Facebook User Guide for Twitter Status Update

Lots of people use Facebook, but don’t use Twitter, yet, they are exposed to status updates that were originally posted to Twitter and automatically re-posted on Facebook. So far so good, except by the fact that Twitter updates have their own set of rules, which goes from unique syntaxes to quirky abbreviations to compose those updates. It’s all “normal” to Twitter users, but probably most of my Facebook friends get lost and start to think I’m crazy. I need to fix that.


This is just a very simple guide if you are a Facebook user and you keep seeing this strange status updates that make no sense to you.

1) @
This is the easiest way to know a status update came from Twitter. It refers to another Twitter account. For example, “Great news article at @mashable today”. The “@mashable” refers to the Mashable account on Twitter (http://twitter.com/mashable).

2) RT / via
RT means “re-tweet”. Re-tweet is the same thing as forwarding an email, but you are forwarding a tweet. When you see something like “RT @seattle20: Don’t miss Poker 2.0 tonight…”, it’s a tweet originated by @seattle20 and re-tweeted by me.

It can get confusing as on this example:

“Don’t miss it! RT @Seattle20: Note to startups! RT @AWSstartups: 4 more days to enter AWS Startup Challenge”.

If you see this on my Facebook status update, what it means is that I wrote “Don’t miss it” then re-tweeted from the @Seattle20 account. The @Seattle20 in turn wrote “Note to startups” and re-tweeted @AWSstartups, which in turn originally wrote “4 more days to enter AWS Startup Challenge”. This is just like when you get an email where people have been forwarding/replying and adding to it. The easiest way to think about it is to replate “RT” with “Forwarded from”.

Alternatively, some people/apps use "via" instead of "RT" and they put at the end of a tweet, like this: "4 more days to enter AWS Startup Challenge (via @AWSstartups)". I hate "via" because it confuses the reader in figuring out who's the original author of a tweet.

3) #
Oh hashtags! It drives Facebook users insane. Hashtags is a way to tag tweets. But it’s a lot more than that. Hashtags can be used to indicate the context of a tweet: “I’ve been looking forward to the #NBA play offs”. On this example, you can just ignore the “#”, but the author of the tweet meant to say “this is really about NBA”.

Hashtags are more commonly used at the end of a tweet, as in “Just watched some amazing video http://bit.ly/abcde #TED #medicine #future”. There is no pre-established rule for hashtag. Each person uses as they wish, however, on things like events, the organizers promote a standard hashtag so it makes it easier for people searching for tweets on that event to find them by using the standard hashtag, like #TED.

A much simpler way to think of hashtag is to substitute “#” with “file under” and imagine you are organizing your tweets on specific categories. That’s why you’ll see tweets like “I just spent 3h w/ AT&T customer service! #fail”.

4) <3
Have you seen something like this? “Just <3 Redfin!”. Turn your head to the right and look at “<3”, what do you see? It’s a heart. So just replace <3 with “love” and you are set.

5) OH
OH stands for “overheard”. That’s a connector between the physical world and the online world. If you see a Facebook status update “OH: ‘I wish the food didn’t smell like socks’”, it means someone heard that somewhere and thought it was funny or insightful and mentioned on a tweet. Usually it's used to protect the identity of the person who said that, and a lot of people use OH hours or days later to make sure the date/time cannot be traced back to the source of the comment.

6) I’m at... / I just unlocked the … badge
That’s not Twitter per se, but it’s Foursquare. You probably heard of Foursquare already and every time a user Checks-in somewhere, he can select to update Twitter with that information. Depending how Twitter is configured to sync with Facebook, that update will appear on Facebook as well (sometimes twice).

7) bit.ly / t.co
As you know Twitter is limited to 140 characters only. That means a link to a news article could consume most of the space you’d have to write a message. To fix that there are services like Bit.ly and Twitter own t.co which make URLs very short, like this http://bit.ly/bB1Hev. Those services are called "URL Shorteners". Twitter applications and services usually do that automatically.

8) #fb / #in
There are two hashtags that don't belong to the traditional use of hashtags. They are directives for the services that sync Twitter with Facebook and LinkedIn. The standard Facebook App for Twitter will post all tweets to Facebook, however there is a Facebook App called “Selective Tweet” that only post tweets to Facebook if they have “#fb” on them. Similarly, if you went to LinkedIn and added your Twitter account, LinkedIn will only post updates from Twitter if they have “#in” on them.


I hope this cheat-sheet will be useful to FB users so they can understand what tweeps (Twitter users) are saying. Now post this to Facebook and help spread the word.

Microsoft and Its 3 Employees Generation

Last week I was at my wife’s 10-year Microsoft anniversary celebration at the EMP. As it always goes Microsoft celebrations feel very sterile (that’s another post). Talking with many of my friends who are hitting the 10-year mark with the company I realized they are a special breed. These are the folks that joined the company at the same time Steve Ballmer became the CEO.


These folks are very different from previous generations (1999 and early) and very different from the folks who joined just a couple of years later. Why? Because they joined at a time that stock options were supposed to be worth something, but after ten years, it’s worth pretty much nothing for most of them. The employees who joined after 2002 had already low expectations.

So the 2000-2001 Microsoft employee generation is likely to be the most disappointed. They joined when there was a lot of hope, they saw people getting a lot of value from their stock option, yet, they were given an empty gift box. Based on that, you’d think they are the most likely to quit the company, but the opposite is true.

Without any real stats but based on my small view of the world, I see people leaving Microsoft many times a week. I see a clear split between two groups, which matches the groups I mentioned above. The first group is people who’ve done some (or a lot of) money at Microsoft. They joined prior to 1999, they worked there for 11+ years, made money, and are ready for something new. The second group joined Microsoft between 4-8 years ago (2002-2006), they are much younger, and they decided to leave to pursue their own startups or to join companies like Google or Facebook.

But the 2000-2001 group is not leaving. They have a problem: sunken cost. They invested too much to leave it on the table. They spent so much of their lives at Microsoft they feel like they are pot committed. They keep talking about being there for a few more years, until things get better, until the stock is at $40, until they get to become a Principal (or a Partner).

To be clear, most of people at Microsoft are very happy. They don’t like Steve Ballmer and most executives, they don’t like the stock price not moving, they don’t like the lack of big innovations coming out of Microsoft (yes, I heard about Kinnect). But they feel comfortable with their work/life balance. The benefits are outstanding, the pay is good and the bonus is great. Why leave?

I not trying to critique/criticize or trying to change anything. I’m just making an observation from my point-of-view.

I bet Michael Arrington will quit AOL on...

...September 28, 2011.


Conceivian, the Startup Lab I joined a month ago, has just launched a fun project so people can bet when Michael Arrington will quit AOL, and we called it www.WhenWillMichaelQuit.com.

While trying to catch some Zs last Wednesday I start to wonder when will Michael Arrington quit AOL. I actually was thinking about it in the context of many of my entrepreneur friends who are “locked” into contracts for many years after their acquisition. On one case, the entrepreneur couldn’t manage to stay a whole year at the new large tech company and walked away from a lot of money.

See, depending on the company (and the deal), it’s pretty hard to have free-spirited entrepreneurs being “locked” into the large company “jail”. It has nothing to do with the merits of the larger company, but everything to do with how smaller business and large business work. There is a sea of differences and when you think you know how bad it is and how you are going to manage, your learn that entrepreneurs working at very large companies is a soul-killer move.

I’m pretty sure -- scratch that, I’m 100% sure -- Michael Arrington will not stay the full 3 years for his earn-out (there is a rumor he’ll get about $15M extra in earn-outs, which could be $5M per year he works there).

Why not create a site?

This is when I started thinking about a website for people to bet when they think Michael Arrington will quit. People could just pick a date, and we would see a distribution of exactly when people think it will happen. Fun.

On Thursday, after a long afternoon of discussions related to another Conceivian project, and just before I left the office, I dropped a line to the team, like... “What do you guys think of a website where people can leave a guess when Michael Arrington will quit AOL?” After a few stares I left for the day.

After a full day of work on Friday, around 4pm I asked people if they had thought about it. Everyone were on board. In less than one hour we spec’d the user experience, we made a short to-do list, we decide what was not in scope, and got everything ready to be done on Monday.

Getting to work...

On Monday we got cranking. We’ve designed and built the site. We integrated email, RSS, Twitter and Facebook. We prepared the go-to-market plan (yep, we did that). We talked about legal issues, liabilities, conversion and finished 80% of the product. Our goal was pretty ambitious. Build most of it on Monday, have a beta for friends on Tuesday afternoon. Sneak preview to the press on Tuesday night. Fix the final blocking bugs and prepare for production by Wednesday morning, and announce it as soon as we felt it was a “go”.

There you have it: http://www.whenwillmichaelquit.com/

Read the official blog post from the launch at WWMQ and a different angle at Conceivian’s blog.