Category Archives: Twitter

Twitter and Follower Reciprocity (a.k.a. To follow (in return) or not to follow)

With Twitter, or for that matter any other microblogging platform, do you follow everyone who follows you?

I tried. Back in the early days of Twitter… a year-and-a-half ago or so… whenever someone followed me I almost inevitably followed the person back. We were all trying to figure out what this new medium of “microblogging” was all about, so I followed most of the very early adopters as we all joined into this grand experiment.

But somewhere along the way I had to stop the immediate reciprocity. As Twitter has grown and more and more people have joined the service, I found there was no way that I could really follow all those who started following me. I simply didn’t have enough attention to share. I watched (and marveled) as folks like Robert Scoble, Jeremiah Owyang and Chris Brogan all started following thousands of people. (They still do: Scoble follows 21,000+, Jeremiah almost 6,000 and Chris over 12,000.)

I realized over time that my usage of Twitter was a bit different from that of Scoble and others. I outlined the 10 ways I learned to use Twitter first in December and then again a bit more back in April. For me to use Twitter in the way I do, I like to focus a bit more on the people and services I follow. I do like to scan down through them… and for me that meant following fewer people.

The “Replies” tab in Twitter also helped. I could use that to see who had replied to me publicly with “@danyork” and from there I could learn about people that I might want to follow. (Now I have the same functionality in Twhirl and pretty much never go to the actual Twitter web site… but the purpose is the same.)

The increasing amount of “spam” Twitter accounts has also killed any kind of immediate reciprocity, at least for me. When you can tell just by the name that the account is there purely to sell you something, it’s a very easy decision to NOT follow that account. I’ve found that the spammers are getting a bit less brazen and sometimes when I do look at someone who is now following I find that even with a “normal” name… they are still a spammer.

So what do I do these days when I get a follower notification in email? Or if I see someone publicly replying to me on the Replies tab?

IF I have time (and that’s a big “if”), I will go take a look at the person’s Twitter page. (And if I don’t have time, I sometimes let the notices accumulate and then look through a batch at once… or sometimes admittedly I just don’t have the time to look at them.) What am I looking for?

What are they tweeting about? – If the person is tweeting about things that are of interest to me – and especially if they provide links to interesting articles I haven’t seen before – I may follow them then. If all they tweet about is their lunch or what TV show they are watching, I’ll usually pass.
Do they have a website URL in their profile? – What is the site they link to? Do they blog? Are they doing something interesting or with an interesting company or organization?
Who are they? – If they are a friend or someone I know in some context, I’ll often add them.
Miscellaneous – Sometimes I may add someone purely because I’m not following anyone doing the kinds of things they do… or I think their posts are funny or interesting… I don’t always have a solid reason.

Basically I’m trying to figure out… why should I let this person have some of my attention?

It sounds harsh… but to me the reality is that we all have only so many minutes in the day and we all have a zillion other things we are trying to do. If I am going to start following someone… why?

I try to look at folks who follow me… but I often can’t… and so over time the ratio of people following me to people I follow has continually grown and grown. I feel bad, sometimes, too, when I wind up talking to someone and they say “I follow you on Twitter but you don’t follow me.”

What do you all do? What criteria do you place on people you follow on Twitter? How do you respond to follower notifications?

Technorati Tags:
twitter, attention, microblogging

Simple explanation to Dennis Howlett’s avatar in SAP video…. he did it!

Why is SAP’s “ESME” video using Dennis Howlett’s Twitter avatar image?

1 Reply

UPDATE: Okay, so the answer is simple… the ESME video is using Dennis’ avatar……. because Dennis is the voice in the video!

Nothing wrong here… move along now… 😉

Why is SAP’s video for their “ESME” Twitter-for-the-enterprise product using the avatar picture commonly used by Dennis Howlett?

Being a fan of microblogging, I was intrigued to see the ZDNet story about SAP’s “Enterprise Social Messaging Experiment” (ESME) and, still stuck at the airport, I figured I’d watch the 6-minute video. It looks quite cool… but I was struck by another fact: why was the video using Dennis Howlett’s Twitter avatar image?

Take a look yourself – here’s the video:

Now notice when they are showing the “ESME” interface as they tell their story. One of the characters (“Jim?”) has this picture (displayed multiple times):

Now look at Dennis Howlett’s Twitter page (or see the large version of his picture):

Am I just way too tired or aren’t they the identical image?

Since I use Twhirl for reading Twitter, I see Dennis’ avatar all the time (since I follow him) and so that picture is one I recognize right away. For instance, here’s a bunch of Dennis’ posts all seen in Twhirl:

Dennis twitters quite frequently and also blogs at ZDNet… so his picture is certainly seen around.

So why is it in a video from SAP?

Was someone involved with creating the video just looking for an avatar image to use and grabbed Dennis’?

Very strange…

Twhirl (and a whack of other Twitter clients) add identi.ca support

The real meaning – and power – of identi.ca (a.k.a. open source Twitter)

6 Replies

Is identi.ca the savior of microblogging? Or is it simply Yet Another Twitter Clone destined for doom?

THE GREAT HOPE

As those of us of the Twitterati watched the FailWhale appear multiple times today and wrote posts like mine wondering if we should just give up on Twitter, there was this afternoon a moment when the clouds parted, the trumpets sounded and a bright beacon of hope appeared before us all… here came the launch of identi.ca, an… (gasp)… open source version of Twitter!

Dave Winer declared “Oh happy day!?” and Marshall Kirkpatrick was out with the first longer writeup: “Identi.ca: May A Million Twitters Bloom” (which is definitely worth a read). Those links were twittered and re-twittered…

What happened next was of course entirely predictable… about 1,000 people jumped over to identi.ca to set up accounts (myself included, I’m identi.ca/danyork)… and swamped the server. There was no way that any brand-new service could measure up to the repressed frustration of the Twitterati, and so there was the inevitable backlash…

…the user interface sucks… this doesn’t look like a Twitter-killer… I’m not getting all the updates… the Jabber integration doesn’t work for me… ugh, this isn’t good!… where’s the API?… what do you mean there’s no SMS interface?… why are the RSS feeds broken?… how can I see replies?… do I REALLY need yet another <expletive> service?

Beyond showing that people need to chill out a bit and give a new service time to develop, the comments somewhat miss the point:

The success or failure of the site, identi.ca, really doesn’t matter.

What matters most was very nicely summarized in a post (what do we call them? they aren’t “tweets”!) by Edd Dunbill:

THE REAL POWER

The real power resides in the actual software being used, called Laconica, that is used by identi.ca. It is open source/free software and licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License. As stated in the FAQ:

How is Identi.ca different from Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Plurk, others?

Identi.ca is an Open Network Service. Our main
goal is to provide a fair and transparent service that preserves users’ autonomy. In
particular, all the software used for Identi.ca is Free Software, and all the data is available
under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, making it Open Data.

The software also implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol, meaning that you can have friends on other microblogging services
that can receive your notices.

The goal here is autonomy — you deserve the right to manage your own on-line
presence. If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).

That last line is key… “If you don’t like how Identi.ca works, you can take your data and the source code and set up your own server (or move your account to another one).” As Aswath said:

THE PROVERBIAL GENIE IS OUT OF THE BOTTLE

Anyone can now start up their own Twitter-equivalent. In fact, Russ Beattie already has… http://foozik.com/ is up and running with the Laconica code.

More will follow. Someone will throw it up on Amazon’s EC2 and put a cloud computing infrastructure behind it. Once Google’s AppEngine supports PHP (which the Laconica code uses), someone will throw it up there. Someone will make it work on the evolving P2P network clouds. Someone will add code for an SMS gateway… someone will add a solid API. Someone will add the Replies tab and improve the UI.

Many implementations will suck. Some will suck badly. But others will excel… and somewhere in all of that something resembling the next Apache or WordPress may emerge. Will it be Laconica? Maybe… or maybe some fork or derivative work. Or maybe some other version written in another language but inspired by the Laconica work.

Of course, just because anyone can “run their own Twitter” doesn’t mean they will. Most folks won’t. But some will. Other users will join those services. Maybe the identi.ca site will lead the pack… maybe some other implementation will eclipse its lead. The individual sites don’t really matter as much as the software that powers them.

WEAVING THE TAPESTRY

Of course, to make such a distributed / decentralized system work, the individual servers need to understand how to connect to other users. As Marshall writes:

Ultimately, this means federation. I put a customized version of the foundation software (called Laconi.ca) on my server, you put one to your liking on yours, we both get friends on our local copy and any other versions around the web – and everyone can communicate with each other just like we were using the same service from the same provider. Whoever comes up with the best alternative to the garbled name Identi.ca wins!

That’s the hard part. Coming up with a way to easily and securely pass information between the servers… and to uniquely identify users running on the different servers. The good news is that there are some folks already looking at this through the OpenMicroBlogging initiative (that, like Marshall, I had not heard of before today).

The other good news is that we have multiple precedents for doing this before. Think of Jabber and XMPP. I have a Jabber ID (JID) of “dyork@jabber.org” (or “danyorklpg@gmail.com”). I can do XMPP-based IM with anyone else who has a JID. Our servers can resolve the JIDs and communicate with the servers. Each of us can be running our own Jabber server – yet we can all find and communicate with each other.

Or think of email. Each of us has the option of running many different kinds of email servers. Yet we can all communicate through an open standard, SMTP, and we can be uniquely identified with our address.

BUT WILL IT KILL TWITTER?

Probably not. Let’s be real… Twitter has hundreds of thousands of active users these days (maybe more?). At some point, they’ll fix their stability problems. People will stay there because their “community” is there. Let’s face it, simply the existence of an open source IM solution (Jabber/XMPP) hasn’t killed off the walled gardens of AIM, MSN/WLM and Yahoo!Messenger.

But Laconica and it’s impending derivatives gives us all a “Plan B”… it gives us choice and “control”… when we finally hit that pain threshold and decide to move on… there’s another choice out there.

More than that, the release of Laconica unleashes the “power of play”… developers can now tinker with the code… change it… improve it… do wacky things with it that Evan at identi.ca had never even remotely dreamed of. Every developer who gets pissed off at yet more Twitter downtime now has a building block to launch off in pursuit of “building a better Twitter”.

Sure, the code needs work… maybe lots of work… that’s okay. It’s a building block.

At the very least there is the potential of competition for Twitter… competition is good. It keeps the leaders on their toes… and fosters innovation.

THE MISSING MEDIUM

The phenomenal success of Twitter has shown us that we were missing a communication medium.

Somewhere in the midst of email, IM, web sites, blog sites, IRC, video, RSS feeds, Facebook, MySpace, VoIP, cell phones, snail mail and everything else… we wanted yet another way to communicate. The one-to-many mode of Twitter… mixed in with a one-to-one mode… and accessible through a wide range of devices and a simple API.

Twitter’s very simple question of “What are you doing?” showed that there was desire out there to provide “status updates”… which evolved into everything else we do now with Twitter. And now pretty much every “social networking” site out there along with IM services and many other apps have added “status updates”.

IT’S ALL ABOUT CONTROL

As early adopters and users, our frustration, though, has been that the services allowing us to publish those updates have been out of our control. Whether it’s been Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Plaxo Pulse, Skype… or… pick your service… we are locked into their infrastructure. We can’t experiment with it. We can’t tinker with it. We can’t hack on it. We can’t fix it. All we can do is pound our head against walls…

With identi.ca and Laconica, we see the hope to regain that control. Some of us want that, while others admittedly don’t care – they just want a service that works. There are many barriers to such a service reaching the level of usability that we probably want. It may never get there. Twitter may mystically fix all its issues and we’ll just stay over there and this whole thing will fade into the background of other available-but-not-widely-used open source and free software.

We’ll see.

Meanwhile, the code is out there for those who want to play with it. As Marshall said “May A Million Twitters Bloom”… let the hacking away on the code begin… it will be fun to see what evolves…

P.S. You can find me at identi.ca/danyork as well as twitter.com/danyork

Technorati Tags:
twitter, identi.ca, laconica, microblogging, opensource, freesoftware, status

At what point do we simply give up on Twitter?

6 Replies

At what point do we finally call a spade a spade and just give up on Twitter?

This morning the Twhirl client I use started acting really flaky. Tweets wouldn’t post… or they would post but then would lock up Twhirl. Sure enough, the folks at Seesmic/Twhirl used their new ability to send out status updates to give us this:

I tried sending an update, but I have no way to find out if it got there because Twitter’s main page currently has the wonderful “fail whale”:

There’s been no end of commentary in the blogosphere on Twitter’s instability in recent days… a quick Techmeme search will show some of the flow of articles, in particular Dave Winer’s “State of the Twitter” and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch post about the conversation moving to FriendFeed.

The question remains… how much longer will we all put up with Twitter’s downtime?

It’s almost like a digital version of “crack”… we keep returning to feed our addiction to the conversation. Surely it will get better now, we think. They must have fixed it after this update. With all that investment money, they must be able to fix this, right?

Why don’t we go to FriendFeed? Or Plurk? Or, heck, even Facebook with it’s status messages? Some people definitely have moved… but most of us remain. Why?

I don’t have a solid answer. A blogger named Corvida outlined many of the issues in her post “The Problem With Leaving Twitter“. It is all about the community… about the many people you connect with who have, in many cases, become actual “friends”.

I think it’s also about the APIs… for all of its faults, Twitter stands above so many others with the many different ways you can send updates to it… via the API from a ton of different clients… from the web interface… from the mobile interface… from IM (if they ever fix the IM interface)… via voice from Jott or Twitterfone… from your blog site… from other services. The absolute simplicity of the Twitter API has created a whole ecosystem of integration around the service.

It’s also where – at this moment – much of the “conversation” is among the emerging tech / new media / chasers-of-bright-shiny-objects. It’s our virtual water cooler. It’s our “Cheers”… it’s where we hang out.

How much of that conversation will remain, though, is a good question. Each day Twitter seems to try our patience a bit more. At some point we may all reach that pain threshold where we finally say “enough is enough” and move on to somewhere else…

When do we hit that point? I don’t know, exactly, but it’s increasingly seeming like the answer is… SOON!

P.S. You are welcome, of course, to follow me on Twitter when the service is up… as well as on Friendfeed for when it isn’t. 🙂

Technorati Tags:
twitter

The Sad State Of Twitter…

2 Replies

As I posted a couple of updates to my Twitter stream this morning, I noticed that I hadn’t received any updates for most of two hours in my Twhirl client. I tried going to my Twitter page and when I couldn’t I naturally tried to go to http://www.istwitterdown.com… today the answer was not “Yes”, but rather:

It’s really very sad when “Yes” becomes “of course”. When the expectation is that the service will be down, you really have to wonder about the long-term viability of the service. At some point Twitter will cross the proverbial “threshold of pain” that will indeed cause users to flock to other services. Judging from past history, that threshold is very high… but with Twitter’s frequent outages lately, you have to wonder if we aren’t rapidly approaching that point.

I see from Twitter’s new status blog that they were making database changes last night. Will the changes be enough to keep people using the service? Will they be enough to bring the pain level back down?

We’ll see.

Technorati Tags:
twitter

When Twitter Goes Down… oh, how we have come to rely on it

1 Reply

If you are a Twitter user, you are no doubt by now aware that there is a serious problem. Annoyingly, it’s not a catastrophic failure… it’s far more subtle than that. The site looks like it is fully operational. You can post tweets.
You even get some tweets from people you follow.

But that’s the issue… you get some of the tweets in your twitter stream, but very definitely NOT all. As now noted on the Twitter site, some maintenance they did this weekend to improve caching obviously didn’t work:

Oops.

The problem, of course, is that for those of us who have integrated Twitter into our regular workflow, it has become part and parcel of how we communicate. I liked what the folks at Mashable said:

Why the hysteria? Well, Twitter seems to have become more than a service. It’s a new way of communication. You simply cannot replace it with anything; what are you gonna do, get all your Twitter friends to become your friends on ICQ? That steady stream of freshly baked, human-created (well, some of it is bots) info is the information junkie’s bread and butter.

Indeed it is more than simply a service. Here’s hoping that they get it working again soon.

P.S. Several writers have pointed out that we might actually be more productive today without Twitter around to potentially distract us. On one level that might be true… but on the other level Twitter users might be distracted in checking to see if the service is back up! 🙂

Technorati Tags:
twitter

Local TV station using Twitter to solicit stories

Isn’t TweetLater missing the point of Twitter?

6 Replies

I have to admit that I don’t quite get TweetLater:

“Now YOU Can Schedule Future Tweets For All Your Twitter Accounts“

And this:

“Stuck on an aircraft? Back to back meetings? Taking vacation? Running errands? Playing with the kids?

Have peace of mind and more free time. Keep your Twitter feed ticking over with new tweets even when you’re not in front of your computer.”

Now, don’t get me wrong… I fully understand and appreciate the value in scheduling blog posts. Some time back when I was more interested in growing my readership, I did exactly that. I would write up a series of posts and have them set to publish on certain days at certain times. Do a flurry of writing and then let the posts just stream out there over the next days or weeks. Every now and then I consider doing that again. It makes sense to me if you are trying to maintain/grow readership and want to maintain consistency in posting.

But those are blog posts… usually larger blocks of text. And usually pieces that I really need to write on my laptop or other computer. They are took long to really type on a Blackberry or other portable device. (or at least longer than *I* want to type on a Blackberry!)

Do we really need this for Twitter?

Isn’t the point of Twitter really to talk about what you are doing now… or what has your attention now? Isn’t it really a tool for your life stream? Or for pointing to your blog posts? Or querying your network of people? Or hanging out at the virtual water cooler?

Now maybe those are just ways that I use it and maybe others have other uses where TweetLater might be useful. But given that you only type 140 characters or less and that you can do this from a zillion different interfaces (cell phones via SMS, cell phones via web, Internet cafes, any web access, other sites, etc.), it seems to me that it is easy enough to update Twitter from most places.

More to the point, if you are stuck on an aircraft or playing with your kids, why should you be twittering? In my book it’s perfectly okay to be offline sometimes.

Are we finding people who feel they MUST twitter all the time?

Are there people who feel that they need to twitter on a consistent basis in order to grow/maintain their followers? Will people really have more “peace of mind” if they queue up a bunch of tweets?

Are we just creating another rat race where Twitters feel they have constantly keep producing? (And isn’t that just a hamster wheel?)

That’s certainly not how I use Twitter, and it seems to me to be the polar opposite of the whole Twitter “What are you doing” mindset… but maybe there are some folks out there of feel “they have to twitter” in order to keep on going. (I would suggest that perhaps such folks need to “chill out”, but hey, that’s just my view.)

Where I could see it working

Now where I can see something like TweetLater being used is for Twitter accounts tied to an event where you tweet out parts of the schedule. For instance, let’s take a tech conference that has keynotes, breakout sessions, breaks, etc. The organizers could publicize that people could stay up-to-date on what is going on at the conference by following the conference twitter ID. The organizers could then use a service like TweetLater to queue up tweets to go out at certain times:

8:55 – “Keynote with XXX, CEO of YYY, starting in 5 minutes in Grand Ballroom I”
10:30 – “Morning refreshment break in Foyer II sponsored by XXXXX”
10:55 – “Concurrent sessions starting: XXXX in Panama 1, YYYY in Panama 2..”
11:00 – “Exhibit Hall now open. Visit booth 1234 to win an iPod.”

Etc, etc. You get the idea. The conference staff could queue up these scheduled tweets to go out but then also send out unscheduled tweets as the need arose (“Session A in Panama 2 has been cancelled as the speaker’s flights were cancelled.”). Attendees who followed the conference name could get those updates on whatever device they found useful. All in all I could see that being useful at a conference.

So there I could see it being useful. But for individual twitter users? I don’t see it… but maybe I also don’t see all of how twitter has evolved.

What do you think? Would you use a service like TweetLater? Do you know of people you think might?

Technorati Tags:
twitter, tweetlater, blogging, microblogging

Disruptive Conversations

Dan York on the intersection of PR/communication and the "social media" of blogs, podcasts, wikis, Twitter and more – and the way our conversations are changing…

Category Archives: Twitter

Twitter and Follower Reciprocity (a.k.a. To follow (in return) or not to follow)

Simple explanation to Dennis Howlett’s avatar in SAP video…. he did it!

Why is SAP’s “ESME” video using Dennis Howlett’s Twitter avatar image?

Twhirl (and a whack of other Twitter clients) add identi.ca support

The real meaning – and power – of identi.ca (a.k.a. open source Twitter)

At what point do we simply give up on Twitter?

The Sad State Of Twitter…

When Twitter Goes Down… oh, how we have come to rely on it

Local TV station using Twitter to solicit stories

Isn’t TweetLater missing the point of Twitter?