TechTalk

08/05/2009 In Business Resources by Brad Slavin

Hummingbird claims to be the software that the “Twitter Elite” don’t want you to know about. The developers claim that by using Hummingbird software you can automate to the building of a huge twitter following in a matter of weeks rather than months or years. I am a skeptic, I have always been the person that wants’ know “what’s the catch” or if something is to good to be true it probably is. Skeptical not cynical

So I plunked down some hard earned cash on April 20th of 2009 and decided to give it three weeks. Today is March 8 and I feel that I am in a pretty good position to be able to give this review. So that’s 19 days of owning the software, probably 15 days of using it, and I am SHOCKED at how well it works.

Here is the background information:

1. I created a brand new twitter account on the 20th of April. I added a picture to the account and I had ZERO followers at that point. Here is a copy of the email receipt to show when I got the software.

2. I searched the Internet for some relevant links in the niche that I was interested in and then copied the URLs into a text file on my desktop making some notes to what the web page was about.

It looked like this:

Short Sales:
My tweet, and then the url that I found:

How to do a short sale – http://www.ehow.com/how_8132_short-sale.html

Snag a great deal on a short sale http://money.cnn.com/2009/01/27/real_estate/short_sale.moneymag/index.htm

How to exit your property with a short sales http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/hotproperty/archives/2007/03/the_new_exit_st.html

I created about 40 links like this by searching google for “short sale 2009”

3. I posted about 10 of these links into my newly created twitter account while inside the Hummingbird interface just so that I had some content for people to read when they checked out my profile.

4. I used hummingbirds built in twitter following tool to find followers and I picked a keyword that I wanted to follow. I found a user talking about short sales and they had about 3500 followers. I clicked on their profile, and then on the list of their followers and when the list of their followers came up I pressed the button in Hummingbird to auto-follow the users in the list.

5. I then started posting every 5 or 10 minutes one or two of the remaining links that until I had posted about 30 total links including the original ten before I turned on Hummingbird.

6. At this point I was about three hours into the process and I had followed nearly 1000 people. I manually stopped Hummingbird because I did not want go get the account banned on the first night for following to may people. This was just too easy.

7. I had about 40 people following me within four hours. I then went back to step number 2, rebuild my tweets for the next day and went to sleep.

8. When I woke up I had 327 people following me! This was in less than 8 hours! I kept posting links throughout the day.

9. On day two all I did was post links and kept following the rest of the people in the account from that I was originally following. I got up to about 1100 people that I was following and about 36 updates. At the end of day two I had 331 unique twitter followers all found and auto followed with Hummingbird.

11. At about 8pm on day two, I started my first mass unfollow. And the next morning my numbers were even at about 331 followers and 381 following.

10. Day three I just posted about 20 new links found the same way as step 2.

12. I then started the process over again. Basically wash, rinse, repeat. I have done this three times in since I started using the software and as of today May 8, 2009 I have 1,627 followers and I am following 2,001 total twitter users and everything was automated with Hummingbird.

13. In Summary:

• Start a twitter account
• BUY HUMMINGBIRD – $197 is cheap!
• Search Google for relevant content
• Post 10-20 updates per day
• Use hummingbird to find a person with lots of followers in your niche follow their followers
• Wait 24-36 hours and unfollow the people that are not following you
• Post 10-20 new tweets a day
• Repeat.

*** I will tell you that the first 200 followers are the most difficult, actually maybe the first 40 are the toughest, people don’t want to be the first to follow a new user but one I got to about 40 twitter followers the Hummingbird really helped me to kick it into over-drive. ***

Results on Day 11

This software is amazing! I would most certainly recommend Hummingbird if you want to automatically build a twitter following. It is a great twitter manager software that automates the tiring tasks!

Results on Day 15.

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16/03/2009 In Just ! Me by Brad Slavin

I have been looking at these guys for a long time as a solution to my bad habit of NEVER checking my mailbox. They have a system that handles physical mail via email – Earth Class Mail brlliant! On more than one occasion I have had to visit the post office because my mailbox filled up and they “impounded” the mail and halted delivery. Ouch!

The majority of my bills are electronic, I get the statement, I use my bill pay software to pay the bill and I never have to touch paper! No spam, no junk mail, no credit card offers, no coupon packs. And after a while you also get no checks from clients because the mail carrier stops delivering the mail… Ouch.

After picking up the huge box of paper (time after time) I realized that 99% of the volume and almost 100% of the weight was just junk…trash…(well actually recycling) but its a problem. There is just no reason that there should be so much junk. The other issue is that with all of that crap, its easy to miss the important pieces of mail trapped in the folds of the local coupon books.

The other reason to consider an all digital delivery for your mail is to protect against identity theft or if you are a vagabond and like to travel. This way you can get your physical mail sent to your Inbox wherever you have access to your email. Check them out – I will and I will keep you updated. Once again, Earth Class Mail for handling your physical mail via email.

Oh you can also view it on my cell phone.

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07/03/2009 In 15 Minutes by admin

Looks like the government is at it again. Doing their best to keep our information safe (subtle irony here). There were 48 files that were breached from a server containing information on over 45,000 FAA employees and retirees.

You can read more about it on the FAA website at – http://www.faa.gov/news/press_releases/news_story.cfm?newsId=10394

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17/02/2009 In 15 Minutes by Brad Slavin

Sick and Tired… This describes my year long spiral into unhappiness with Mediatemple.net. Fantastic reviews online, but overall a really crappy provider. I use a service called Pingdom.com which tracks uptime of all of my domains and websites. And after checking out the stats I was so disappointed with Media Temple and their support staff that I just had to call it quits.

The Pro’s

The Con’s

I would get a page from Pingdom, letting me know the site was down – I would wait a few minutes, check and then fire off an email… I then got a reply that they were working on it. You know, it is just once to often. The other big issues was how the server would just freeze up for a few seconds, and as long as 30 seconds when I was SSH’d into the machine. I would be untaring a file, it would hang and then just sort of restart. Very frustrating.

As my brother would say “Ambitious, but Rubbish”

Here is my uptime image from Pingdom, and you can see why I am leaving.

Mediatemple sucks

This may just seem like random squabbling, but I used to own (and sold) an ISP and hosting company. The reason I went to (MT) was because I wanted a managed service, with better than average performance for a fair price.

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11/12/2008 In Business Resources by Brad Slavin

Today I received a strange email from a friend on facebook. She is not the type to send random spammy emails so when I got this I was a little suspicious.

Knowing a little about how this virus was going around I felt pretty sure that I could track it down, without getting infected. So I decided to follow the link in the email – which by the way she sent to all of her facebook.com friends. (Lets hope they did not get the virus)

Once I followed clicked the link – I was redirected from a geocities link http://geocities.com/kellyconway02/index.htm…. to a site that calls itself YuoTube – Broadcast Yourself. Notice this is Yuo, not YouTube… Clever. It also has a reference to Teresa in the header and her picture in the profile to convince an unsuspecting viewer that this is a legit message.

And the profile picture that matches the facebook profile picture.

To make the page look even more believable that they have also included a user review section.

The culmination of the deception is possible because the video window looks like you are missing a plugin in order to watch. They report that you need a new version of Adobe Flash and then the download auto-starts.

This is the popup with the URL and port number for the setup.exe download that is a virus.

I then traced this IP down to the “Korean Education Network” and filed an abuse complaint. Who knows how many people will get hit before they respond.

Suggestions on how to get these guys shut down would be appreciated.

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