Month: March 2009

Proof that Twitter has become more commercial

General

I could have used “How to get people to stop following you on Twitter” as the title of this blog post.

Yesterday I got eight email messages from UseQwitter.com that various followers of me on Twitter had quit following me.

And get this: All eight quit for the same reason!

“What was the reason?,” you might ask.

I wrote four days ago my first only-personal tweet on Twitter.

All that I wrote was something to the effect of: “Go figure. Weather in Houston is spectacular, but I am sick.”

By the way: Do not look for this tweet now; I deleted it after realizing the error of my ways!

I was imitating someone whom I follow in Austin, who had tweeted something about Austin weather that same day.

But his tweet was not as personal as mine; he simply celebrated the beautiful weather that day.

What those eight Twitter followers of me did — that is, quit following me — actually matches my own behavior about a month ago, when I stopped following a woman who was tweeting like crazy and mostly about personal stuff such as boarding an airplane, going to dinner with someone, and looking for a nightclub to go dancing.

After she started to follow me, I started to follow her because she seemed to have some interesting ideas related to Internet marketing.

But the dominance of her personal tweets over her business tweets made me stop following her.

This is my personal proof that Twitter has become more commercial than personal: I will stop following others when they tweet too much about personal matters, and others stopped following me when I tweeted about one personal matter after my seventy tweets about various business matters.

So my advice to anyone is to take care with the subject matter of one’s tweets.

“Power Washing: Commerical and Res.”

Adjectives

I saw this on a hand-written “bandit” sign this morning.

Problem:
The misspelling is quite obvious, I hope!

Explanation:
A “bandit” sign is what the City of Houston calls any sign placed illegally in a public right-of-way, such as at a street corner.

The misspelling of the word “commercial” — as C-O-M-M-E-R-I-C-A-L — on a sign that read “Power Washing Commerical and Res.” was very obvious.

The sign was one of many hand-written signs that I had seen around Houston in the past week for the same power-washing company, which apparently offers its services to both residential and commercial customers.

What gave me pause, though, was that this was not a typographic error.

Granted, people can easily misspell words when hand-writing them, too.

But this particular error (Would you call it a “hand-o” instead of a “typo”?) caught my eye because it immediately looked wrong.

This makes me wonder whether the sign writer was simply guessing at the proper order of the letters, knowing that there were both an “i” and a “c” in the middle of the adjective “Commercial”.

Such will be the fate of anyone who is not taught phonetics, in my opinion.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “commercial” — 672,000,000 matches
  • “commerical” — 5,450,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the correct spelling versus the incorrect spelling by a ratio of 123-to-1, which is excellent, although my enthusiasm is dampened by the nearly 5.5 million misspellings.

Solution:
“Power Washing: Commercial and Res.”

“a student of mine’s mother”

Apostrophes, Possessives, Pronouns

I heard this the other day, and it struck me as odd — mostly because there is a bad habit among many American children to say “mines” instead of “mine”.

Problem:
A pronoun may not be converted into a possessive simply by adding apostrophe-“s”.

Explanation:
The archaic use of the word “mine” as a pronoun is as a substitute for “my” — as in “Mine eyes have seen the glory …”.

But the word “mine” as a pronoun has two modern meanings:

  1. a predicate-adjective form of the possessive case of the pronoun “I”, as in “The green car is mine.”;
  2. something belonging to me, as in “Mine is the purple towel.”

I am unsure whether the “mine” in “a student of mine’s mother” more closely follows definition #1 or definition #2.

Concentrating on the first part of the phrase, one could argue that the “mine” in “a student of mine” follows definition #1 because one could say, “The student is mine.”

Or one could argue that the “mine” in “a student of mine” follows definition #2 because one could say, “Mine is the student.”

No matter which argument makes more sense to you, it is clear that “mine” in “a student of mine’s mother” is a pronoun.

And a pronoun may not be converted into a possessive simply by adding apostrophe-“s”, so the phrase must be rewritten.

Solution:
“the mother of one of my students”
OR
“one of my students’ mothers”