Interesting how everybody is positive about something they haven't really had a week to use. No hey, my scanner won't work, or how much did you spend on your memory upgrade ?
Let's wait three months, when the inevitable clamoring for service packs and the first complaints about slowdowns happen.
second evdawg, it's as fake as a $3 bill. The tweets are real but they've definitely been selected to give an impression, and you don't know whether the authors of the tweets are 'real' people either, or just legends.
Most people who care about Windows 7 have had it for far longer than a week - whether they've been using the RC or they are a student who was able to get it through the MSDNAA program.
Yes, some of it may be from new users, but if there actually are any real tweets on there, it could very well be from people who have been using it for a while.
They might be real entries, that doens't mean they're randomly chosen. MS probably selected a bunch that made them look good, and then threw in a few that were somewhat neutral to make it look fair (I'm thinking the downloading, what are the new features one)...
here are a random couple I tracked down by handle (some I tried to track down, but couldn't find). from the current moment, they are 7 and 22 hours old.
You click the message and it gives you details, including "view on twitter". The one I checked was 20 hours old but seemed to be part of a genuine stream unless they went to the trouble of creating a back-catalogue of tweets in order to astro-tweet (!).
I think it's more interesting than that. they obviously picked the tweets as those search streams have all sorts of junk in them. so, they had to pluck out tweets that sounded twitter-ish, but not too twitter-ish. not sure if this was done by humans or robots.
I love this technique, I use Shannon Whitley's free Chatterbox widget to display an unfiltered list of tweets mentioning Mailana on my front page.
http://www.realtimechatterbox.com/
Shannon's widget filters out obvious obscenities, but otherwise I just make sure I've got a reply to any negative comments. Seeing that dialog in there demonstrates a bit of authenticity.
Also, nobody's heard of my startup, so I feel fairly safe. Security through obscurity. :)
Thanks for sending that filter idea, I have never "understood" how to integrate twitter for marketing but that's a heck of a start - I'm planning to run some A/B tests on that . . .
Let's wait three months, when the inevitable clamoring for service packs and the first complaints about slowdowns happen.
second evdawg, it's as fake as a $3 bill. The tweets are real but they've definitely been selected to give an impression, and you don't know whether the authors of the tweets are 'real' people either, or just legends.