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Taking the temperature of the Web is being performed by tools like Digg.com which provides a bottom-up way to make popular sites and stories emerge. Only drawback it requires a voluntary act by the user and isn't integrated with the flow of his activities.
As for taking the temperature of Twitter, a similar mechanism has just been put in place recently by MicroPlaza.com which makes these stories emerge from the crowd you follow. These are the types of productivity tools I believe we are going to be seeing more and more as they will allow to gain better focus on relevant information flowing inside Twitter.
Louis, you may therefore not be reading individual tweets from the crowd you follow, but you are now able to read the most important stories they have been filtering for you, and much more.
Greg
http://microplaza.com – feel free to follow @microplaza to get an invite
Now it's not. Do you guys realize that now you cannot autofollow as many people as you feel like, nor even manually follow them, until you already have enough followers of yourself, to justify you going over a new 2000 cap the developers of Twitter have put in?
http://twitter.zendesk.com/forums/10711/entries...
If you had an artificial boost from being a national network personality like @davidgregory, that's nice, but what about the rest of us who have come by our hundreds or thousands of followers by dint of the hard work of interactive conversation on Twitter?
They sort of snuck this in without too many people noticing -- none of the A-listers complained because they already had their 20,000 or 60,000 as early adapters and autofollowers by then, already had their broadcasting apparatus firmly in place, and could afford not to care about the little guy having to manually add one by one over time as he climbs slowly over 2000.
If you are not willing to lead the charge to @biz on this sort of "net neutrality" issue and insist on no caps on following, and deal with spam through trusting the community to block spammers (so that mass blocks trigger spam investigations), then don't keep dining out on your ability to autofollow because you aggressively autofollowed when it was legal, built up the necessary leverage and thus got followers, and then freed yourself of the cap.
It is an unfair and non-neutral system, rewarding early adapters who aggressively followed everybody to get followers, and now punishes those who honestly get a lot of followers the manual way, and the old habits of broadcasting patterns of elites have merely reasserted themselves in this "new media".
While Twitter now penalizes you presumably by forcing a ratio on you, too, you got away with building up that gigantic broadcasting list by aggressively friending, and using the auto-follow functions too which compounded the function of people mining their friends' friends for more contacts.
Do you think automatic scripts on following should be disabled?
I don't buy the excuse of the need to get rid of spam. They could have a) simply harnessed the community's willingness to follow-block obvious spammers more by calling for people to do this more consciously b) have staff or even volunteers cull spammers. It's like the argument some make in Second Life that to get rid of manipulation of parcel traffic statistics, you should completely remove the traffic function itself that sorts search/place results, rather than disincentivize that manipulation by requiring that bot accounts be paid for and marked as such, or by penalizing the manipulation of traffic statistics by removing parcels from search. There is a persistent lobby of tekkies constantly calling for the removal of traffic, and therefore the hobbling of those whose sales were gained by legitimate traffic that was merited by bots, rather than the removal of bots.
There is a kind of learned helplessness about bots or automated processes and a strange unwillingness to block the automated processes themselves, or charge for them, rather than capping people's merited additions. What would be a legitimate use of autofollow that isn't an old-media broadcasting function?
And if it's decided that autofollow has some legitimate use cases, if the Twitter developers want to address this, they could charge people who want to use auto-follow, i.e. big businesses, or have people pay for maintaining big inventories of friends, i.e. broadcasters like NBC or Scoble. Couldn't Robert pay $9.95 a month, given his load on the servers? Couldn't any of us? I never understand the reluctance of these services to require a subscription model at least for the power uers.
It would be odd if the Twitter devs flogged you as a favourite, drove up your traffic in friending that way, then punished you and capped you again after the wave -- is that what you mean?
I totally understand that server space or bandwidth are scarce commodities. Then they should have subscriptions for power users or find other community-based ways to curb spam and abuse if they are unwilling to cull spam themselves.
Loic made a mistake by cleaning out who he follows, and in doing so he changes the relationship dynamic. Whether intentionally or not, he's now signaled that he's not interested in what most of us have to say. Whether it has an immediate effect on his following or not remains to be seen, but it doesn't strike me as the wisest of moves if you want to continue to grow your following and build your base.
Not if everyone uses Twitter like Louis is describing. At that point, it's dead.
Here's the dirty little secret: mostly, he isn't. And mostly, you're not interested in what everyone has to say either. And if you had to actually listen to everyone, you'd go insane pretty quickly.
Loic dumped 20 thousand people, effectively signaling he wasn't interested in what any of them have to say. Those people can just as easily dump him, something that could affect his growth and future influence. I'm not sure if it will or won't, but it will be interesting to see how it plays out. A quick glance at most peoples friend-follow ratio would indicate to me that it will affect his growth and influence (relative to Roberts for example), but we will have to see.
Remember, part of the attraction to Twitter is this idea that you can create a kind of personal one-to-one relationship with people you otherwise wouldn't have contact with. Openly dump everyone whose followed you, and suddenly that's a completely different type of relationship.
http://loiclemeur.com/english/2008/08/10-reason...
I like Robert's video because it explains how he is using Twitter+Friendfeed to both find inspiration for his work and stay more connected with his audience.
I like Ian's comment because I tend to use twitter more as a point to point sharing tool than a conversational tool: friendfeed and blog post are so much better for conversations.
I agree with Louis that twitter is a platform and there is no wrong or right way of using it.
I am a little pissed at Loic because I think that he handled himself like a jerk, which is weird because he is usually mister nice guy. May be the result, directly or indirectly, of a lot of people promoting TweetDeck over Twhirl and his new recommended pattern being more twhirl friendly.
Time to get back to work!
But anyway, here's a Venn diagram of the two protagonists' positions: http://twitterlap.com/loic/scobleizer
But from what you say, I don't understand why you bother to follow people. Your tools - especially search - let you find everything someone directs at you whether you follow them or not. So why bother following? You're not actually *using* follow.
All they do, all day, is talk about the drugs they take... ;)
fwiw: I tend to agree that Louis was making her point is a very prescriptive manner, hence the statement: "If you want people and discussion go to Facebook and FriendFeed. If you want to get a litmus test on a topic, go on and use Twitter".
Is there an orthodoxy that we must now all follow? For Loic to change his mind after something he wrote nearly a year ago, in this fast changing environment is hardly what you'd call hypocritical. For him to realise that the way he was using Twitter was not optimised for him, so he's changing it (given that it has changed to such an extreme since last summer)... is interesting, but hardly controvertial.
My personal use pattern: I have a note saying "Please do not expect me to follow you back, I may not". that cover me off. I'm about 70/30 real life friends (Hello Ian) and news feed/opinionators. I *personally* find I tend to unfollow anyone who uses it purely for self aggrandisement. To put it plainly - if I want to listen to a bunch of hot air, I will put up with it from people that I care about :)
Maybe if I keep at it and get more followers ... yes, that's what I should do.
People use Twitter to communicate in different ways and for different reasons ...
1. Like-minded individuals: People sharing ideas and building communities
2. Individuals with celebrity status: automatically draw in a fan base as would in glossy magazines, or online in Facebook, Myspace and the Websites/Blogs, fans want to know the ins-out of your life;
3. Innovators: you have a product/service in the public domain:
People want to connect and stay intouch with the latest going on's, and yes they want to interact especially if the Innovator has put themselves within reach out in the public domain (Twitter) if you're leading expect on your tool/solution people its natural for people to follow you and want to discuss topics and generally receive a response. At the end of the day they feel the need to connect, it relies on the Innovator to include in their reportoire the best tools to contain and maintain the feedback/comments/complaints the best way they can
4. Innovators who promote growth ideas for business development:
Invitation is open to whoever needs the product/solution, read whats on the label and if it doesn't suit your business or purpose then quite simple don't use it, you have choices, no one is selling something you don't want!
4. Desperado's who intend to use Twitter as a third-party traffic engine: where they have exhausted and bombarded personal/business Emails, Mobile Phones, Online Web-forms with (SPAM) these people are now targetting Twitter followers with Robots to divert traffic. We all know what this looks like (1 Tweet, large friend base, small followers)
Like I told a recent friend on Twitter, "There are no rules in Social Media-TOS yes, rules no."
All the best.....
These solutions are in place on a number of sites now limiting Twitter down to a variety of Signals - from sports (http://sunstweets.com) to conferences (http://briantroy.com/blog/demo-09-justsignal-tw...) and Health Care (http://ushealthcrisis.com).
This allows a content site to engage it's users with interactive content and leverage the social graphs of those users to find more "fans".
The truth (for me) is that Twitter is about both... engaging in conversations about topics that interest me AND following people I find interesting. The way I find interesting people is by participating in conversations about topics I find interesting. justSignal tools are a great way to do that.
Then I would say that identi.ca is perfect. It has groups you can follow and receive all updates posted to that group in your feed. That means you can follow topics instead of (or in addition to) people.
I wish you wrote about "microblogging" instead of "Twitter". Twitter is one player within the field of microblogging, please don't make people think that it's the only option. Sure it's the best option for many ATM, I won't argue that, but still: You perpetuate the idea that they're the only one. (And since Twitter is a walled garden it's not the best option for anyone in the long run, IMHO)
Funny, same debate happening in LInkedIn - volume over value. Maybe less is more.
Maybe its the case where one choose to use Twitter as an extension to their business, then it would be more appropriate to make the separation of what is support issues, complaints, feedback and so on through a categorisation tool, but just relying on Twitter to do that then your bound to fall into problems because no one can seriously manage to filter out the important things from a 20k+ followers/friends on a daily basis, seems (time management) is called for.
Can you fit 20k people or 1k people on your mobile phone, when would talk to 1k people !!!
You should only be using Twitter for its correct purpose if you want to extend build it, I don't see no reason why anyone would want to fit a square through a triangle!