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Ten reasons to give up on twitter

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

Once again I have deleted my twitter account. Here are ten reasons to give up on twitter.

  1. Europe is neutral about the site. If you want friendships with people an ocean away join.

  2. Whenever you want to post some technical problem means you have to post five times

  3. If you have a real job, not freelancing, then you can’t afford to check updates all the time.

  4. Lack of user engagement, when less than a tenth of your replies are responded to you know there’s no point staying up to date with those people.

  5. Virtual community, unlike with facebook and other social networks the people you interact with here are strangers.

  6. Spam, as more and more marketers come to the site so the more you use certain words the more unsolicited messages you get.

  7. Veteran community: Aside from Facebook all websites are at their community most interesting when the users are new and passionate about the service. That has faded with twitter.

  8. 140 characters; Although it was great three years ago mobile phones are now far more capable mobile devices. Limiting yourself to 140 characters is no longer an interesting option.

  9. Server downtime. For three years they have been struggling with making the platform stable and for three years they have been failing. If you have to try five times to post 140 characters then something is wrong.

  10. User indifference. They are indifferent about their user base. Just take a look at the FAQ and try to offer them feedback and you will first have to go through an FAQ before being able to explain your views.

Having a full time job means that my free time is more precious than before. As a result I’d rather be out in the real world doing real things. It’s also about how much time you need to invest into such a service before getting anything of any value out of it. As a result a year after I first left twitter I have left again. This time I think it will be for good. I don’t like the way the company is run and I don’t like the way the users are using the site. Goodbye twitter. On to better things.

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Two Seesmic evenings later

Byrichard

For the past two days I’ve been monitoring and participating in the seesmic conversations and it’s been a really interesting experience. There are so many different people. You’ve got some people living in San Francisco, others in South East Asia, France, Australia and England and they’re all coming to chat via video.

This chat is different from other chats in that it’s recorded segments. It’s about people speaking about key parts of their day. Both Documentally and Sizemore for example decided to meet up at Sizemore’s place to have a very entertaining evening of Seesmic video posting and discussion. As a result of this Jester joined in although quite timidly, at least for the start. With time I’m sure she’s going to become quite active.

There is a great range in age group from those that are children all the way up to their parents and beyond. As a result it’s a family environment, a community where people joke around and have fun. It’s a place that shows how a community can form without any ties in the physical world, at least initially.

It’s a great place and the best way for you to get a taste of the conviviality for this website is seesmix, the daily show that summarises the hottest conversation for the day. On some days it’s conversations about racoons, snow, a song that sticks into people’s heads and many more topic.

It’s also about the overheard conversation. It’s about someone putting something out there and waiting for people to respond. It’s about individuals talking and for others to involve themselves, community building. As a result of this it’s quite different from the culture and the use of video phones that we had envisaged many years ago.

I really enjoy the conversations on seesmic and I can see how strong a community it can become with the right discussion and time. I can see it as a video version of twitter and I’m wondering whether threading would be that useful, after all the conversations are working fine as they are.

It’s about actuality, about currency. If you want to get something out of this community then you need to participate rather than sit on the side and listen. You’ve got to become part of the storyline, to show your character to encourage others to interact with you. There are apparently about 1000 people currently active although no more than 50 people are trully active on the site at the moment.

As it moves out of Alpha we can expect a lot more fun.

Counting follower mass by absolute tweet number

Byrichard

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.

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On moving from the Social media capital of Europe to Geneva

Byrichard

As a student it was not unusual for me to spend no more than six hours a day at home. The rest of the time I was out socialising, whether helping post grads with their work or with those from my studies. As a result of this I started to pay attention to many of the social networks. It had shifted from Facebook where all my real life friends could be found to more abstract social networks such as twitter, jaiku and others.

Through these networks I saw what everyone was up to and I could take the opportunity to go out and meet them occasionally at first and then more and more frequently as time passed. By the time I left England I had the opportunity to meet with one group every Friday morning and quite a few others on a number of different occasions. As a result my social life was built around what I saw via twitter and seesmic.

In geneva that social scene is pretty small at the moment. Some people are in Geneva, some are in Lausanne and others in Zurich. The problem is they’re not centralised therefore participating is not practical. That’s one of the weaknesses of social networking that I’ve encountered over the years. I do miss that aspect of life in England and I should attempt to recreate it here.

I’m not the only one facing this problem. Corvida of Read Write Web wrote about this topic recently and it’s an interesting challenge for Gen Y and early adopters. The majority of the users of mobile social networks congregate in one specific city and rarely move outside of it. As a student facebook was great to find out about events that were going on within that circle, then twitter became great once I graduated.

Now the challenge is to find what social network will be of interest in a city like Geneva. Would it be facebook used by most people in my age group. paying services that guarantee no results or simply going out into the physical world hoping to meet people that way.

Each method requires time and I’m not sure which is the most adapted to the lake Geneva region. It’s something I’m going to explore over the coming weeks. I want to rebuild a good physical world social network once more and see which tools remain relevant now.

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On twestival

Byrichard

The first tweetup I went to saw a crowd of no more than sixty people. The twestival had many more. Enough to fill the Doon club. So many new faces but not many new people to follow. It’s fun to see how big the London twitter community has become.

The usual people were there, sizemore, loudmouthman, documentally, danacea weaverluke and a few new faces like digitalmaverick, amandita, Poppyd and a few more people. Some video was shot of the event but I’m not sure by when they’ll go up. There was no wifi so no opportunity to do some live streaming.

At the same time I’m thinking it’s time for a plurk up of the same scale, since for the moment there are so few people.

Now it’s time for Tuttle.

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Recommending my twitter friends with MrTweet

Byrichard

Whilst I listened to MrTweet speaking on the Net@Nite podcast from several month ago I found it interesting that he spoke of the re-tweet as giving credit to those you follow who share some interesting links.

If you spend a lot of time on twitter though after seeing the same retweet too many times you may not follow them anymore. What I propose is to use MrTweet’s recommendation instead. The process is simple. Go to a profile page and you can see two things. You can see who has recommended you (me) or who you have recommended.

If you’re a twitter Veteran like those I follow and I then you don’t need MrTweet but if you like my blogging and tweet style then by seeing who I recommend you can find more relevant people to your twitter stream. As a result you will be following a group of friends rather than random strangers. As a result that sense of community will remain strong.

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