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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.