The article talks about how Retweets (a key aspect of Twitter) wasn’t part of the original design but was birthed though users trying new things and pushing the technology to its limits. Twitters moderators learned from the innovation of their users and implemented a more stable retweet system and new additions that users suggested or requested.

This article can teach our class to listen to our users and allow them to take our memes where they are meant to be. We may have a plan in mind but if it takes off in a different direction we can’t fight it.

A twitter account which tweets and retweets art created which the 140 character limit. With over 100,000 follows, this is a good example of coming up with an original idea and letting a social network take it to the next level.

There are robots on twitter that track specific hashtags and topics and follow anyone who mentions them. Advertisers and sellers use these to push their products and websites to anyone that could possibly be interested and many that aren’t.

This can be applied to our class because we are trying to gain as large of an audience as possible. By gaining followers on twitter like this we get spammed with advertisements and no one sees what we are trying to spread the word about.

3 Facebook mistakes summarized:

1) Cover photo mishaps. Its one of the first things people see when they visit your wall so make it something entertaining and that doesn’t hinder you.

2)Don’t spam people with facebook apps like the questions apps. Spread out your use of these tools otherwise they will hurt instead of help.

3) Don’t post the same thing all the time. People will get annoyed and you will gain a negative reputation.

Contest:

Talks about Peretti’s background in Contagious Media and Memes (Blackpeopleloveus.com and Therejectionline.com)

Secret Sauce; Have some humor, and perhaps an element of unreality (realistic but farfetched) with a dash of the provocative or controversial.

Talked about why sites failed

Examples:

60 second story- interactive but flat (not very funny or controversial)

Farting Saucers and Felon Check- Funny but lacked interactivity and provocation

This article talks about different ways to destroy your printer and all the videos that have been made about this topic. The important thing to take away from this video is the lesson that original ideas are hard to come by and you need to be creative in how to address a topic if you want to seem original.

While the original intent of this article might have been geared more towards videos, I think I could apply this lesson to my meme. Almost everything I do regarding this meme someone, somewhere has almost certainly done it before. I need to be as creative as possible and try to do things no one has done before otherwise my meme will get grouped with all the others like it and get lost.