Twitter

One of my biggest frustrations at the moment as a user of twitter is that I can’t meet with the people I chat with on a regular basis. As a result of this I am trying to find as many Geneva based twitter users as possible to organise a tweetup. There are two options, the first is to do it at the same time as twestival but that is one event that I personally want to have nothing to do with. I was disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm that people at that event had for twitter. As a result I would prefer not to repeat that experience. What has been suggested by Sandrine is a tweetup at the same time as the LIFT09 conference is taking place in Geneva. For those that are not familiar with LIFT09:

warzabidul - 20th of Jan, 2009

I’ve written many times about how stupid it was for twitter to cut the sms service in Europe. It discouraged me from using the service. I also commented on how they should have made a better mobile version of their website for non iphone users.

I also wrote and commented about Jaiku and what it promised but that failed to get enough users to be a serious contender.

Saw this post on techcrunch and the intern is not wrong. I left a comment on the blog. I also decided to leave that comment here.

Get out of London, get out of Paris. Get to the provinces and the small towns. get into the french speaking, Lithuanian speaking, portuguese portions of twitter and the social media. Let’s see whether people really are interested in twitter. As an english person of course you’d be led to believe that twitter is popular. You have over 10,000 people in London alone using twitter. Now step out to Portland, Dorset and see how many twitter users are active there. Twitter is not popular outside of the microcosm yet. Just because big names like ross, branson and others are on twittter doesn’t mean you’ve got an active group of users. It just means people heard about twitter, created an account but then not followed it up with actual tweeting, especially not in sufficient quantity for it to be considered anything more than a fad yet. I say this as a former London twitter user now living in Switzerland where people are still rather pessimistic about twitter and it’s value. Of course people have heard about it but it fails to have any relevance until the time when their friends in the physical world come and participate. The intern isn’t wrong in what he/she says.

snowbroader - Jan 1, 2009

Hey Richard,
Do you know when the Geneva event is planned?
Thanks
Nico

For the moment I am planning on going to Zurich for the twitter dinner. It’s the first Zurich twitter event I go to and it will be interesting whether I need to speak swiss german or whether my English and French will help make conversation a little simpler. I don’t exchange messages with many Zurich twitter users so it will be quite different from the London events where I had exchanged so many messages. There’s another one in a month’s time in Paris although with the label I don’t enjoy much. I like the word tweetup because you have to smile to say it. Video of the event may arrive online. As a side note I should be going to one of the Geneva Inauguration event to get some footage of how the international community/facebook users of Geneva react to the event.

A few days ago I noticed that twitter was tweeting their programs as they were on in German and this looked like a good idea. I commented it was a shame that they didn’t have the same in French. Within a few days it’s there. This morning I saw Arte’s tweet for one program and so I’m watching a guy play some Chopin on the Piano. I spend quite a bit of time watching the twitter stream so if someone gives me their program details, as an opt in then there’s a good chance that I will tune into the program on the spare of the moment. If I had intended to watch the program at 2038 in three days time I would have forgottten about it. As things are that’s what’s playing on the right side of my screen now.

And in great style twitter is broken again and yet again they’ve found a new way in which for this to be evident. Today they’ve devided to block all ingoing tweets, no more posting for the next few hours I guess. They really should get a prize for this. No warning, no status.twitter.com message, nothing.

Today twitter has reminded me of why I dislike how it’s managed. With the big Mac World event and CES twitter is down, for the count. The problem is that these crafty people have decided that rather than take the site down completely they would let it lag. As a consequence of this lag the site has been rendered redundant but don’t worry. Other sites like plurk, friendfeed and facebook are still standing.

Twitterfriends is another of those interesting tools to see who you converse with most on twitter. You can see who replies to you most, who you reply to most, the sphere of influence and more. As a result it’s a good tool with which to establish who are the interesting people to continue following as well as those that may be worth dropping. In particular the second to last tab deals with inactive account. It’s a quick and easy way to see which accounts are no longer worth following. The network tab is also interesting. It’s a quick way of seeing who is in your networki graphicaly. Click the FOAF (friend of a friend) tab and you can see how your network and that of others interact. [caption id=“attachment_916” align=“aligncenter” width=“373” caption=“Warzabidul statistics for 3rd of January 2009”][/caption] As more people use the website so the value of those figures go up. You’ll notice that according to this I have received no replies. If that was a reality I would have given up on twitter a few months ago.

warzabidul - Jan 3, 2009

Testing discuss at the moment.