I’m currently working on the ‘other social media channels’ chapter of our book. There will be a sizable section on Twitter. One small question I’m struggling with is “should organizations follow everybody who follows them?” The safe answer, of course, is ‘yes’. That seems to be the prevailing etiquette (Twittequette?). But it’s not one to which I subscribe.
I’ve mused on this subjectbefore, and I’d rather not muse on it again. It’s the kind of echo-chambery silliness that gets much too much play online. But, in the interests of writing a useful book, here I go again.
Is Mutual Following the Predominant Behaviour?
First off, is mutual or reciprocal following the predominant behaviour? I think so, though I haven’t seen any empirical data or surveys on the subject. I receive an occasional coolly-worded tweet from somebody on Twitter that implies that I should be following them presumably because they’re following me. Lee recently mentioned how that he doesn’t adhere to this policy. His approach seems similar to my own views on the subject:
I take a decidedly lightweight approach to social media. If I haven’t met you or don’t know you personally, I’m not likely to add you as a friend or follow you. I currently follow about 200 people on Twitter and it’s still too much. When I follow someone with the @leelefever account, I try keep up with most of their updates. This is how I’ve always used Twitter.
Giving into this perceived social pressure would force an unwelcome change in how I want to use Twitter, and make it a less useful tool.
The New Blogroll?
Julie pointed out that reciprocal following feels a bit like the new blogroll. A blogroll was a handy way of linking to all of the websites you read. It was also a polite way to recognize that another blog or site had linked to you. They ‘voted’ for your site, and in return you ‘vote’ for theirs using your blogroll.
I’m not sure why (though I expect RSS played a role), but blogrolls seem to be going out of fashion. And the difference between a blogroll and reciprocal following on Twitter is that the former is a passive list on a static page or sidebar, while the latter changes how you use the tool.
In both cases, the behaviour feels kind of punctilious–that I’m doing it primarily for the sake of appearances. The two perspectives feel like, I don’t know, like the socialist versus capitalist view of Twitter. What do you think?
[BioWare co-founder] Muzyka explained that the designers of the game wanted to ensure that The Old Republic was a story-based MMO that followed in the tradition of the Knights of the Old Republic. He added that while people have often asked BioWare if the company would ever produce the third installment in the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, this new game amounts to installment Nos. three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine and beyond.
The Little Things
There’s no release date as yet, so the game is probably more than a year away. I visited the game’s flashy-flash website in the hopes of subscribing to an RSS feed or something, so that I could periodically get news updates. There’s a newsletter, but I’d rather not give them my email address. I didn’t see a feed on the home page, but I did see this familiar row of social media icons:
Great, I thought, I’ll just subscribe to the Twitter feed. The link goes here. Unfortunately, there’s no account there. In fact, ’starwarstheoldrepublic’ is too long for a Twitter user name.
Ah well, maybe I’ll just subscribe to their YouTube channel instead. I click the little YouTube icon next to the Twitter one. Nope. That’s an invalid user name, too.
The other icons–Facebook, MySpace, Flickr–do work. But it’s a reminder to ensure that you get the little things right. I’m guessing their website has received, what, 50,000 visitors in the past day? At the very least.
No RSS feed on the home page and a 40% failure rate on their icons is a bit of a shame. I doubt they’ll lose many players at this stage, but those early adopters are too valuable to give away so easily.
After digging around a bit, I did find a developer blog for the game. I’m going to subscribe to that for the time being.
I should say that I’m looking forward to trying another Star Wars MMPORG. I quite enjoyedStar Wars Galaxies, at least until they screwed it up.
When Twitter–the popular microblogging platform–is down for the count (something that’s been happeninga lot lately), they display this charming image on their website:
I think it’s quite lovely, in a surreal sort of way. And it always struck me as a bit existential. I started to wonder about those eight little birds, and how they must feel about their workload. So, I made this 2-minute video, which features the worst animation you’ve ever seen:
Apologies for my pitiful reading–I’m an awful actor. An actress friend of ours, Mercedes Dunphy, was in town for the weekend, so I got her to do the other voice. She raises the bar considerably. I lifted the opening lines from the seminal first episode of Red vs. Blue, and stole a couple of other lines from Waiting for Godot. There’s also a Douglas Adams reference which, given the presence of a plummeting sperm whale, seemed like a must.
I was a little disappointed by the way both Vimeo and YouTube processed this video. YouTube wouldn’t remotely keep the audio and animation synchronized, and Vimeo cut out the open three seconds of video (hence the overlapping groans), which shows the whale image above to aid with context. I’m pretty new to this video stuff–any recommendations as to how I can upload this to a video-sharing site without it getting all bollocksed up?
Something that Todd said in a comment on that post resonated:
I found myself thinking that broadcast was the wrong word for twitter, as it tends to start working more like IM over time, only not as isolated.
Looking back at my Twitter stream, most of my tweets (I’m still displeased by that word) are replies to other people, or links to something. I’m not sure why, but I’m disinclined to post tweets that answer the default Twitter question, “what are you doing?”
21st Century IRC
I used to hang out in a Skype channel that included 30 or 40 Vancouverites from the tech community. I’d let in run in the background, and remark on some tech news or bemoan the Canucks as the mood struck me. Twitter has replaced that as a kind of 21st century IRC.
I have a link blog in the sidebar of this site. It’s a kind of clearing house for stuff that interests me, but doesn’t merit a full post on my site. A couple hundred people subscribe to it, and I really don’t know how useful people find it (I’ve never asked).
Now every time I spot a link I’d like to pass on (such as this blog of things that look like a duck), I have to decide whether it goes in Twitter, in the link blog, or both. Both takes too long, and I have yet to develop criteria for what goes where.
I asked, on Twitter, about just streaming my link blog into my Twitter stream, but I got a couple of negative responses. Understandably, people (presumably they were link blog subscribers) didn’t want to get repeated content. When I first signed up for Twitter many moons ago, I did that with my blog’s RSS feed, and somebody told me it wasn’t kosher.
They’re probably right–I find little value in tweets that read “New Blog Post: http://www.verysmallurl.com/fdfdla”. If I want to read your blog, I probably already subscribe to it. Obviously the etiquette on all this stuff is still emerging.
The number of people I follow is up from 33 to 58. The increase is mostly due professional interest (I’m following some top tech bloggers). I tend to give people a trial run, and if I find what they’re writing about interesting, I stick with them.
No Debate Team at This High School
The major frustration that I’ve found on Twitter is that it inhibits debate. I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to have a cogent argument that doesn’t devolve into sound bites on the platform. I love debate–it’s one of the reasons I spend leisure time online. Twitter seems to act a bit like high school in this regard–either people hurl insults or just talk nice (I know high schools have debate teams, but that’s where my analogy breaks down).
So, the experiment continues. Any suggestions on how I should handle the link blog vs. Twitter issue?
Just a quick note to say that I’m going to be in California for New Comm Forum this week. On Wednesday, April 23, I’m going to scoot down to Web 2.0 Expo to see a couple of clients and conduct a couple of interviews for our forthcoming book. I was fortunate to get media accreditation for the latter event (conveniently, our book is distributed by O’Reilly, the same people who put on the conference).
I know I’m a minnow in the tech-blogger ocean, but if any Web 2.0 Expo attendees want to pitch me, feel free. I like Stowe’s Twitpitch model:
Here’s the rules for Twitpitching:
All companies who would like to have a meeting with me, need to send me a Twittered description of the product. Yes, please Twitter it to me at www.twitter.com/stoweboyd. Yes, one tweet, 140 characters less the eleven used for “@stoweboyd “.
Optionally, send a supporting twitpitch with one link, and no other text. Could be to anything: website, video, press release, Rick Astley, etc.
Then, twitter me one or more suggested times/place to meet at the event, using the times on the calendar, and a location in the conference building I won’t have time to visit your nearby hotel or offices.
Until today, I’ve been using a tool called Tweetmeme to check, once or twice a day, what’s being talked about on Twitter. It takes its name from Techmeme, and aspires to be a kind of real-time Google Zeitgeist for Twitter. Today I happened to learn about two more such services, so I thought I’d write up a quick review of all three
It does an okay job. Right now it rightfully (at least as far as I can tell this morning) identifies Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice (as with every tool and site, self-referential stories tend to bubble to the top). However, it mimics the user interface of Twitter itself, which doesn’t seem like the natural way to present this aggregated “what matters” information. Just because it’s about Twitter, it doesn’t have to look like Twitter.
Next up is Buzztter (via a tweet from Robert), which uses a tag cloud model to track what’s big on Twitter. Their logo looks like an unholy union of Flickr and Google. Buzztter seems to think that tweets about the pope are at the top of the list. The Egypt story is nowhere to be seem. I’m not keen on Buzzter, as there’s no indication of relative popularity.
Finally there’s Alpha Twitter (heads up, incoming lawsuit over that name). This seems to be the best of the bunch. It’s stupid-simple, with a ranked list of the top links. You can also view the most popular links for a longer period, including (cue ominous voice) All Time. Thanks to Alpha Twitter, I watched this amusing satire of a Jobsian keynote. Thanks to Andy for the pointer.
Since it launched, I’ve been conflicted about Twitter. It’s an ego distillery, and the signal to noise ratio is ridiculously high (or should that be low?).
Yet, I’m feeling increasingly obligated to engage with the tool for professional purposes (not to mention the book we’re writing). I encourage all of our technology clients to use the service, but there would be obviously be applications for an active personal account as well. A friend recently launched a new project, and announced it on Twitter. He called it something like “a fantastic lens for focusing attention”.
But, man, I just can’t get interested.
Thinking about it, I wondered if it had something to do with an obligation to ‘follow’ a few hundred members of the digerati. Or even the social obligation to follow everybody who’s following me? I more or less bowed to that perceived pressure in Facebook, and now I’ve got 455 friends and rising. How many of them are actual friends or colleagues in any kind of meaningful way? Less than half, I’d guess. As such, it’s a useless tool for monitoring actual friends’ activity. And I’m not even sure if I want to do that.
My New Baseline
So here’s my latest Twitter experiment. I’m only going to follow people who I personally know, and with whom I have an ongoing regular relationship. We see each other at least occasionally, or exchange emails or something. If I met somebody two years ago at a conference, and haven’t seen them since, they’re out. If I read their blog and comment regularly, and send them an email every once and a while, they’re in. That’s my new baseline.
I just culled my Twitter following list down to 33. It will increase, as I haven’t actively sought anybody out to add, but I’m going to try to be disciplined about it.
Hopefully this approach will help me get more excited about the tool. Instead of just another fire hose of geeky news, I’ll be watching my friends and colleagues lives. Which, just as mine would, may turn out to be tremendously dull. But I’m giving it the old college try. Again.
I don’t expect to ‘tweet’ (that is, broadcast messages) very much at this stage. I plan to just watch and reply to others if something tweaks my interest.
On a personal note, I have very mixed feelings about Twitter. I’ve found that it’s kind of an Ego Distillery. Blog posts, obviously, tend to be pretty self-centered. But because Twitter is restricted to 140-characters per post, it really seems to bring out the self-importance in everyone.
Twitter asks the question “what are you doing?” I find that the answer is too often “something really important”.
That’s why I only post quotations from songs and poems in my own Twitter account. It ensures that I don’t add to my already burgeoning self-centered online presence, and my Twitter followers probably enjoy a break from the banalities of their friends and colleagues lives.
It’s slightly odd to quote myself quoting Vanessa, but I’ve been meaning to express my uneasiness with Twitter outputs on this site, and this was a handy way to do so.
Am I alone in thinking of Twitter as an Ego Distillery?
You might rightfully ask why I’m using the tool at all. And you’d be right too. Simply put, I need to keep an eye on Twitter for professional purposes. Plus, it’s a fun game to think of good quotes.
A couple of weeks ago, I made some silly comics to promote a product review to some bloggers. I used Comic Life, an easy-to-use app that comes with OS X.
That’s when I had this week’s free idea: a microblogging platform based around comic book frames. It works like Twitter, except that each time you want to post, you choose an image (probably of yourself) and a type of thought or speech balloon. Then you type your message.
Here’s my, er, prototype:
The app would integrate with Flickr and other photo-sharing services, enabling you to choose from any of your photos, or photos with a particular tag. You could also use your webcam to snap a photo.
There’s obviously the problem of ‘twittering’ from your mobile device, but you could set up one or more default comic frames for posting on the go, or for when you couldn’t be arsed to make a new comic frame.
Ironically, what I’m describing feels slightly like what Flickr briefly was when I first saw it. Kind of a real-time chat with photo-sharing on the fly.
I suppose the downside is that it’s slower-per-post than Twitter would be, and people are very attracted to the enforced brevity (a side effect is that Twitter seems to be an Ego Distillation Engine, but more on that another time).
What do you think of this week’s silly idea? Maybe it already exists?
For professional reasons, I’m forcing myself to pay more attention to this whole microblogging/status trickle space. I believe I’ve discovered a wayto update Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Tumblr and Facebook all at the same time. That would make life easier, certainly.
But I need a Jaiku invitation. If you’ve got one kicking around, please send it to me at darren {at} darrenbarefoot {fullstop} com. Merci.
