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To Twitter or not to Twitter, that is the technology conundrum of the day.
It began for me as a curiosity. “Huh? Twitter? WTF?”
Then I began reading more and more about it.
For example, David Pogue, of The New York Times summed up my feelings nicely:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/technology/personaltech/15pogue-e... (for full article)
From the Desk of David Pogue
Twittering Tips for Beginners
By DAVID POGUE
Published: January 15, 2009
As a tech columnist, I'm supposed to be on top of what's new in tech, but there's just too much, too fast; it's like drinking from a fire hose. I can only imagine how hopeless a task it must be for everyone else.
Which brings us to Twitter.
Twitter.com is all the rage among geeks, although it has more hype than users at this point. (When I speak at tech and education conferences, I routinely ask my audience how many are on Twitter. Usually, it's 1 in 500.)
Basically, you sign up for a free account at Twitter.com. Then you're supposed to return to that site periodically and type short messages that announce what you're doing. (Very short — 140 characters max.)
Then, you're supposed to persuade your friends and admirers to become your audience by subscribing to your utterances (called tweets). Big-name tech pundits amass tens of thousands of followers. Normal people may have five or six.
I'll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, "I'm now having lunch"? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?
Then my eyes were opened. A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As we looked over one particular application, someone asked, "Hasn't this project been tried before?"
Everyone looked blankly at each other.
Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.
I was impressed.
So I've been Twittering for a couple of months, and I've learned a lot. I'm still dubious about Twitter's prospects for becoming a tool for ordinary people (rather than early-adopter techie types).
But one thing's for sure: The whole thing would be a lot more palatable if somebody would explain the basics. Something like this:
* You don't have to open your Web browser and go to Twitter.com to send and receive tweets. In fact, that's just silly. Instead, people download little programs like Twitterific, Feedalizr or Twinkle, they get the updates on their cellphones as text messages, or they use something like PocketTweets, Tweetie or iTweet for the iPhone. I've been using Twitterific for the Mac, which is a tall, narrow window at the side of the screen. Incoming tweets scroll up without distracting you. Much.
* Your followers can respond to your tweets, either publicly or privately.
* It seems clear that you, as a tweet-sender, are not actually expected to respond to every reply. At least I sure HOPE that's the expectation. I mean, some popular Twitterers have 15,000 followers; you'd spend all day doing nothing but answering them all.
* The Web is full of "rules" about the proper way to Twitter, and a lot of them are just knowier-than-thou garbage: How many tweets a day to send out. How many people you should follow. What you should say. And so on. The first adopters are milking their early advantage for all it's worth.
I found one rule, though, that answered a long-standing question I had about Twitter: "Don't tweet about what you're doing right now." Which is weird, since that's precisely how the typing box at Twitter.com is labeled: "What are you doing?"
* One person criticized me for not following enough other Twitterers. The implication was that if you send out tweets but don't subscribe to a lot of other people, you're an egotist.
So I signed up to follow prominent tech gurus like Guy Kawasaki, Tim O'Reilly and CrunchGear. But then I was astonished to see Guy send out tweets literally *every three minutes.*
"Holy cow," I thought. "Does this guy do anything all day but sit in front of Twitter?"
I posed this question to my followers, too. They promptly informed me that some people, like Guy, use automated software robots to churn out tweets, largely to promote their own blogs, sites or other products. (That doesn't seem quite right to me.)
In the end, my impression of Twitter was right and wrong. Twitter IS a massive time drain. It IS yet another way to procrastinate, to make the hours fly by without getting work done, to battle for online status and massage your own ego.
But it's also a brilliant channel for breaking news, asking questions, and attaining one step of separation from public figures you admire. No other communications channel can match its capacity for real-time, person-to-person broadcasting.
********************
And now there’s this just-released research:
http://dallas.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2009/04/13/story11.htm...
ON SOCIAL NETWORKS, TWEET AT YOUR OWN RISK
Dallas Business Journal - by Jeff Bounds and Christopher Calnan Staff writers
When it comes to online social networks such as Twitter, users should be aware that tweets could lead to trouble.
A couple of University of Texas at Austin researchers have developed an algorithm for a “de-anonymization technique” that, by tracking common relationships, identifies the posters on social Web sites such as Flickr and Twitter.
It’s a troubling proposition for business people, who in increasingly larger numbers have been using Twitter, the text message-based social networking tool.
The problem is that Web sites such as Twitter still don’t have a revenue model and operators are free to do what they want with the information they collect. And if UT computer scientists can identify users, then marketers or criminals could, too, said Arvind Narayanan, who is one of the researchers and a doctoral candidate at UT.
“To that extent, it presents a privacy threat,” he said. “Bad guys could do that to harm users in a variety of ways.”
Narayanan and UT computer science professor Vitaly Shmatikov claim a third of verifiable users can be recognized by aggregating the Twitter information with publicly available information.
Mike Lynn, a partner at the Dallas commercial-litigation law firm Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox LLP, says companies should monitor their presence on social networking sites, and only selected employees should also be able to update it. There ought to be guidelines about what can and can’t be posted on the site. He also cautions anyone who uses Twitter to be cautious of legal hassles that can result from their online posts.
John Pozadzides is CEO of iFusion Labs LLC, a Frisco company that offers a technology service called Woopra, which tracks visitors to Web sites in real time.
“Communications are taking place right now on Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking services behind your back,” he says. “It’s going on, whether you ignore it or not. The wisest course of action is to be informed about what’s being said about you in public forums.”
Companies with brands to protect should immediately get on social networking sites like Twitter and lock up the user ID associated with those brands, he says. “If you don’t get it, somebody else will.”
*********************
So for me, I'm still wondering why people use Twitter at all? A few years ago it was MySpace, then Facebook and now Twitter (to name only three) ... all fads, seems to me.
LinkedIn (User since January 26, 2004) has remained one of the most serious business-to-business sites out there for me ... second only to Duke City Fix. Some friends use Plaxo, but that clearly doesn't have the momentum behind it that LinkedIn has.
The “trouble with Twitter” from a business networking P.O.V. is that it’s totally un-targeted marketing. A shotgun approach vs. nailing your true audience, 100% of the time. Or, to be prosaic, it's about quantity, not about quality. Who's got the most followers?!
My Google homepage includes a WikiHow column (occasionally very cool, fun stuff, such as how to exit a moving car).
A recent WikiHow column, "Be a Twitter Celebrity," (link below) convinced me that, ultimately, Twitter is a vapid waste of time. In fact, I'm 99.9% certain that as soon as everyone is gainfully employed again, it will vaporize into the byte-o-sphere:
http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Twitter-Celebrity
What do you all think? I really want to know.
Noel
Then I began reading more and more about it.
For example, David Pogue, of The New York Times summed up my feelings nicely:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/15/technology/personaltech/15pogue-e... (for full article)
From the Desk of David Pogue
Twittering Tips for Beginners
By DAVID POGUE
Published: January 15, 2009
As a tech columnist, I'm supposed to be on top of what's new in tech, but there's just too much, too fast; it's like drinking from a fire hose. I can only imagine how hopeless a task it must be for everyone else.
Which brings us to Twitter.
Twitter.com is all the rage among geeks, although it has more hype than users at this point. (When I speak at tech and education conferences, I routinely ask my audience how many are on Twitter. Usually, it's 1 in 500.)
Basically, you sign up for a free account at Twitter.com. Then you're supposed to return to that site periodically and type short messages that announce what you're doing. (Very short — 140 characters max.)
Then, you're supposed to persuade your friends and admirers to become your audience by subscribing to your utterances (called tweets). Big-name tech pundits amass tens of thousands of followers. Normal people may have five or six.
I'll admit that, for the longest time, I was exasperated by the Twitter hype. Like the world needs ANOTHER ego-massaging, social-networking time drain? Between e-mail and blogs and Web sites and Facebook and chat and text messages, who on earth has the bandwidth to keep interrupting the day to visit a Web site and type in, "I'm now having lunch"? And to read the same stuff being broadcast by a hundred other people?
Then my eyes were opened. A few months ago, I was one of 12 judges for a MacArthur grant program in Chicago. As we looked over one particular application, someone asked, "Hasn't this project been tried before?"
Everyone looked blankly at each other.
Then the guy sitting next to me typed into the Twitter box. He posed the question to his followers. Within 30 seconds, two people replied, via Twitter, that it had been done before. And they provided links.
I was impressed.
So I've been Twittering for a couple of months, and I've learned a lot. I'm still dubious about Twitter's prospects for becoming a tool for ordinary people (rather than early-adopter techie types).
But one thing's for sure: The whole thing would be a lot more palatable if somebody would explain the basics. Something like this:
* You don't have to open your Web browser and go to Twitter.com to send and receive tweets. In fact, that's just silly. Instead, people download little programs like Twitterific, Feedalizr or Twinkle, they get the updates on their cellphones as text messages, or they use something like PocketTweets, Tweetie or iTweet for the iPhone. I've been using Twitterific for the Mac, which is a tall, narrow window at the side of the screen. Incoming tweets scroll up without distracting you. Much.
* Your followers can respond to your tweets, either publicly or privately.
* It seems clear that you, as a tweet-sender, are not actually expected to respond to every reply. At least I sure HOPE that's the expectation. I mean, some popular Twitterers have 15,000 followers; you'd spend all day doing nothing but answering them all.
* The Web is full of "rules" about the proper way to Twitter, and a lot of them are just knowier-than-thou garbage: How many tweets a day to send out. How many people you should follow. What you should say. And so on. The first adopters are milking their early advantage for all it's worth.
I found one rule, though, that answered a long-standing question I had about Twitter: "Don't tweet about what you're doing right now." Which is weird, since that's precisely how the typing box at Twitter.com is labeled: "What are you doing?"
* One person criticized me for not following enough other Twitterers. The implication was that if you send out tweets but don't subscribe to a lot of other people, you're an egotist.
So I signed up to follow prominent tech gurus like Guy Kawasaki, Tim O'Reilly and CrunchGear. But then I was astonished to see Guy send out tweets literally *every three minutes.*
"Holy cow," I thought. "Does this guy do anything all day but sit in front of Twitter?"
I posed this question to my followers, too. They promptly informed me that some people, like Guy, use automated software robots to churn out tweets, largely to promote their own blogs, sites or other products. (That doesn't seem quite right to me.)
In the end, my impression of Twitter was right and wrong. Twitter IS a massive time drain. It IS yet another way to procrastinate, to make the hours fly by without getting work done, to battle for online status and massage your own ego.
But it's also a brilliant channel for breaking news, asking questions, and attaining one step of separation from public figures you admire. No other communications channel can match its capacity for real-time, person-to-person broadcasting.
********************
And now there’s this just-released research:
http://dallas.bizjournals.com/dallas/stories/2009/04/13/story11.htm...
ON SOCIAL NETWORKS, TWEET AT YOUR OWN RISK
Dallas Business Journal - by Jeff Bounds and Christopher Calnan Staff writers
When it comes to online social networks such as Twitter, users should be aware that tweets could lead to trouble.
A couple of University of Texas at Austin researchers have developed an algorithm for a “de-anonymization technique” that, by tracking common relationships, identifies the posters on social Web sites such as Flickr and Twitter.
It’s a troubling proposition for business people, who in increasingly larger numbers have been using Twitter, the text message-based social networking tool.
The problem is that Web sites such as Twitter still don’t have a revenue model and operators are free to do what they want with the information they collect. And if UT computer scientists can identify users, then marketers or criminals could, too, said Arvind Narayanan, who is one of the researchers and a doctoral candidate at UT.
“To that extent, it presents a privacy threat,” he said. “Bad guys could do that to harm users in a variety of ways.”
Narayanan and UT computer science professor Vitaly Shmatikov claim a third of verifiable users can be recognized by aggregating the Twitter information with publicly available information.
Mike Lynn, a partner at the Dallas commercial-litigation law firm Lynn Tillotson Pinker & Cox LLP, says companies should monitor their presence on social networking sites, and only selected employees should also be able to update it. There ought to be guidelines about what can and can’t be posted on the site. He also cautions anyone who uses Twitter to be cautious of legal hassles that can result from their online posts.
John Pozadzides is CEO of iFusion Labs LLC, a Frisco company that offers a technology service called Woopra, which tracks visitors to Web sites in real time.
“Communications are taking place right now on Twitter, Facebook, and all the other social networking services behind your back,” he says. “It’s going on, whether you ignore it or not. The wisest course of action is to be informed about what’s being said about you in public forums.”
Companies with brands to protect should immediately get on social networking sites like Twitter and lock up the user ID associated with those brands, he says. “If you don’t get it, somebody else will.”
*********************
So for me, I'm still wondering why people use Twitter at all? A few years ago it was MySpace, then Facebook and now Twitter (to name only three) ... all fads, seems to me.
LinkedIn (User since January 26, 2004) has remained one of the most serious business-to-business sites out there for me ... second only to Duke City Fix. Some friends use Plaxo, but that clearly doesn't have the momentum behind it that LinkedIn has.
The “trouble with Twitter” from a business networking P.O.V. is that it’s totally un-targeted marketing. A shotgun approach vs. nailing your true audience, 100% of the time. Or, to be prosaic, it's about quantity, not about quality. Who's got the most followers?!
My Google homepage includes a WikiHow column (occasionally very cool, fun stuff, such as how to exit a moving car).
A recent WikiHow column, "Be a Twitter Celebrity," (link below) convinced me that, ultimately, Twitter is a vapid waste of time. In fact, I'm 99.9% certain that as soon as everyone is gainfully employed again, it will vaporize into the byte-o-sphere:
http://www.wikihow.com/Be-a-Twitter-Celebrity
What do you all think? I really want to know.
Noel
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Noel on -
Those are the kinds of things I'm finding most useful on Duke City Fix as well - it's an extraordinary resource.
In the interests of objectivity, this just in (and my interpretation of the demographics is the out-of-work segment is trying anything it can):
Thursday, April 16, 2009, 6:32am PDT | Modified: Thursday, April 16, 2009, 6:50am
Twitter users up 131% in March
Silicon Valley / San Jose Business Journal
The micro-blogging service run by Twitter Inc. more than doubled its number of U.S. users in March.
The San Francisco company signed up more than 5 million new users across the country to hit 9.3 million last month, comScore said in a report released on Wednesday.
The report theorized that Twitter is benefiting from a growing number of mentions in the media. It also reported a large overlap in audiences for major news outlets and Twitter.
"The average Twitter user was often two and three times as likely to visit the top online news brands as the average person," comScore reported. "For example, while 17 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience visited CNN.com in March, more than double that percentage (38 percent) of Twitter.com visitors did so."
This week's report from comScore follows another last week that showed that Twitter's growth appears to be driven by an older demographic than expected. It reported that while 18-24 year olds are 12 percent less likely than average to visit Twitter, 45-54 year olds are the most likely to use the service at 36 percent above the average. They are followed by 25-34 year olds, who are 30 percent more likely.
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Permalink Reply by JeSais on
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Ashton Kutcher trumps CNN on Twitter
The actor is the first Twitter user to have 1 million people signed up to follow his tweets. As the winner, he will have to donate 10,000 mosquito nets in time for World Malaria Day on April 25.
so I guess if Ashton is doing it... read the LA Times article-->.
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Permalink Reply by chantal on -
Thought you might be interested... Reid just wrote an interesting article related to this post:
Is Social Media the New Branding?
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Permalink Reply by Noel on
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Thank you, Chantal. Reid's blog, and perhaps especially blog title, is brilliant. (His responses in this thread are equally so.)
Philip K. Dick predicted the manifestation of "social media" long before it even existed in such works as "Blade Runner" and "Minority Report," thanks to his paranoia, his schizophrenia, his drug use and his strange visions. He foresaw that we would barely be able to escape attempts to insert "buy this" thoughts into our over-burdened minds.
I truly think that facebook and twitter open those Pandora's boxes. (The ancient Greeks understood a thing or two.)
Everything I learned about how to develop and execute highly targeted marketing is being undone by this atom bomb approach (not to sound like Mr. Dick...) of simultaneous messaging to everyone on the planet at one time.
Not sure we can stop it or change it. People, who are largely sheep (thank you, Luis Bunuel), will do and follow whatever seems most popular. So in their rapid acceptance of intrusive messaging they are hastening the complete end of our peace and quiet.
Have you noticed how hard it is to be almost anywhere public without a TV or hateful music mix playing? We are not allowed to be alone with our thoughts, or to speak quietly with our companions. Soon that noise will be marketing messaging, if Mr. Dick correctly predicted the future.
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Permalink Reply by Noel on
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As a follow-up, here's a LinkedIn poll on this topic.
http://polls.linkedin.com/p/36268/zultf
I posted this minutes ago and there are already lots of responses.
N.
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Permalink Reply by Reid Givens on -
Wow, I didn't think anyone read my blog :)
Thanks
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Permalink Reply by Noel on
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I thought I did ... even clicked onto "Why the best thing to happen to the Blogosphere is Twitter." I kinda, sorta thought you were arguing against?
What's interesting, really interesting, about the poll is that "Back to work and they're gone" and "They improve networking, lots" are neck-and-neck in the lead. Pretty contradictory, n'est-ce pas?
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Permalink Reply by Noel on
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To follow up on my Philip K. Dick riff above, I wanted to point to a NY Times article that states a similar thesis, titled:
"Ear Plugs to Lasers: The Science of Concentration"
An excerpt:
Imagine that you have ditched your laptop and turned off your smartphone. You are beyond the reach of YouTube, Facebook, e-mail, text messages. You are in a Twitter-free zone, sitting in a taxicab with a copy of “Rapt,” a guide by Winifred Gallagher to the science of paying attention. ...
... “People don’t understand that attention is a finite resource, like money,” she [Winifred Gallagher] said. “Do you want to invest your cognitive cash on endless Twittering or Net surfing or couch potatoing? You’re constantly making choices, and your choices determine your experience, just as William James said.”
the full article is here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/science/05tier.html
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Permalink Reply by Noel on
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Is this the final word?
A Social Media Tee, on a remarkably funny site: http://site.despair.com/socialmediatee/#
Check out their de-motivational posters ... too funny.
N.
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Permalink Reply by Noel on
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Andreessen: Facebook will make 'billions'
http://albuquerque.bizjournals.com/albuquerque/stories/2009/07/06/d...
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