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Yep – ten thousand tweets

Byrichard

Yesterday afternoon I arrived at a milestone point, ten thousand tweets on twitter. That’s After less than a year of using the website. To me it’s replaced the university bar for two reasons. The first of these reasons is I’m now a graduate so there’s not much point in going to that bar anymore. The second reason is the organic way in which you create a network of contacts.

When you first arrive in twitter it’s a scary place. You see thousands of 140 character messages arriving every few minutes and it’s a time consuming to find the people that you find interesting. There’s the notion that you “follow” people. It’s used to describe the way in which you listen to what they have to say.

As you listen to this conversation you see that one person talks with another person and over a period of time as you follow the conversations so you get to see who the participants are. Over a period of days or weeks you’ve got several dozen people you’re following. That means that you’re now able to have many conversations a day. It’s just a question of how much time you’re willing to put.

In this respect it’s like university. There are two ways you can treat student life. You can be an Honours student with very few but good friends or you can be a high achieving student who’s created a network of hundreds of friends. I chose the latter option. I could go into university any day of the week and it would take an hour to walk from one side of the building to the other because of all the friendships I had established there.

It’s the same with twitter. The more time you put into twittr the more you get out of it. The fact that people like Robert Scoble, Chris Brogan and Chris Pirillo take the time to follow and listen to people on twitter tells you a lot about the types of conversations that are occuring.

The first two individuals take a huge amount of time to talk with people on twitter and it’s a really great tool to see what’s going on, in fact so great that I no longer feel the need to read as many RSS feeds or listen to as many podcasts, simply because I’m participating in the conversations before they become even blog news.

There is another aspect to twitter. When you’re on twitter you may be behind your computer, having never met any of these people in person and so it’s really strange to use twitter. It’s thanks to Sizemore organising the London twitter meetup a few months ago that I started to see Twitter in a very different light. It wasn’t just a website. It became a means by which  for me to create friendships online before bringing them into the real world. Jeff Pulver, Chris Brogan, Robert Scoble and many others do the same.

On the lighter side there’s the flirty side of Twitter. The social media make flirting fun. Quite a few times I’ve created nice friendships with girls and as a result had 2-3 hour conversations via IM, Video webcam and more. It’s a way of life for a new age in human interaction. A year ago I would meet people in person and when they moved to another country the friendship would go online. Now it’s the reverse and that’s what I enjoy so much. That’s why I don’t feel it’s an addiction. Does it sound like I’m an addict?

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Plaxo Pulse and Facebook

Byrichard

For all of those privacy advocates I’m on your side for this issue. With a lot of communitis you create a profile and friends can see it. What you give them are both your name and possibly phone number but no more. When you’re building a database of contacts you must ask for it.

When you add friends to outlook, address and other applications you’ve done research and the users have given their consent. That’s not the same as harvesting them direct from facebook. No one said they wanted you to have their e-mail address. No one chose to give you those details.

If you want them ask for them. Taking contact details from 5000 people is unethical and wrong. That’s very similar to spam behaviour.

What makes this worse is that Plaxo is associated with this. I use Plaxo pulse and you can see it on the right side of this column.  I don’t mind their services but for people to harvest their friend’s data without prior consent will help increase this feeling of insecurity.

We’ve had that debate on Seesmic, on Facebook and other online communities. If we want real communities transparency and trust are key. Stop abusing it.

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On meeting Robert Scoble at the London Geek Dinner

Byrichard

This afternoon Nik Butler, Loudmouthman sent me a text message asking whether I was free to go to the London Geek Dinner where Robert Scoble would appear. Of course I was free so I decided to go to the event and met a number of people. The first person I met was Robert Scoble for this particular event. He was standing at the door and as I came up he welcomed me into the room, we shook hands and I got his business card.

That was quite unexpected, so approachable. I spent some time talking with Loudmouthman, Michael Beddows, Liz Strauss and Giles Thomas.

The London Photowalk itself saw us walk from The Geekdinner venue down towards Southbank and the film cafe. It’s the first time I went to the bar and I’ve been living in London for over three years now. It’s amusing to see how many photographs were taken and videos recorded. It was the photographer photographing the photographer. Scoble interviewed people as we were walking down the street and others were filming the filming.

I enjoyed the evening and meeting Scoble. For a while I nicked his video camera and filmed some shots of London for him. One of those shots was the Midnight ring of Big Ben. That’s about it for tonight.

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