Twitter

I really like Friendfeed and what it’s becoming. What I love is how easy it is to follow many people and converse with them about everything they share. It’s the future of web sharing but it may take several months for people to move towards it. There are a number of things I love. First of all it aggregates your live stream in one place, so anyone who has an interest in you can share what they like about your work and you can follow this conversation. The second aspect that makes it so strong is that you can do the same for them. You can select those you think are thought leaders and follow everything they do and say. It’s mature, it’s like a web forum but grown up in that it branches out to blogs, twitter, plurk, youtube and flickr to name but a few networks. That’s just a small part of what makes it so interesting. Something else that makes this website and service interesting is the level and depth that conversations can take. If you get a few people talking together you get a debate and a dialogue, or conversation going. This contributes to the continuation of the discussion. What’s more is that it’s less name based. You can see what FOAF (Friends of a friend) are discussing and joining in. That’s not where it stops though. The rooms, albeit a little geeky for now will be a great place for people to come and discuss new topics, from political elections to festive events where they live and more. It’s specially designed for this. Look at the Davos room for example. RSS feeds from a variety of sources are aggregated into one place for easy digestion, especially when using the realtime feed option. The biggest weakness of the site at the moment is user numbers. With just a few hundred passionate users the discussion means the creation of a strong community bond that has long since dissapeared (or at least changed) for Twitter. Add Feedly to this and you’ve got one of the most interesting services yet to come out. Feedly makes it easy to share your content to many social networking websites, of which friendfeed and Google Reader are part. Read your google reader items in feedly, share them, add notes and more. It’s all synced from one place and it’s not website specific. You don’t need to be on the feedly website to use it. Just add the plugin and it works. I look forward to welcoming you there.

When you first arrive on twitter it’s lots of strangers sending messages speaking about what they’re doing and it quickly becomes overwhelming, especially with the vast number of people. For the first few months many people send no more than a hundred posts a day as they get used to the twitter stream. Eventually with time they get into the swing of things and they begin to interact with the other users and this creates a sense of friendships. Those friendships grow and they flourish, from the occasional exchange initially until several weeks later they are full grown conversations. That’s when character begins to show, when we see who we would love to spend more time and who we would get to meet in person. That’s when the tweetup is about meeting old friends for the first time in person. For most of you this is a foreign concept. For you the web is a place to keep in touch with friends who have moved out of the town where you are living. That’s why facebook is popular with over one hundred and fifty million people worldwide. That’s why so many of you are friends of mine on facebook but not on twitter. There is another trend, which is stronger and stronger, online friendships becoming physical world friendships. I call them this way because as good as the conversation is online you can’t give the person a hug or share a meal with them. The tweetup was an occasion when you had the pleasure of meeting these people for the first time. i still remember meeting sizemore for the first time, Loudmouthman and a few others. I remember meeting Documentally too. What made these meetings so interesting is that we knew each other from weeks of tweeting in most cases, although in others it was spontaneous. There was no breaking the ice. You just go straight into the conversation an that’s what makes it such a great networking tool. That’s part of the reason I was invited by Seesmic to LeWeb. I really value these opportunities. Recently though there’s another trend. You meet people in person and learn they twitter, you chat to them in person for a day, two days or more and you feel you have a good connection. A few days later you’re online, using twitter and you’re interested in staying in touch with them, seeing what they’re doing and sharing that passion, whatever the project. There is that drift away though, you give them your time but they don’t reciprocate. Instead you get a deluge of self promotion and ignored comments to what they’re doing. That friendship which had seemed interesting is broken. People don’t have time for twitter. Thousands of people are joining twitter every day and thousands of people are finding new followers but none, or hardly any of them are working at what made twitter so great, the community aspect. The community feel has disappeared. It may have something to do with traveling away from London but I think it’s deeper than that. I feel that as twitter has grown in value and as it has become part of their daily lives they are less willing to devote as much time to communication online. Of course this may be a sign of how ubiquitous Twitter has become. If it’s a tool where everyone is spread around the world then everyone wants to be online to talk because that’s their only choice. Now though opportunities have blossomed and twitter has become a local affair, and the bigger the local population the more isolated you will feel if you’re living in the provinces. That’s what I feel now. I’m not saying it’s a negative thing. I really disliked the only twestival event I went to but I think that’s because I saw that twitter has finally become something local. The fact that the event is in over 100 cities proves this. Twitter has become local, and so the focus is on those that live within easy meeting distance of where you live. That’s why London twitter users ignore users in other cities. That’s why there’s a new form of community. I’m looking forward to when twitter becomes more popular in Switzerland, when I get more local friends to use the site. In the meantime though I have to accept that more traditional approaches to friendships may serve me better. I did leave forget my phone at home tonight, when I went to meet some friends and I didn’t turn back to get it. I went out. I was disconnected from the world and it didn’t matter. I was finally living locally once more. I’ve learned a lot from this twitter separation. I will be back to the service but if you don’t give me the time of day when I send you a message then you can forget about me following those hyperlinks to the work you’re so busy promoting. I want to feel I have a personal connection with those I follow, not that I’m part of an audience. I want you to be in my seminar group.

warzabidul - Feb 4, 2009

What makes the first meetups so great is that you spend weeks and months talking to people, you develop a relationship with those people so that when you finally meet them you’re really happy. That feeling is made even nicer when you realise you have similar interests to people you had not met yet.

Now the tweetups and other meetings often feel like a formality, nothing fun, nothing innovative. That is not to say that I don’t like tuttle. In fact I do like tuttle because there you still have that young entrepreunerial spirit, those innovators and thinkers. There’s a lot to be gained from the tuttle meetups. That’s a concept that works really well in my eyes.

There is a video of me at the only Twestival event I have ever been to and I lay into the event for the fashionistas that attended the event. I was so disappointed with the event as a whole that I have lost my passion for going to social media events, especially when I need to travel over a thousand kilometers. Environmental conscience is one good reason for not travelling to these events but the second is the quality of the people there. When I talked to people at the Twestival event and asked them about twitter they looked at me strangely, when I asked them about how many tweets they had written they told me from five to two hundred on average. As a passionate twitter user and having been to a lot of social media events, tweetups and seesmeetups this really dissapointed me. The event felt like nothing more than a facade, nothing more than an opportunity for people to say “look at how trendy I am, I’m on twitter” yet not understanding anything about the ethos of the twitter way of life. I love twitter, and I love those that use it well, I love how certain people use it the same way they use sms and other social means. I don’t like that in Switzerland I’m strange because I use twitter. I like it even less that over here twitter will never be popular. There is no reason for it because of social cohesion, but also a far smaller community. Switzerland is about skiing, sailing, cycling, hiking, parapente and more sports. We’re not in a city. We’re in the countryside, Europe’s playground. Why be geeky when sports would be more social. More to the point everything is current. I don’t need to wait two to five years for people to adopt the sports. That’s why I’m coming back to Twitter on Valentine’s day. (It’s also the day I got my driving licence ;-))

Here we have @sizemore speaking about why he organised the first London tweetup. I will upload some of the other interviews soon but I’m just checking the player embedding first

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reyes - Jan 4, 2009

ooohhh I like this idea! Sounds good. Its time we got some more interesting metrics for twitter and move away from the ol’ ‘how many followers have you got’ mindset. Maybe it could delve deeper into twitter conversations by looking at replies and RTs as well.

What makes this idea interesting is that those that attract twitter users get a higher rating :-). Scoble would still do well in this model. Others would do better.

Dear developers, As the number of people on twitter increases and as people get into the thousands of followers I would like to demonstrate that those thousands of followers does not amount to much. Instead I would like to count follower mass by the absolute number of each follower, added to the number of followers. In other words if you have ten followers with ten tweets the number would be 100. If you have 1 follower with a thousand tweets then the value would be a thousand. If you have five followers each with five thousand tweets then that would give 25,000 as a value. The point of this application would be to demonstrate that your follower mass may not be as great as you excepcted it to be. The more active your followers the higher your value on this scale. If you develop this application let me know :-) I’d love to use it.

petegilbert - 29th of Jan, 2009

I agree that Twitter can often be frustrating and time wasting. I hate having to search through people’s Tweets to catch the start of a conversation. But in a way it’s strangely fascinating, like maybe you shouldn’t be reading it…

I do like Friendfeed a lot but find it almost impossible to get my local active group of Twitter people to use it. I post stuff on there and it just goes into a void. No-one follows you on Friendfeed (except yourself, maybe Scoble) and it feels a bit one sided. I want to use it more though so I’m not going to give up.It will catch on more in Europe but it’s going to take time.

Having used Friendfeed intensly for the last two days and through reading this post I believe that twitter is on it’s way out for early adopters for one fundamental reason. The re-tweet. Twitter is over simplified for anything but IRC like conversation and as a result of this for passionate users such as myself we bounce from the walls of twitter without an opportunity to escape it. We see links but know nothing about them. We see retweets but don’t understand them. We get replies of which conversation they were part of and in general twitter is a two message medium. The two message medium is the way I think best illustrates how people use twitter most of the time. Too many people worry about productivity and wasting time and because they feel guilty for having a conversation on twitter they cut it off after two messages on average. As a result the twitter user often feels that they have wasted time. In Friendfeed however you write a message, link to an article and if people like it you see how many people, including you liked the article and you can see the comments. As an effect of seeing their comments you may exchange more messages with them. It doesn’t matter when you join the conversation because the flow is still there. This saves so much time and technology that I am really thinking of moving away from twitter to Friendfeed because it has finally come of age and is more reflective of the way people disseminate and share information for at least a few more weeks. Anyone else feel the same? Let me know.

An American in France - Jan 1, 2009

You blog is gorgeous. I will be back to this blog. I have a blog about France, which is my baby right now. -melaniekraus from twitter

Glad you like it :-), I’ll spend time looking at yours, watching a documentary at the moment.