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Jun 07 2009

ReTweet Tweet Tweet – We Are What We Tweet: What Value Are You Giving Your Following?

"If I ReTweet myself, then I ReTweet myself. I am large. I contain multitudes."
–  WWhitman adapted from Song of Myself

Seems like a good bit of Twitter is stuff like this:

picture 28 ReTweet Tweet Tweet   We Are What We Tweet: What Value Are You Giving Your Following?

and stuff like this:

picture 29 ReTweet Tweet Tweet   We Are What We Tweet: What Value Are You Giving Your Following?

and Mr. 50k (now nearing 100k) generates a heck of a lot of tweets that look like this:

picture 32 ReTweet Tweet Tweet   We Are What We Tweet: What Value Are You Giving Your Following?

There's no questions that he's tweeting. And He's generated A LOT of tweets in his historical rise to non-fame.

picture 311 ReTweet Tweet Tweet   We Are What We Tweet: What Value Are You Giving Your Following?

But much of it is little more than chatter, like the folks in the grocery store on their bluetooth headsets that talk to their disembodied friends through out their entire shopping spree. There's not much to the conversation. And the appearance is fairly goofy, especially if they like to gesture with their hands… But the conversation looks  similar to the tweets above. Chatter for chatter's sake.

[Wait a sec, "Husky pants for adults?" Now that's funny. Would I follow the guy? No. But he occasionally shows a blip of humor throughout his meteoric 14,000+ tweets.]

Let's do the math on this for a second.

picture 33 ReTweet Tweet Tweet   We Are What We Tweet: What Value Are You Giving Your Following?

That's only 24 tweets a day, 7/24. So not un-reasonable. But check out Mr. 50k's tweetcloud:

picture 34 ReTweet Tweet Tweet   We Are What We Tweet: What Value Are You Giving Your Following?

Id's say that's pretty much a tweet content value of ZERO.

Perhaps I need to do a bit of work on my content as well:

picture 35 ReTweet Tweet Tweet   We Are What We Tweet: What Value Are You Giving Your Following?

But at least I have a few more words to work with.

So last observation:

The top image is a friend who is working to work Twitter as a business. To him, Twitter is an RSS feed that's easier to explain to people. Feed everything through it, derive benefit from the followers actions.

The 2nd image is from Whurley. No harm in referring to your self as an evil genius, over and over and over again. And no harm in self-promoting a bit via your Tweets. [We all do this.] But if your primary contribution to the twitterverse looks like a self-selected "genius" promo, well… ]

The 3rd image is from Mr. 50k. Who in dialogue via twitter admitted that he Auto-DMs people so that he can communicate with them better. When I asked him why he didn't at least visit the person's Twitter page and see if he had any connection whatsoever with the person, he responded, "When you get over 100 new followers a day, you see if you have time to contact each one of them directly."

In a rather amazing turning of social media on it's ear, Mr. 50k called me after I had been tweaking his ear for a week to stop "gaming" Twitter. He asked me to stop. We had a nice chat. "You can't believe what kinds of opportunities this number of followers gives me."

Uh, yes, actually I can. What I still wonder, is what kind of value you can possibly give to your followers in 736 tweets per month. And if it's just chatter, WOW that is a lot of wasted energy for all parties concerned.

I will leave you with the actual WWhitman quote.

"If I contradict myself, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes."

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/tweet-tweet

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Mar 29 2009

Pay-to-Play Twitter – the Twitter Problem (UPDATE 3-29-09)

Category: community building,social media,speed the web,tech opinion,toolsjmacofearth @ 7:51 am

Who determines what's gaming the system? Does Mr. 50k, who AUTO-BOTS everyone and everything get kudos or crickets? Who decides which API calls get white-listed and which get black-listed? Who decides how many Twitter calls is enough? Who throttles the system for the commercial accounts vs. the free ones?

As with Google when a company controls too much of the communications space they have an opportunity to "do evil."

So Twitter did a parnership with Microsoft (speak of the devil) to see if the ExecTweets model had legs or more importantly, gold coins. Well, I'd say they are foil wrapped coins if you ask me. [Oh and Federated Media is gonna do the advertising model for them as well.] Getting in bed with MS is sure to hasten your demise not improve your street cred. But then again, turning down a half-billion dollar offer from Facebook is pretty ballsy.

But what's a Tweeter to do? Is it time to pay the tweet-keeper? Are there "premium" features that Twitter can think up that the Twitter-App community hasn't? Okay, so even if they can't, they can squeeze off the target app and build it for themselves and charge money for it. Right?

Okay, so why does this sound so much like the debate over pay-for-quality-bandwidth issue in the internet infrastructure space? Because it's the same thing.

Does Twitter and Biz Stone and Co. OWN Twitter and the Twitter API? Yes. Is the Twitter API so important that we'd all be willing to pay to play on Twitter's fail-prone network? [Trick question. But would it improve the service?]

At the moment, Twitter is the only way to get your Tweetoff. But it cannot stay that way for long. What do you suppose Google thinks about being left out of the MS-Twitter revenue sharing model? I'd bet Jaiku is still bitter on their tongues and I'd bet when the "system" is ready they will offer a "TWEET-OPEN" format or "TWEE-CONNECT." It does not matter what they call it.

Twitter is a network and a protocol for 140 character messages. Not too unique in the world of internet communications. Facebook offers more characters, and keeps f-ing up their web pages, but they have 10x the users. That's right. Facebook makes "Twitter" our favorite champion of the innovative, new frontier to the uninitiated, gaming platform for the greedy… Facebook makes Twitter look like a minnow to Moby Dick.

So it won't be long. Mark the date. Twitter and MS get in bed together. Days, weeks, later Google or Facebook releases the FREE-and-EASY network API for Tweeters ready to UPGRADE their service to servers that don't have a Fail Whale joke attached to them. Oh, and don't expect the Twitter-App Innovators to sit by and watch TweetiePie get all the gold coins.

Check out Jively, a single developers attempt at building a new Twitter. [Like Twitter but better.] Or Yammer.

So MicroTweet, TwitterSoft, TwitterLIVE. ExecTwitter sounds like a Twitterjoker.com concept if I've ever seen one. Not as good as the e-Penis joke I saw today.

If we are waiting for Microsoft to be innovative in the communications space and Twitter to get a clue about how to make money, we might examine our own navels and ask what we are willing to pay for what's FREE. And when it is still FREE somewhere else, how long will we pay for what we have?

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/pay2play

UPDATE 3-29-09
[Here is a copy and paste of an short post my Marc Canter, the champion of Open Mesh and Open Social. He takes on the Twitter Problem I address above.]
Decentralized Twitter’s time has come
Its great to see others like Dave Winer start to realize that Twitter has too much power in one vendor’s pocket and that it’s time to decentralize the whole notion of Twitter.

This is exactly why I resisted to signing up to Twitter in the first place and why I’ve continued to complain about relying upon a centralized service at all. [1], [2], [3], [4]

That’s why God (or whomever) invented DNS.  If we are to rely upon Twitter as infrastructure – it better sure as hell be decentralized!

Now how do you do that – and let other vendors in on it?

I’m sure that’s the last thing Evan Williams and Fred Wilson wanna see happen – but their lack of understanding the nuances and issues here – kind of are forcing the point.

Look – it’s not that Twitter is totally coolio.  But we need 100 Twitters.  That’s what I said before and why I’ll keep saying it.

Distributed decentralized Twitter = YES

– Marc Canter, May 4, 2008

+++

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Sep 16 2008

Making a Mesh of it All – A Portable Profile for the Future?

It's at least once a week that someone expounds poetic about a new social technology. Something along the lines of, "Follow me, friend me, badge and group me, and let's all hook up after work for a margarita this Friday."

I was blurry eyed and fuzzy brained today when a colleague was giving me the scoop of a new "fan-based" platform. "It's something that Zappos uses…" I admit I was not full of my usual energy for the new find. In fact, try as I might, I could not get the gist of the advantage of the platform to any other platform of the 10 platforms that I use regularly. Oh, but it does have a mobile, "iPhone-ready" I think he said, version out-of-the-box.

I relish the work I do with Dell these days. Social media is definitely the next-gen thing, and Dell is definitely leading the charge in many areas. So to sit on a team at one of the world's largest internet retailers and to be getting to talk about this new stuff, I am truly honored. The catch phrase "dream job" doesn't really do it justice. But I blather…

Back to this new platform, site, technology, sociology, folksonomy, taxological framework…

All I could think about was one of the early WEB 2.0 mantras. Users should be able to import and export their data easily and without barrier. And it hit me.

SMACK!

We've been talking a lot about Single Sign On lately. So that users don't have to remember multiple accounts and passwords just to navigate several social media sections of Dell.com. And I have been trying to up the ante with OPEN ID or whatever the next-level of OPEN ID is. What I really want is simplicity AND portability.

How can I create a central profile (kind of like I have on FriendFeed) that easily integrates with the newest of the new social media systems? And what kind of security would be required and what needs to be strengthened in OPEN ID? (See FFoFF) then when my friend says, "You've got to check this one out." I could simply add the new system to my "social keychain" and I'd be learning rather than updating. And I am sure my eyes would be less likely to glase over at the exclamation of, "You've got to check this one out."

And lastly, I began thinking of all the abandoned profiles I have in all those "newest" of last year sites; and how in Second Life, when you are not online your character just slumps and hovers. And I would want my portable profile to be retractable as well. I really like the link on the twitter profile screen that says, "Delete this Profile." Not that I would do it, but it is nice to know, that with a click (Boy, I sure hope they ask for confirmation after the first click.) I could wipe all traces of my existence from the wikiblogiforumcommunity that I no longer feel attached to.

Click. >> Yes I'm sure. >> */Poof/* >> Click here to create an account.

Nah, I don't think I will. Not today.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://bit.ly/social-mesh

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future posts

A Collaborative Space: WebEx, Go-To-Meeting, Skype, Basecamp (Teaming/Meeting Tools)
Twitter Problem: How do you find enough interesting people to follow? Then how do you keep up with them?
The Agile Mind: Construction, Evolution, Care, and Feeding Instructions for Mental Flexibility

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