Remember my Social Media Guide For Free Software Projects? Skreech was so kind to point me to a really great un-example site: Microsoft’s social media page for Windows 7, where they show what people are saying about it. Go take a look.
Now there are a few interesting things to mention about this page.
Quite fast, huh? Lots of people talking about it. Are those messages real-time? Nope. The page is just made to give you the impression they are. I picked a few random ones and got pretty much everything between 3 hours and 8 days old. See the slider at the top? Yea you can slow it down to actually be able to read it unlike the default.
If you feel like it just watch it for a few minutes and watch the same messages appear again. It started to loop after about 10 minutes here.
Now let’s take a look at the actual content of the messages shown. Windows 7 must be the most awesome operating system out there. In the 30 minutes or so I watched the stream there were 2 messages with a slightly negative touch. Every single other message praised it. Every single one. Now call me biased but I don’t believe it. So I had a look at the actual Twitter search page for Windows 7 and Win7. And indeed you find tweets, that are less positive, like this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this or this. They do however have little stabs at Linux and Apple in their selected tweets (“I though Apple had it together but with Win7 out of the door they better get moving.” and similar.). This page seems to indicate that they do indeed filter for family friendliness and so on. Fair enough. But it also says that they do not filter out the negative stuff. Uhhhhm yes you do.
The Facebook messages are taken from the Windows fan page on Facebook. Now my guess is that the audience of said fan page is slightly biased 😉 but I’ll let that one slide as there aren’t a lot of good ways to get such messages out of Facebook.
There is probably more but those are the things that immediately jumped into my eye. Please leave comments if you find other gems.
Now the sad thing is: From my quick check of Twitter and Co it seems that Windows 7 is indeed good according to quite a few people. There are indeed a lot of people tweeting about it. There would have been no need to hide behind filtering and sneaky web-apps trying to create an illusion of a lot of communication. This would have been a great opportunity to show what people really think about it and gain credibility. But it failed. It failed to be honest and instead took the secure way. If you want to take the secure way stay away from social media!
Wanna learn how to do it right? Get in touch with me and have a look at buzz.kde.org (which is indeed live and unfiltered and could use some coding help – ping me if you want to help).
But that thing look so cool comparing to buzz.k.o, if there is any mockup, i’d volunteer making KDE’s buzz look cool and fancy too.
If – by your own admission – that quite a few people are posting positive tweets of Win7, why would it come as a surprise that positive tweets outnumber negative one’s on Microsoft’s social page?
I’ve learned to never expect objectivity from the Linux crowd, but now it looks like I’ll also need to learn to expect accusations of conspiracy where simple common sense would’ve sufficed…
Sigh..
http://twitter.com/Wizzier/statuses/5516983817
http://twitter.com/dajuam/statuses/5477829370
http://twitter.com/applenag/statuses/5465143136
http://twitter.com/ayushpatel/statuses/5443341972
http://twitter.com/WDC/statuses/5438888726
http://twitter.com/shtole/statuses/5438444868
http://twitter.com/drinkwrandall/statuses/5424137669
http://twitter.com/d4v3/statuses/5401574411
http://twitter.com/digitalarbeiter/statuses/5401357096
http://twitter.com/JinxWolf/statuses/5350046646
Personal opinion. Get over it.
In Dutch we say: “Wie een hond wil slaan, heeft licht een stok gevonden.”, which means: if you want to find something bad/negative you *will* find it.
Hmm… page source confirms your tale! such an insult if you happened to be a Windows user! by being mis-lead (oh what a surprise!) by Microsoft!
@Emil: cool! I will get in touch with you when I have something.
@Eice: I am not surprised by the fact that positive messages outnumber negative ones. It’s the fact that they are outnumbered by so much more than in what Twitter actually has.
@Martijn: Of course. I never said there wasn’t anything bad to be found about other operating systems. It’s the fact that they are _way_ underrepresented on the Microsoft page compared to the actual Twitter search.
It is also interesting that if you click for only the Blog feed you get a:
No more social media items available for the selected filter
So the filter is there, but there is no (or not enough) blog posts about Windows 7. You would think that they would be able to find at least a few blogs about Windows 7…?
@SØREN: Heh that is indeed strange. When I checked there were a few blog posts.
@MARTIJN In English, we have “a pessimist is rarely disappointed”, which is kind of the same.
In Britain, we have adverts for Windows 7 which feature your typical man-in-the-street (or woman-in-a-taxi) saying how a various feature of Windows 7 was their idea – this is such a crass advertisement, and galling to all those application designers/writers and open-source folk who have had their ideas and experiences ripped off.
I can’t believe it! But thanks, M$, now I have a new negative example for my marketing lecture in two weeks.
is it that hard to believe that MS improved on Vista?
If you were a Vista user, Windows 7 would seem a huge advancement.
I used it for a week and I was surprised how well everything worked. Not the horror story I was expecting.
After a few days though, back to kde4 for me.
@Ian: Again, this isn’t about the fact that there are a lot of positive comments. I’m not surprised by that at all after Vista. It is about screwing the view by filtering out a big percentage of the negative comments that actually are being posted despite the fact that they would still be outnumbered by the positive ones.
I am not surprised by the fact that positive messages outnumber negative ones. It’s the fact that they are outnumbered by so much more than in what Twitter actually has.
I’m sure you must have some credible statistical data under your belt to be able to arrive at this remarkable conclusion, then.
Have you actually looked at the Twitter searches I linked?
I enjoyed this post and some of the comments. Lot of the debate can be put to rest with use of appropriate technology like the one I describe below.
The first and only truly semantic search engine that currently works on Twitter data is TipTop now available in a beta version. This engine understands each and every message on Twitter just like a human being would. As a result, it can discover from within the data the very best tweets organized nicely along a variety of categories and concepts learned dynamically. In fact, the entire platform learns from data as data flows through the engine. You can also now see in real time the sentiment associated with anything in the world that people are talking about. Please give it a try. Take a look at Windows 7 in TipTop
Do you actually expect us to believe they’re supposed to represent a sample set that accurately reflects the overall population?
@EICE: Nope, I don’t believe his trying to do that, I think he just want you to all see that asuming the oppposite reaction (a negative one) is absolutely ilogical too, not only it’s falacy per se, also it seems like people is very happy with Windows 7, even “techies” like it.
@Eice: It’s what the Microsoft page makes us believe. And I never said that it does or does not represent the whole population. I just compared the actual Twitter page with the selection of messages they show from there.
You’re obviously not reading what I am writing so we’ll stop that discussion now. Thank you.
For a blog post that started off with accusations of conspiracy of how Microsoft is filtering out unfavorable tweets from its social page, you seem to have resorted to a most classic display of hypocrisy by censoring and deleting my replies to your posts.
Pathetic.
No Eice, I told you the discussion is pointless with you since you refuse to read what I reply and therefor the discussion is over. You don’t seem to understand it. Deal with the consequences.
It is very clear to see what Lydia pointed out with this blog entry. And I can not see it negative way, just as a question why Microsoft is doing it if they market their own service as “What people is speaking of Windows 7”.
Of course PR section forced that there should be only a few negative comments because otherwise they can be show to be falsefying results right away even by most blinded fan.
But hey, if we want to see our bad sides, bugs, mistakes etc. We can always point out people to the bugs.kde.org or the distributors own lists. There is everything where we can draw even graphs to show the existing problems and resolves.
We are open and we do not even try to hide that we are not perfect and good.
The MS is hiding the real opinions of Windows 7 users on it’s service and saying it is even realtime.
And if someone calls what Lydia wrote as conspiracy, have not even readed the text itself and the proofs. What even anyone can do themself by just comparing MS service site and suggested social sites. That is not conspiracy if anyone can notice that MS is faking… that is just a fact. Conspiracy is saying that we are on the mission to make MS look bad by falsefying the facts. But anyone can go there and check themself the functionality and notice the thing how it really is and told here.
Microsoft after watching millions leveraging social media to promote their products,decided to do that their good old Microsoft way.I agree with you,that its biased because even if you invent a time machine there would be at least 10% of the people who would dislike it.Windows 7 is no time machine its just a fix for Vista.In the end all consumers are never happy which makes the vendor unhappy coaxing him to resort to such unfair means.
Btw these screenshots confirm your point:
What people are saying about Win 7
http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/8711/screenshotku.png
What people are actually saying about win 7
http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/4208/screenshot1er.png
buzz on KDE is great, but there is a script on buzz.kde.org causing firefox to consume heaps of CPU making the site unusable. Looks to be jquery from the Google API, according to the alert box. Maybe it should be upgraded to the latest version of jquery?
Surprised that this passed testing ?
@James: Yea I know 🙁 It’s really not nice. That was the reason I asked for coder help in my blog. I now have found someone who pretty much rewrites it. The problem should be gone then.