This twitter WTF??

A friend of mine has been on twitter in the past and didn't use it much. Recently, he opened a new account and has been thinking of using it more and letting Face book cool on the back burner a bit---

So today he sends me this e-mail

"So today I open my Gmail and I have about 20 new people following me on twitter. I open one and its someone from Malaysia. All their posts are in Malaysian, or whatever they speak. So I click block. Then I go back to my email. ALL of the new followers are from other countries and none of their posts are in English. I blocked them all.  Just opened my email, there are MORE, followers from other countries. WTF"?

Here was my response: 

There is no need to "block" people, if someone wants to follow you, let them, it is like someone reading your blog, there is no urgency to reach less people, unless you are running a secret society. There are tons of people out there who will follow you with the only expectation that you will follow them back. They just want to be able to say "Hey look at me I got 25,000 followers in 3 months'! Uh ..whatever. The giveaway is somebody who say for instance  sells bridal gowns, and that is all they tweet about, suddenly out of the blue they are following you, The odds are they want you to follow them back. There are actually software programs that do this digital phishing. If after a week or so if you don't follow back they disappear. My own pet peeve is people who call themselves "social media experts". They want lots of followers to in fact prove that they are experts at what they claim. Invariably they have a blog and write about things like "Top ten ways to improve web traffic". These people LOVE the words TOP TEN!! I mostly don't follow these people because they seem to be all in a giant pit of silly sameness. Then many businesses will follow, (like restaurants), also wanting a follow back and they are looking for free advertising, and a cheap way to get their message out.

Either it is public or it isn't. There are things you can go on and "categorize" yourself. For instance you can put Aerospace, Photography and Cooking as your interests that you tweet about. Then people searching that might follow you. Also of course they search your Bio, if you have a blog put a link in the bio. There is an expectation if you have 10,000 followers you have more influence in the world than if you have  100. Of course if your 100 followers were heavyweights like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, etc those 100 might be mucho more important than the 10,000 but that is another discussion. There are sites you can go on to actually buy followers and I don't know how that works. Followers are generally considered good unless it is offensive like maybe porn or spam. Don't be stingy many people are out there slack-jawed and hungry for your wisdom. it is all about sharing right?

You have to decide of course why you are on there, on twitter, and what you want to get out of it.

I have a dude I follow in Singapore (never met, don't know well), and we have had discussions about a variety of things. I think it is pretty cool you have people following you from foreign countries. Don't assume because they mainly write in a foreign language they can't read or communicate in yours. My neighbor is on twitter and she mainly writes in Japanese!

I have actually met up with people IRL that I have only known through twitter, which is weird but good. It is literally a digital community of your own building, it is a digital garden and it grows with the TLC you put into it and the way you tend it. You can be stoic and machine like on twitter or very friendly, open, and gregarious. Of course you know me, I am an opinionated, fairly fearless, wide-open warrior of the good argument, the good discourse, and I am not hiding from anyone. People in America talk about the disenfranchised 99%, well maybe they should make themselves heard a little more. I also like to bring interesting stuff to the table, interesting links, and stuff I do myself like this writing or maybe photos which I take. I have been interested in photography since I was a little kid so it leaks through the fabric of what is me. The more I use twitter the more I see the value in it.

So for me I use twitter more now to find out what is going on in the world, like right damn now, what's happening?? I use it like I used to use DIGG and Reddit.It is better though because it is more focused to followers because I pick and choose,  I fine tune my stream regularly-

 I use it for news about specific categories of things like Aerospace= @flightblogger and @runwaygirl get on the planefolk list

I use it for comedy so that= @robdelaney and @uncledynamite for instance get on the funny list

 I use it for local community so I have local #duvall people and #98019 people because the Snoqualmie Valley is it's own bizarre little ecosphere

You can make lists and put all the people and accounts on that list you want. So you can search for 'woodworking" or :"bloodwood" and then check those people out. You can follow them and add them to the list "woodworking wonks". If later on they get flaky you can delete  them to "deleted island". If however someone is truly priceless you might look at the people THEY follow, there might well be some gems in there. You can set up lists that are quite different then just pull up that specific list to see what is happening. You might want a list of "Granite Falls Residents", those people often discuss things you won't read about in the Seattle Times. Use the Find People search window on twitter. Put in Granite Falls just to see how many of your neighbors are on twitter and who they are, and what they are into- I bet it surprises you.

By the by, I think you have an excellent question and I am going to post this response as a blog post. Some people got the original notion that with twitter they were supposed to simply tell people where they were eating lunch, I delete those people. If they do the foursquare thing much and tell me they are "mayor of Woodinville Starbucks", I delete them. Another thing is you can have boring people on a list like "Granite Falls Folks" without Following them and vice-versa, does that help at all??

My number one rule is; don't bore people, their tiny fragile lives are short, and don't tolerate people who bore you either-- tweet on brother!

Twitter= Sustainable value? YES!

Of what value is twitter to me?

Me; this 21st century Renaissance man, IMM (in my mind), with a multitude of interests and being very busy of course (don't we all say we are very busy?), what does twitter do for me? Is twitter unique, or just another social media fad that will soon be but a cool shadow in the alleyway of the unused, unwanted and unloved?
I use twitter as a search engine for what is happening in the world and it works very well indeed. With the "lists" feature I can list people, writers, who have their tight little grips on a certain niche of information.

An example would be the "aviation" field, I can follow @flightblogger, @runwaygirl and @Heather_Poole among maybe 25 accounts in all. this gives me a tightly focused news feed from people/sources that I have winnowed out to be valuable to possibly just me.
I ultimately do this myself every day. I hardly ever buy an actual newspaper anymore, I go online, from computer or phone, and scan several news sources for the bits that seem most tasty and useful. If I can locate others that seem of a like mind and they list/mention what they are finding of interest on twitter, it really saves me time, all the while giving me a different, broader perspective, and takes me to places I wouldn't locate on my own. Obviously, searching other people's list of those they follow on twitter gives me leads to the talking heads and info-generators that are tangential to my own life.

I don't see this same ability on; Facebook, Plaxo, Linkin or many of the other social media sites and see them as more of a white pages of who they are. Rated at the top of "social media" are also Reddit and Digg, and they are great but that news is unfiltered as to a particular group of people, and "Youtube" serves a different purpose as well. These sites are often what people put links to on twitter, I don't see them as supplanting twitter. Twitter's use, as far as tweets generated, is over a billion tweets a month http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/10/twitter-now-more-than-1-billion-tweets-per-month/ . Twitter continues to grow in importance regardless of what you may have heard. In the same way that snow in D.C. does not supplant the impact of global warming/climate change, so too does the fact that the "dude in the cubicle three over" tweeted for six months and stopped, does not change the fact of twitter's grip on modern news dissemination.

People have said many times that twitter is rubbish, and several embraced the Pear Analytics study that "40% of twitter is pointless babble" last summer, http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/2009/twitter-study-reveals-interesting-results-40-percent-pointless-babble/ . Well this is quite true, however about 90% of the Seattle Times is; pointless babble, crap I have no interest or use for, ADVERTISING, and poorly written drivel. It is that 10% of shiny nuggets I look for and value.
If we discuss TV, then this figure of "pointless babble" goes to 99%, most especially if we are discussing a Television news broadcast. To calculate FOX News, a cursory understanding of the principles of Six Sigma would be of help.

So if your twitter is dull it is your own lazy fault my friend. Using many services such as Tweetdeck a inquisitive industrious person can have several columns of spicy, meaty topics, divided according to the users own desires and needs.
From the Iranian Revolution to the recent resignation of the CEO of Sun Microsystems, in this day and age twitter is usually the first source, the most varied and unbiased, and the one that can be tailored to tastes you find the most palatable.

So if you most post 'pointles babble" it's OK, I can live with it,go!

How can Twitter turn a buck?

Image via Wikipedia

How can Twitter turn a buck?

We keep hearing stories about maybe Twitter will be sold, and nothing happens. We hear about revenue models but nothing happens. The idea that keeps getting kicked around is advertising ala Google, and yet there doesn't seem to be any concrete idea how to make it work and nothing happens. To me this is a failure.

I feel just treading water in the rapid breakneck social media world is the very definition of failure. How big a failure? Big. Jolie O'Dell says it is one of the "Top ten failures of 2009" http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_failures_of_2009.php I agree. The promise was so great and the growth so fast to not make a major move of some kind really saps the momentum. Can you feel the slowing of the Twitter momentum? Yeah I can too.

We can talk about MySpace and how it went from 60% to some 30% of the market in one year and now will lose some hundreds of millions of dollars. In my opinion something like a social media service once tainted as being undesirable and un-cool is almost un-repairable. I don't think we will be able to re-cool MySpace. We can talk about all the little Twitter copycats too.
http://www.wired.com/software/webservices/news/2007/05/twitter_clones

So what to do?
I find the downtime and lack of service or "Fail Whale" the most disturbing aspect of Twitter. It was funny at first, now I wonder if there is any plan at all to move on this and get the infrastructure fixed. I know this costs money.

How to make money? I would look at the users and grade them. We have all seen the studies that a fairly small percentage of people do 90% of the tweeting I would charge these people. A formula should be utilized which considers the amount of tweets, the number of followers, and the value therein. Personally I would pay a small fee, say $10 a year for better service. I would rather deal with this than cheesy advertising. Whatever you decide Twitter hurry up! You are running out of time.

Should I Facebook Myself?

Do I Facebook? No.

I could well be in the minority however. Looking at Alexa, Facebook is numero five in global use and that is pretty high for social networking. I just read during Christmas day Face book had a huge surge in traffic this year. My Space is currently seven, while the useful Craigslist is 39. My Space used to be the rocket to ride, but now if you are over 22 and not in a crappy band you are basically considered a child molester/stalker for My Spacing.

Facebook is supposed to “keep you in contact with your friends”. It would seem if someone was in fact your friend you would call them, or e-mail them, but possibly this contact is a new kind of contact, a casual, voyueresque creature requiring less effort, thought and concentration. The “friend”person can’t ask questions on the phone to find out if you are really listening, this could be handy for relatives who you are somewhat required to stay in contact with, but who really aren’t friends you would hang with, you know, if you weren’t accidentally related to them. It could be these “friends” are really just passing acquaintances in the social salton sea.
At the start, it was used to get to know people in school at Harvard; it makes a great deal of sense to me. Most people are young, and from different parts of the country, and trying to get to know each other and hookup, and screw each other’s brains out, and that makes sense doesn’t it? I think we were all students at one time and thought “hey who is that cute new girl/guy over in the corner”? It helps out to look up the Facebook profile and find out they are a Mormon or Vegan before you start investing in valuable chatup time no?

One of the first companies to buy in was Microsoft and they also have some kind of advertising deal with Facebook. I suppose it makes some strategic sense to have the same kind of thing at Microsoft as at Harvard, to try and bring diverse groups of people together at work. My wife uses the whole social networking concept in her work, so she is a member of damn near all, and experiments with many different platforms and concepts, to see how they interrelate and succeed with or against each other in the great social networking cage match. Who will win out? Will anyone really still Twitter three years from now? I can see why Obama Twittered during the campaign it was like sending a constant bombardment of TV commercials to millions of people for free. Would anyone really care to know though that I was sitting in the airport waiting to go to New York and I was bored? One article I read recently stated that the fallout of Twitter was that regular working folk were finding out that most glamorous star’s lives were actually quite mundane. Really GTFO?

I always thought everyone would just have their own website eventually and that has not materialized. I suppose it is a little too hard to set up, and maintain, and it is not free generally speaking, and so that isn’t working. What is working is a site that is free and very modular and easy to set up. People want the ability to post from cell phones and that includes pictures and text. People want the ability to easily include or exclude whoever they want. They want the flexibility of having various levels of privacy for different areas of their site too. Many posters need significant storage space because all those digital images, and videos and music clips add up after a while. They also want that high school thing of showing off how many “friends” they have, because this makes them feel popular and cool, just like uh..high school cliques. They want to look cutting edge and cool and rad even though all the cutting edge and rad and cool sites all look the same. They want to look like they lead a glamorous life just like Brittany. (See above)
I don’t think any current site offers all this although maybe Facebook comes closest.
One ironic dichotomy is that people think Facebook and networking is must have for work and business contacts. However for every feel good story of meeting someone and making some money together there are ten horror stories of Facebook faux pas. It is a public face and in the super litigious, politically correct, looking for dirt to get ahead over-someone-else’s back world (in this economy); it is like walking through a dark room full of bear traps.

I like this rant:
"A well-meaning friend of mine, whom I love dearly, is always telling me my life isn't fully realized because I don't have a Facebook page. OK, so what would I get with such a glorious thing? "You can promote your blog," she always assures me. Oh, yeah? But my column promotes my blog and my blog promotes my column. How much more promotion do I need? "People can contact you," she adds soothingly. Oh, yeah? Well, I already put my email address at the end of my column and I'm also reachable by phone, fax, text, blog comments, and messenger pigeon. How hard is it to reach me? "But you can make all new friends," she goes on. Oh, yeah? Well, I already know every single person in New York and even a few in Jersey and one in Pennsylvania. And I actually know them in person, not just by typed messages". http://blogs.villagevoice.com/dailymusto/archives/2008/07/fuck_facebook.php

Right now Facebook might be the best we have but I am getting networking fatigue. How many social networks do I have to be on to be socially connected, information spreading and thought leading enough? Next year will LinkedIn or Hit5 be cool and Facebook just another My Space has-been? What if I do get out there and find myself to be just mundane? The horror, the horror.