Habitually Good

Everybody loves Twitter. Those who don’t understand it love it. It’s trendy. It’s the in-thing. Well, because it’s all that, it is also host to a lot of evil. You can get spammed, phished, stalked, or just about anything in the world. My personal grudge is how I pick up fake followers when I type some keyword. I almost started a dictionary of bot-inducing keywords for Twitter.

In such an exploited medium it is refreshing when someone does good old fashioned marketing on Twitter. Meet Andrey K (Andy).

Let me step back a little. I moved to storing my blog images and media on Amazon S3 about a year ago. And I made use of a great FireFox plugin called S3Fox to upload my files to S3. That was all fine till I stopped using FireFox and started using Chrome. It just so happened that only because of S3Fox I was still firing up clunky old FireFox whenever I needed to upload an image.

Coming back to the main story – I was setting up a new computer at home and was happy that I don’t have FireFox on it, however that happiness was not so long lasting because I needed S3Fox. So, I decided to share my grief with the Twitter population through a tweet. Out of the blue came a tweet addressed to me from cloudberryman aka Andy.

He simply asked me to checkout CloudBerry Explorer. The rest is history. I downloaded the tool, found it very useful. Got rid of FireFox. And now I am writing this post.

So, why is this such a big deal?

Because the response coming from Andy was personal, solicited, and contextual. It was not an automated bot. What’s more, Andy responded to further questions and queries. So, I decided to get in touch with him and ask a little more on how he uses Twitter for his business. Here are some of the key points of our email exchange:

• Andy uses some predefined searches to scour the Twitter stream. You can do this either through Twitter Search or through a tool such as TweetDeck. Whenever he comes across a Tweet which he thinks could be from a user who would benefit from knowing about CloudBerry Explorer, he sends them a reply on Twitter. Simple.
• He gets over a third of his visits to his website through Twitter.
• He must be doing something right, because according to him, in the last 6 months, he has only received 5-6 negative responses to his tweets. Most people come back with thanks, or even use Twitter to send him suggestions or queries.

About CloudBerry Explorer for Amazon S3

Need I say more than the fact that I have it installed on all my computers? Maybe I do. Well, it is a quick, responsive, extremely easy to use tool to move your files between your computer and your account on Amazon S3.

It supports background processing, so you can actually queue up a large number of files, minimize it to the system tray, and forget about it. It will work in the background to get your data transfer task completed.

It has some neat features so that it allows you to manage multiple S3 accounts, and lets you move data between them. A nice looking user interface, with multiple tabs support makes it a nice complete package.

I would say, once they develop it a little more (have versions for various platforms, etc.) they should make a serious attempt to sell the tool to Amazon.

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