Not Twitterific

Hey guess what, Twitter is either the best or worst place to get your breaking news from. You know when its going to be a really *great* place? When the terrorists themselves start broadcasting. 

Hella grim yes, and most certainly on the horizon. Straight outa a bad sci-fi movie, and into your living room, phone and beyond.

They’ve already started advertising.

Black Friday Online

Black Friday is upon us once again, a joyous occasion where Americans show just how far they’ll go to save a buck. Of course for many that’s very important these days, so I imaged this Black Friday to be especially crazy. While we have to wait till early tomorrow morning to find out, we can get some insight thanks to Google Trends. 

As I was scanning it tonight I thought it spoke very well for the current economy here in the states. With tighter budgets this year, where is everyone looking for deals? Let’s take a look at current search trend rankings and find out.

Right away in the top spots we see outlets are going to be big. I’ve watched trends over a few Black Fridays and never seen this many listings for outlets, in fact other outlet related terms are included throughout the rest of the list (over a dozen times). Looks like folks are going to try to score deals on already discounted goods this year.

Further down we see Apple and iPods are still the hot product to snap up. I’m sure they will do just fine this year, unlike many other retailers who don’t start to appear till further down the ranking list.

Finally we start to see some of the big name retailers, all the usual suspects are here. Circuit city placed a little higher as well, with their recent bankruptcy announcement you can bet they’ll see lots of looters shoppers.

Eck the rack! That’s like where clothes go to die.

Finally down at the very very end of the like we have Saks. The premium department store is still generating some buzz, but not even close to the others.

So there you have it, I encourage you to scan trends a few times over the course of the day. It’s a unique insight into this strange pastime. 

As for me, I’ll be doing all my shopping with Amazon Prime this year.

Black Friday is always a unique time of the year online. Folks create massive amounts of content to share the once held secrets of the retail giants. Someone even made the ultimate black friday guide, in freaking excel format! Check it out below (click full screen in top right corner), or you can also download the Black Friday Guide excel file.

Black Friday 2008 Master Excel Sheet - Get more Docstoc Buzz

Via FriendFeed

Thanksgiving with the Percivals.

Twitter Bling

Magpie is a service that helps you monetize your Twitter followers. Ads are placed into your stream every 5 tweets automatically (they store your login info).

I’m titling this post How to Lose a Follower in 10 Tweets because I assume any valuable followers would drop you after the 2nd ad. A novel idea sure, but I only see low weight users with noisy time lines giving this a serious push. Most of us are now focusing on noise reduction, so we won’t appreciate the ads. 

TechCrunch is calling this PayPerPost for Twitter. Much Like PPP, I assume the publishers here are mostly mom and pop based operations trying to tap social media. Normally by spamming it just a bit. Of course that’s a bit ironic because many of us happily use Twitter to pimp our own endeavours. 

I’ve yet to see a #magpie tag flow by on my feed, since I keep my followers pretty tight I don’t expect to see many. But hey, I won’t blame a few of you for trying, if you do let me know your experience in the comments.

Check the Twitter Search to see some of the ads, along with user reactions. Also this discussion on FriendFeed.