I’m not the only one who is frustrated by how often Guy posts about alltop. Guy’s response to the criticism? “Unfriend me.”
It’s nice that he’s honest about not changing, but it flies in the face of everything he says about listening to the customer. With “do as he says, not as he does” in mind, I offer to put his customer’s back in control.
Announcing a twitter bot that retweets everything Guy Kawasaki tweets, as long as it doesn’t contain “alltop.”
Meet the real Guy Kawasaki: http://twitter.com/gk_minusalltop
Caveats:
- It’s updated once a minute, so occasionally you’ll be 1 minute behind the over 60,000 other people who want to know what’s going on with Guy.
- If Guy complains, Twitter might choose to remove this account. I doubt that will happen since Gal Kawasaki seems to be allowed.
- I have no intention of checking any replies to gk_minusalltop. It’s a bot, you can contact me at my twitter account at @whoisgregg or leave a comment below.
Update #1 I fixed the bug where @replies weren’t being posted. Apparently PHP’s implementation of cURL thinks that anything that starts with an “@” is a path to a file. All working now. Amazingly, over 20 followers and Guy noticed it right away. As I told him, I like him and I like Alltop, but too much of the two together is not so good.
Update #2 A bit more explanation of how this came to be… I saw this tweet from Guy the other day where he explains that he sifts through 60K+ followers updates by simply ignoring anything that doesn’t contain “Alltop.” My immediate thought was, “What a great idea! If only everyone who followed Guy could do the exact opposite for his tweets.” Today at lunch I realized I had just recently coded up a twitter bot and with a few modifications could have exactly that feature available. Amazingly people are already following it and at a rate much faster than can be explained by twitter spam bots. ;)
I’m glad I could help. :)
Update #3 @gk_minusalltop has been running 13 days and has attracted 131 followers. The bot updates the Bio with how many alltop tweets it has *not* retweeted. In 13 days, 265 of Guy’s 810 updates have included “Alltop” in them. So, basically a third less tweets and at Guy’s rate, that’s 20 less tweets every day. Definitely a worthwhile project. :)
Update #4 @gk_minusalltop has been running 84 days and has attracted 589 followers. Guy linked to a page about Star Trek four times about a week ago. He was being sneaky by using an adjix link to point to Alltop instead of being upfront about his advertising. Thanks to Leo Notenboom and Ed Palumbo for catching it. The good news? The bot is smart enough now to check if Guy is posting an Alltop link without being honest about it. Should I add a counter for how many times he posts sneaky links? ;)
Update #5 Guy has switched from using Adjix to a new custom short URL service: trkk.us. Unfortunately, this service uses javascript redirects to circumvent the method @gk_minusalltop *was* using to check for sneaky links. I’m working on it, but I can see where this is headed. What a shame. :/
- Automatically removes all ghosttwitter posts (they always advertise for Alltop)
- Do extra testing for any weird URL shorteners that pop up
- Hired an army of rabbits trained to recognize the particular shade of orange/gold that Alltop uses to manually check each tweet
Of course, if the rabbits get tired or run out of food, the occasional tweet may slip through. The trick is to tell me as soon as you recognize an Alltop spamvertisement so I can train the rabbits to recognize the new trick. BTW, that screenshot links to an article with this great quote:
The most important lesson that I’ve learned about business through all these years is that the great companies are founded on the desire to make meaning—and not necessarily to make money.
– Guy Kawasaki
Thanks for that, Guy.
