Whether Friends count more than followers

Byrichard

As you know I’ve been working on unfollowing more and more people over the past few weeks because I felt I was missing the tweets by those who want to participate actively with me. The consequence is that I’ve found twitter to be more sociable once more.

According to a recent article what I felt was the case has been demonstrated through research.

the number of total posts eventually saturates as a function of the number of followers. This implies that users with a large number of followers are not necessarily those with very large number of total posts.

Hence, the number of people a user actually communicates with eventually stops increasing while the number of followees can continue to grow indefinitely.

1. Twitter users have a very small number of friends compared to the number of followers and followees they declare. This implies the existence of two different networks: a very dense one made up of followers and followees, and a sparser and simpler network of actual friends. The latter proves to be a more influential network in driving Twitter usage since users with many actual friends tend to post more updates than users with few actual friends.

As this article implies and demonstrates there is no reason to follow thousands of people. What you should concentrate on instead is a small network of friends because by knowing that you can find them on the site it remains relevant. The more people you follow, and the more filtering you use the more you lose.

If you follow six thousand people on twitter but use tweetdeck to keep an eye on things those following you are going to realise you’re never seeing their output. As a result of this they will unfollow you. If you’re not social with them then why bother following you anymore?

Yet another reason to love Google Latitude

Byrichard

Yesterday I met a friend in geneva. The one that uses Google Latitude. I used my mobile phone to see where he was and just using cell towers I got a pretty good fix on where he was, within just a few hundred meters.

When I called him to get a more accurate fix, i.e. for him to input the address as his latitude position using the power of Google maps, latitude and 3g it took just a minute to find the actual address.

For this reason I love google latitude. When you’ve got technologically savvy users it makes being geo-loced twenty four hours a day extremely useful.

How to Make Friends and Get The Most Out Of Twitter.

Byrichard

Twitter is a multiplatform social chatroom that allows you to converse with people around the world from anywhere in near to real time. It is knowing a rapid growth and so here are a few guidelines to getting started.

140 Characters

If you thought 160 characters for SMS were limited then this limit will be even more of a challenge. That’s nothing to worry about yet, for now all you need to do is create an account and tell us what you’re doing. Don’t make it to personal.

Character building

You can’t tell us everything about you in 140 characters so please don’t try, there’s no point. Instead tell us about something you’re enjoying right now. If it’s a nice sunny tell us something you like doing. A walk is enough. In a few hours time come back and tell us something else you’ve been doing. If you met someone interesting tell us broadly why you enjoyed meeting this person. This will help us establish whether we’re interested in following someone with your character traits. Don’t worry though, you won’t give that much away anyway.

Who to follow

Do you know any bloggers or personalities that you enjoy reading about? If so then add them but not too many. It’s fun to know what they’re doing but you won’t get much of a conversation out of them.

Take a look at the timeline. Who is talking now. Who is having fun, who is doing something that you find interesting? If you find three or four people that you think may be interesting click on their name and look at their twitter timeline. Are there a lot of @ messages or a lot of links. If there are a lot of @ messages then this may be a good sign. It may mean this person is open for conversation with someone like you.

If all they do is link to content then I would think twice about following them. There’s a good chance they are not passionate twitter users. They are simply feeding links without paying much attention to what is being said. For that you might as well use an rss aggregator and get their information that way.

Are any of your friends adopting technology that you enjoy. See whether you can get them to join twitter with you. If you exchange messages with real life friends there are two benefits. The first is that you may be able to trust them. The second reason is that you can plan events with them, see what they’re doing without having to call them to find out.

Another effect is that if groups other than just your friends do this there’s a chance several communities can emerge, and occasionly get together for meetups.

Of course this means that you can plan on meeting certain people during events. If you know you’re going to a conference then see whether there’s a twitter stream, see if you can find out who’s answering to the stream. You may find some more interesting people.

Applications to use

There are three methods I would recommend using for accessing information on twitter. These are the web interface for when you’re on any computer other than your own, simply because it’s a fast and efficient way of getting to see what’s happening. When you’re not following that many people it also means you can watch the public view, scouting for new friends.The drawback is that this takes a lot of time. That’s where certain desktop apps come into play.

One of those I recommend is Twhirl, and it’s not just because I’m a seesmic user whose met Loic several times by now. It’s because it fits in well when you’ve got a laptop. You can go about all your work whilst twhirl checks every three minutes whether there are new messages. It only tells you when there’s a new @reply. There are two benefits to this.

The first of these benefits is that your mind is at ease, you’re not worrying about missing who wants to reach you because the software will fetch that automatically. The second reason is that you can quickly skim through the conversations that are taking place in real time. It’s not per keyword but don’t worry about this.

Some people like to use tweetdeck but I do not recommend this solution. When you’re new to twitter you may only be following three or four people who are active at a time. As a result it’s very easy for you to keep track of conversations, even if six hours have elapsed. For more frequent users though they’ll get confused. Confused people are lazy. They won’t bother asking you what you were refering to. They will simply not answer.

At first you’ll tell me that doesn’t matter, that you don’t care about not getting answers. Don’t worry though, after a while, and through personal connections being formed you will be dissapointed when friends don’t answer. Trust me, a lot of people feel that.

Dabr.co.uk is my favourite mobile application and it works on all 3g phones. it’s a quick and easy way to keep up with all conversations and replies. I’ve already sent thousands of messages with it, still happy 🙂

Spring cleaning

People’s tweeting styles change with time, and so do your expectations on what to get out of twitter. As a result you may be following twenty people who are local to you. When you move though your associations with them decay and after a while it may do you some good to unfollow them on twitter. you’ve still got facebook and their blog to keep up to date. Find new people that are active.

As I said earlier if you see that some people are too self promotional then unfollow them, especially when they don’t respond to your replies. It makes a lot of noise on twitter if we have three hundred replies sent without conversations actually taking place. It’s frustrating for those that follow you.

No automation

On twitter automation is your enemy, never let anything be automatic. Remember that there are real people giving their time and attention to read your stream. If all you do is send links then they will lose their desire to interact with you. This includes Last.fm lists, google likes and dislikes and more. If you write a blog post a day then rather than send a link tell people you’ve just written a post because you were inspired by that topic. If they’re active at the same time as you they go to your profile and find the link. If they’ve been following you for a few months they type three letters and your blog will appear quickly.

Conclusion

Twitter is a conversational tool. The more time you put into being conversational with fellow users the more friendships you will establish. With these friendships you may gain from professional and personal relationships. When you trave you may find people to meet without being in solitude. You’re free to do what you want with twitter but the more of your personality you put forward the more you should gain.

Unfortunate choice of words for a Water Charity event

Byrichard

International World Water Day is held annually on 22 March as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.

“After the Twestival hangover, how much money was raised for charity:water?”

Source

There are some events I don’t feel are really as chartable as they sound and twestival is one such event. I have absoluetely nothing against the charity they are raising funds for but I do question the ethics behind the events. Can you spot the word that I find is unfortunate?

Hangover, that’s the word I think should never be used in this context. Here you are stating that you want to help a charity to raise funds for a charity but you do so through music and other events. Problem is you’ve got people drinking alcohol at the event.If they woke up the next day with a hangover then what value and what message did they get from the event?

If I were to organise such an event, especially in London, then I would go to the Frontline club and see whether they know of any documentaries on the topic. I would attempt to get some people whose job it is to study the problem of water and get them to speak.

In particulr I’m thinking of a session like the one concentrating on water at the World Economic Forum in Davos. They are specialists in relation to this topic. As a result they know what figures are important.

How many litres of water does it take to produce one litre of biofuel for example. I don’t have the numbers on hand but they are impressive.

For More information

Anonymous comments have value

Byrichard

I love anonymous commenting because it’s from the heart that people speak rather than from their pedestal. By this I meran that when you make an anonymous comment you don’t need to know anything. You can say what you feel and you’re genuine. Of course that feeling might last ten seconds and you regret it.The point is that you can speak as part of the uninformed mass, you can afford to be wrong and your sentiments reality the feelings of the crowd.

The crowd is important. Understand the crowd and you understand how to please them. You see worries of anonmity, worries of stalking, feelings that the whole community you need is within three miles of where you live. Those comments have value.

To be attacked both as an individual or a community doesn’t matter. That’s where dialogue and conversation come into play. That’s when we get to see each other’s points of views and it may result in friendships, or the disagreement doesn’t continue. We are the privileged with our blogs and our advanced mobile phones.

For marketers and opinion hunters though it’s great. I read this post and I find myself disagreeing that anonimity is a bad thing. Everyone that comments on this blog lacks anonmity, at least for me because I know them on twitter or other websites. I lack anonimity too.

I use a nickname online but within a minute of searching you’ll find who I am. The effect of that is quite concrete. Whenever I post on a blog, a newspaper or anywhere online I have a personality I want to show. I have a reputation I have to attempt not to damage too seriously. That’s because we all have our own egos to feed. I don’t mean that in the self loving sense that those dissenting voices use against the event and against twitter.

I mean that I want to be taken seriously. I want to be valued. As a result if I flame someone who is part of twitter there is fallout I would immediately suffer from. I’ve seen it happen to others in forums, on twitter and in a number of places.

Why it’s a waste of time to follow certain people

Byrichard

In this article there are recommendations about who you should follow on twitter and I must admit I followed almost every one of them. I have unfollowed everyone of them except one. Chris Brogan. He’s the person whom I feel is most likely to answer a tweet directed at him.

If you’re following someone for their ideas don’t follow them on twitter if they’re not going to converse with you. It’s a waste of time and you’re missing the gems from the smaller time twitter users. Twitter is not about reaching a mass audience, it’s about reaching a focus group.

Twitter’s strenght is the way in which a cluster of people can discuss an idea and bring it to fruition. I’ve seen how tuttle went from being the Social media cafe to being called Tuttle. I watched as people talked online and wanted to meet and collaborate. Thanks to Lloyd Davis and others that idea became a reality.

As a result of this idea whenever I would drop by the Tuttle Mornings (every single Friday I was in London) I would watch as people spoke about their ideas and projects and how they wanted to keep in touch. Twitter gave them the initial contact before the meeting, as well as the follow up once they had met in person. It created a great network of people for getting things done.

If you think twitter is about following a thousand people you’re an idiot. If you think it’s about being followed by a thousand people you’re an idiot. That’s not what it’s there for. It’s there for real time conversations across a number of platforms. It’s there so that when I’m waiting for a train I check what people are doing, for when I travel to meet with friends in other cities and more.

If you’re not on twitter to converse you’re wasting my time, that’s why I’ve unfollowed over a hundred people rcently. If you’ve got something interesting to say people will mention you in their conversations, I will find your blog and I will subscribe to it. That’s the best place for ideas, they’re presented, shared and debated, all activities that take a lot more than a hundred and fourty characters, and threading for that is essential.

Now stop following those who talk, and start interacting with those that listen.

The Feedly and Friendfeed way of doing things

Byrichard

Venture capitalists love to invest in something that works, something that’s concrete. If it’s got a 900% user growth rate overall and tripled in size in the UK alone then this is excellent. That’s the perfect website to invest in. Of course I’m speaking here of twitter. The 140 character twitter website that no one has time to use yet everyone flocks to. With the recent twestival you see that it’s gone local, and that can only mean one thing, that it’s gone mainstream. Perfect, now the web celebs can come in without looking too geeky. Cue Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry to name just two individuals.

It’s passed though. The golden age of twitter is behind us. 140 characters and social presence have moved on from there and I think the companies we should be focusing next are feedly. friendfeed and google reader. The reason for this is simple. We all love to create content and we all love to talk about it. We all love to show others that we’ve found something but the drawback is that we create a lot of duplicates. These duplicates aren’t bad if you’re only following five or six friends. When you follow twenty eight thousand though it does start to get tedious however.

That’s where I feel real enthusiasm for feedly. As you go from blog to blog you find a lot of content that’s interesting but aside from what’s written in the comments for each post you have no idea of what others have thought or said about this. Feedly gives you a small box at the bottom right corner that tells you the number of conversations that have taken place and a quick method by which to see which are the most active references to this post. As a result you don’t need to wait for the kettle to boil to start a conversation. It’s already there.

That boiled kettle of course is Friendfeed. That’s where people will be moving next. That’s where we will find the conversation moving next. Watch the realtime thread and you can see who liked the post, who was vocal about it and when the most recent comment comes in. What this implies is that the limitations felt by twitter will become a thing of the past. We’ve got a high end solution for our content needs.

Of course we’re individuals. We all like to have our own rss feeds and personal content and that’s where google reader integration comes in. At the start and end of the day, when all those we are following are taking care of their children or walking their dogs we can go hunting for original content. We share that content and once people wake up they can comment and so the cycle continues.

Other websites are now providing more interesting options and deserve at least part of that pie.

Any french speaker in Switzerland knows this frustration.

Byrichard

Any french speaker knows this frustration. You see that a new service is available to Switzerland, drop by the site and everything is in German. Google latitude is in German and hundreds of other sites too. The most recent site to suffer from this curse is Nokia music, recently made available in Switzerland.

It would seem that those in charge of marketing in Switzerland believe that people in Switzerland only speak German. French speakers exist too, and so do the Italian speakers. As web content creators maybe it’s time for you to offer us the services in French so that we may use them.

Will companies providing services in Switzerland ever realise we’re not all German speakers? That remains to be seen. Nokia music, you’ve lost my interest.

Don’t make me sign up to login, and use Disqus so I can leave comments.

Byrichard

I’m active on the web, spending thousands of hours a year connected to the web. As a result I have to log into a lot of sites often. I don’t like logging in though. That’s why I would love for big name publishers like the WSJ, NYTimes and others to sign an aggrement with Facebook so that I may log into their service without having to remember my account details.

It would actually serve them better. Facebook knows who my friends are, where I studied, what stories I recommend and in some cases why. It’s also a reflection of the times that are coming.

I went on a blog commenting spree last week and almost all blogs ask for three things, name, e-mail and website url. When I have to input the data I think twice about leaving a comment, and may recommend the story and write a comment in friendfeed instead. Too bad the publisher loses that bit of interactivity.

For those publishers that want me to subscribe to your website you can forget it. There’s no way I’m going to subscribe to a website I visit less than once a month. It’s just too much effort and too much additional information to remember.

What I love are blogs that use Disqus. That’s because when I leave a comment I can find them all in one place at the end of the day. If someone answers my comment then I can see what they wrote. It means it’s an automated attention solution. Anything where I can spend time looking at new content is appreciated. It’s especially true now that web forums have become extro verted rather than introverted.

You’ve probably noticed it too. How many forums are you still part of? In my case none. I prefer the friendfeed and feedly method of doing things, where I actively seek information and get it sent to a central point from which other people converge to comment, and head back out once they’re done. I love the web in it’s current form as a result.

The 50,000th tweet

Byrichard

For Valentine’s day I reached my 50,000th tweet which I dedicated to @orchideane through twitterfone, as asked by @toppgold. I really want to lay in to twitter for having database maintenance. really I do, but I won’t. I’ll concentrate on other things.

There; contemporary joke:

What’s the difference between twitter and the Stock market?

None they’re both down.