Look forward to checking it out. Thanks!

Cool. Message me if you have any questions along the way. I'm here to help!

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I see this as the biggest problem with Twitter also.

Twitter is my favorite app, but it's because I have spent five plus years curating my feed.

There is a fundamental problem with the way they onboard new users and this is why so many people don't stick around.

The onboarding process asks you to select interests and then recommends people to follow based on those interests.

However, they often recommend celebrities and 'popular' accounts.

These people are often terrible at Twitter, so new users see a bunch of boring, self-promotional content in their feed and don't come back.

How did you go about curating your feed?

I tried to get into Twitter for a while and ultimately stopped using it.

Part of the problem I think is I have kind of a wide range of interests -- sports, software, entrepreneurship, etc. So Twitter probably can't gauge my interests very well. I ended up with a lot of those self-promotion feeds and ESPN writers, but nothing ultimately with substance (except for certain people that I found via other sources -- like if I follow their blog, I'd follow their Twitter too).

It'd be better if it was easier to categorize the feeds I'm following and view by category depending on what I feel like at the moment. I know they have lists, but I only just found that a little bit ago -- and it's so hidden that I actually have to type the URL into my address bar because I can't get there from a link on the homepage. Viewing by category should be, if not the default, then one big link away from the initial page.

Lists are the way to go.

Conference or other temporal hashtags are a good way to discover users who are focused on a single topic, who you can then curate into a list. Once you find a few topic experts, they become a discovery source for other experts.

Exactly. I had several abortive attempts at Twitter before I 'got it'. You have to build up your feed slowly and organically. Start by making the effort to follow a few, very high-quality accounts based on your interests, then use these accounts to find others, and so on (unfollowing as necessary to keep the signal/noise ratio as high as possible). This requires substantial effort on the user's part.

I use TweetDeck. It's like the power user version of Twitter. I generally have 20+ columns on my screen at any given time.

Most of the people I follow I found through people I know retweeting them or through looking at the feeds of other successful/important people (for example, I recreated the feeds of other investors/entrepreneurs) - http://theireyes.austenallred.com/

TweetDeck seems to be exactly what I was looking for!

And that other site (twitter through their eyes) looks awesome. Thanks!

Twitter is like any other social network in that it works better if the people you know personally are using it. The only way to build up a good feed is to explore out through your friends' retweets to find accounts they follow that you also like. Then periodically look at your feed volume as a whole and delete anyone too high-traffic or recently uninteresting.

That's true. Most of the recommendations are crap. Got any recommendations to finding high signal/noise users or lists ?

There are a few methods I've found for finding good lists.

1) Google with "site:twitter.com inurl:lists big data"

Google's listings are decent indicator of higher quality lists. Substitute whichever topic you are interested in.

2) Look at your sources' memberships. If there's someone on twitter you follow closely for a topic, check out their memberships to see who has already listed them for that topic and that list may be one to start with.

3) We have a list search you can try out and sort by various metrics to find higher signal lists

https://www.electoralhq.com/twitter-lists/search

Thank you!

Or pay bills with a credit card and get points on the card for your trouble. Plus an extra month to pay.

This is the only thing that would make it worthwhile. I have been wanting to get an Alaska Airlines card...

This is the first thing that stuck out to me also. It's a very polarizing topic and needs to be said differently.

Agreed. Depending on the search the #17 position might not appear until the third page. The vast majority of people don't get past the top three results and almost no one makes it to the bottom of page two or page three. You might get one extra visit a month moving from 40 to 17.

Also the penguin update doesn't specifically penalize new sites. It was primarily directed at sites with unnatural back link profiles.

I have had a similar experience with small businesses over the past year. Even if they don't know what WordPress is someone has told them that they should use WordPress.

I position any project as a way to increase business through design, SEO/SEM, conversion rate optimization, but I find frequently that WordPress is a selling point.

I'm pretty confident that I'll get significant value out of this book for my current job, but I also agree with this sentiment. For all of the value that I have received from Patrick's posts, comments, podcasts, etc. over the years this is the least I can do. Buying it now.

I thought I was losing my mind when this happened to me the other day while at a trade show trying to access Google Analytics from my iPhone.

The service includes directory submission! Is this 1995?

In some cases a directory search is a good thing. Local is one of those cases, and something that is tremendously broken on the web. I'd much rather go to a directory of pizza places in my area than do a keyword search of pizza. Yes this is Yahoo, but local/SMB is a huge untapped market that is not served by the current web.

The only local business I find with websites are the ones that pay some fly by night "web designer" to put up some BS templated site with little info for $2k. Here businesses can do the same thing, but also control their site, get SEO, advertise, and get analytics for less.

This is probably referring to local business directories, which Google uses in part to drive their local search listings (the results with the map & location pins).

That being said it's ironic that Yahoo is providing a service to help people rank higher on Google.