter alert service

December 4, 2008 By

Twilert is a new service which aims to bring the ease of Google alerts to the Twitter world. It’s up against Tweetbeep, which has offered alerts for a while, and both offer filtering by location. Twilert does have the edge on flexibility around the selected keywords, specifying both the username of the sender or the recipient of Tweets, and even offering some basic postive/negative attitude reporting.

So it seemed a good idea to find out more about Twilert, and especially how it might differentiate itself further in the future, by speaking to Dan Leach, who is behind the service.

What was the main inspiration for Twilert? Was it something you personally needed for monitoring Twitter in your day job?
The inspiration came about a month ago when I was looking through the Google Alerts I have setup for my various clients (I work in PR and marketing). A lot of the information was dated and I wanted to find a way of seeing what people were really saying and thinking about the brands and products I represent. As an obsessed Twitter fan I wanted to find a way of tracking conversation and opinion on the site without having to sit in front of a Twitter Search page all day. And so, Twilert was born.

What’s the main advantage over other monitoring services?

There are limited options available to people if they want to monitor “tweets”. Aside from the aesthetic differences between Twilerts and its competitors, the two main advantages include:

  • Full customisation of alerts: Twilerts options reflect exactly that of Twitter’s Search service which mean alerts can be tailored by keywords, author, recipient, location, link-location, and attitude (positive, negative, neutral). This means you can filter out irrelevant tweets from your alerts.
  • Ease of use: Twilert doesn’t require you to have a Twitter account, nor does it require any technical knowledge of Twitter or search. True story: to ensure the site was as user-friendly as possible, the test subject I used throughout development was my Mum. If she can use it then anyone can!

You’ve obviously built in some quite specific ways to filter messages: by location proximity, whether they include links, and by positive or negative attitude. How are you calculating the attitude of Tweets?

The attitudes of tweets is calculated by Twitter’s emotion algorithm (created first by Summize) which uses certain phrases and words that suggest a positive, negative or neutral phrase and maps them against keywords in the tweet.
It is by no means 100% accurate and will continue to evolve, however it will provide a decent enough snapshot of whether people are speaking positively or negatively about whatever you are tracking.

With such a comprehensive attempt at filtering is there anything you haven’t been able to include?

We have included everything that Twitters allows through its API. With the limited information that is provided with each tweet (author, recipient, location, content) it is difficult to filter them anymore than is already possible on Twilert.

The site was built by Codegent – if you funded the build, does this mean you have plans to recoup your money by monetising Twilert? Or by utilising the data on popular terms etc?

Monetising the service is a long way in the future – Twilert is less than a week old so our focus is 100% on providing a high quality service to our users. However, we will be exploring extended functionality that could be implemented for enterprise users. It is worth stressing though that the basic alert service will always remain free to users.

Twilert is definitely the weapon of choice for anyone looking for regular automated emails which compile your reports within potentially pretty specific criteria. It’s also one of the better looking 3rd party applications for Twitter, and being designed by someone working in PR and Media, it should be well placed to capitalise on the influx of brands and agencies looking to

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Getting Shirky on camera

October 1, 2008 By

Excuse the bad pun, but friend and colleague Dave Cushman has started posting a series of videos from an interview with Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody).

Well worth watching.

And if you need another reason, Clay’s still holding the number 2 spot on the infamous ‘Rock Stars of Web 2.0‘ list on Ditto.net.

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