Saw this post on techcrunch and the intern is not wrong. I left a comment on the blog. I also decided to leave that comment here.
Get out of London, get out of Paris. Get to the provinces and the small towns. get into the french speaking, Lithuanian speaking, portuguese portions of twitter and the social media. Let’s see whether people really are interested in twitter.
As an english person of course you’d be led to believe that twitter is popular. You have over 10,000 people in London alone using twitter. Now step out to Portland, Dorset and see how many twitter users are active there.
Twitter is not popular outside of the microcosm yet. Just because big names like ross, branson and others are on twittter doesn’t mean you’ve got an active group of users. It just means people heard about twitter, created an account but then not followed it up with actual tweeting, especially not in sufficient quantity for it to be considered anything more than a fad yet.
I say this as a former London twitter user now living in Switzerland where people are still rather pessimistic about twitter and it’s value.
Of course people have heard about it but it fails to have any relevance until the time when their friends in the physical world come and participate.
Twitter are stopping all SMS for many territories due to cost. They don’t need to send sms. If they had an s60 application similar to that by Jaiku they would incur no extra costs. We would simply take advantage of our dataplans to download the messages at any time that the application is running.
Worldwide we are going to find that there are a lot of dissapointed users. At the same time the centralised conversation that twitter managed to encourage will spread across a number of platforms. As a result twhirl is a good alternative whilst waiting for things to settle.
If the companies can’t behave then we’ll rely on Air applications to aggregate and monitor what’s going on. I already watch seesmic, twitter, identi.ca and friendfeed with twhirl.
All this to say something simple. If you want me to keep coming to your site provide me with the best user experience possible. If not then I’ll be as uncommitted as possible. So will everyone else
Yesterday I decided that I would track how many tweets I receive within a 24hr period. The result is not that bad. Over that period 917 tweets transited through my timeline. These tweets are sent according to the time of day. Some of them are sent during the Australian morning, European morning and goodnight time for America. As a result there should be some visible peaks at certain times of day.
It’s an average of 38 tweets an hour, not to bad when you consider that reading a hundred and fourty characters takes only a second or two to scan over. Out of those tweets the vast majority are in English although I get Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch and Swedish to name those I remember off the top of my head.
The topic of these tweets is quite diverse from people’s project progress to websites they enjoy as well as to their daily lives. It’s an interesting aperçu of what all these social (new) media people are doing. Many friendships are built up as a result of this social network. It’s still interesting and I look forward to getting a higher average than a measly 38 messages an hour. Add me on twitter and I’ll follow you too.
Twitter is alive and healthy, with vibrant communities and an opportunity to converse with people and find information that mainstream media are sometimes slow to report on. Over the last week that balance is swinging towards less positive times.
In Europe, freedom of speech, and freedom of expression require people to say things that they can back up with evidence and facts. If you say something that is demonstrably false, or demonstrably misleading then you are held to account for this.
In the US they believe that freedom of expression includes the freedom to lie with impunity, to spread disinformation and to mislead people, without consequences. By doing this society is vulnerable to tyranny and fascism. If we are told a lie that we want to believe then we are less likely to quibble its veracity. We will repeat the lie, and if we see people who enjoy the same lie, then we will repeat that they have told the same lie. Disinformation is a positive feedback loop of false information being spread as real information, once it gains enough traction.
By buying Twitter, and by saying that Twitter wants to bring freedom of speech, and freedom of expression Musk is saying something that we all value and think is important. The problem though, as I have mentioned above, is that the freedom of expression that Musk is talking about, is not a European freedom, but an American one. It is suspected that he would bring back people like Trump, and that he would make twitter a welcoming place for people to spread lies and disinformation, in impunity.
There is another larger scope to this conversation and that scope is that Twitter is a global social network used by over a billion people a day. During this pandemic it has allowed people who want to find information about the risks presented by Covid-19 to follow experts in their fields, to hear accounts from sufferers of Long Covid, and to get a global appreciation of the risks of the disease. When the WHO backs up what the experts have shared on twitter, and vice versa, when the information makes sense to our moral compass, then Twitter is a great resource for information. It should be protected. It should not be possible for one individual to buy a network with over a billion users.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,”
There are plenty of ways in which people can be proponents of free speech. They can invest in education, they can invest in newspapers, they can invest in library projects and more. They can invest in making sure that people are granted free and equal access to information. You don’t need to buy a social network to promote free speech. Remember that freedom of expression comes with the obligation to be well-informed, and knowledgeable. His “freedom” is to spread rumours and opinions. These undermine, rather than help democracy. I believe that he wants dismantle the gatekeepers, so that it is even more challenging for people to have access to trustworthy information.
On Monday, he tweeted that he hoped his worst critics would remain on Twitter, because “that is what free speech means.” He added in his statement that he hoped to increase trust by making Twitter’s technology more transparent, defeating the bots that spam people on the platform and “authenticating all humans.”
When Google bought Jaiku, and when Facebook bought Instagram we stayed on the networks. Jaiku eventually became Google+ but Google+ was then dumped. Instagram, after being bought by Facebook lost its soul. Instead of being a network of friends, and friends of friends it became a network of adverts and influencers. I dumped the network because I no longer derived pleasure from the network.
Now onto Twitter. Musk “… tweeted that he hoped his worst critics would remain on twitter because ‘that is what free speech means.'”. Free speech isn’t about whether we stay on a platform or leave. It is about the freedom to be on a network that is not owned by someone we do not trust. It is about being on a network that is not owned by a temperamental individual. It is about being on a platform we trust, with values we cherish. I do not value the US values of “free speech”, I value the European ones, that include accountability. Remember the first line of the New York times’ article is “The world’s richest mansucceeded in a bid to acquire the influential social networking service, which he has said he wants to take private.”
Anyone valuing democracy should be worried by that sentence. Within the article they say that Twitter has 220 million daily users. He would take the conversation of 220 million people, and control the network they use, privately. This should not be possible.
Mr. Musk has made some of his intentions clear in regulatory filings, tweets and public appearances: The company must scrap nearly all of its moderation policies, which ban content like violent threats, harassment and spam. It must provide more transparency about the algorithm it uses to boost tweets in users’ newsfeeds. And it must become a private company.
I will finally leave you with the quote above. Do you want to be on a social network without moderation? I do not. That’s why I don’t use other platforms. I am ready to leave twitter, when the time comes. I have been ready to do so for years.
Tweetrush is based on the rushhour engine and aims at providing information on the volume of tweets that are sent every hour of the day. At the present 800,000 tweets are sent a day. That’s an average of 33,300 an hour. I only tweet at about 86 (not 200) a day depending on conversations.
You can see user’s tweet rate as well.
It’s a fun litle app that can help picture how twitter is growing at present.
This has to be the year where I have met the most people online before meeting them in person, which is quite amusing. It’s also the year that warzabidul as a nickname became a person in the physical world to more than two or three people. It’s the year an online person become a nickname for a real person.
It’s the year where, at least for early adopters, Twitter and Seesmic both helped create opportunities for people to meet and get to know each other online before taking it back into the physical world. It’s the year I went to a Podcamp, some tweetups and some seesm’up. It’s the year many of us stopped hiding behind avatars and nicknames and moved towards creating a brand or identity, depending on whether your point of view is that of marketing or personal fun.
I’ve enjoyed learning about the “social media” and all the new possibilities. I look forward to 2008 when many more such networks and events will be organised. It’s been a fun year to be introduced to the “Social Media” and I’m happy to have met so many people.
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2 Comments
Cute but you didn't address the point in the post about SMS. Twitter is now 3 years old. Go ask a US company if they were using SMS for customer service 3 years ago. I bet a lot of them weren't because SMS was slow to take of in the US. Now many use Twitter for cust. serv. So they are a little ahead of EU firms? Who used SMS first? The Europeans did. Answer that one.
I've written many times about how stupid it was for twitter to cut the sms service in Europe. It discouraged me from using the service. I also commented on how they should have made a better mobile version of their website for non iphone users.
I also wrote and commented about Jaiku and what it promised but that failed to get enough users to be a serious contender.
I see quite a few Europeans playing with plurk at the moment. Europe is a fragmented market with many languages and many interesting services as you point out in your post.
If Facebook is anything to go by then we may have to wait at least another year or two before twitter becomes anything more than a play toy for people like you and those those that we converse with on a regular basis.
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Cute but you didn't address the point in the post about SMS. Twitter is now 3 years old. Go ask a US company if they were using SMS for customer service 3 years ago. I bet a lot of them weren't because SMS was slow to take of in the US. Now many use Twitter for cust. serv. So they are a little ahead of EU firms? Who used SMS first? The Europeans did. Answer that one.
I've written many times about how stupid it was for twitter to cut the sms service in Europe. It discouraged me from using the service. I also commented on how they should have made a better mobile version of their website for non iphone users.
I also wrote and commented about Jaiku and what it promised but that failed to get enough users to be a serious contender.
I see quite a few Europeans playing with plurk at the moment. Europe is a fragmented market with many languages and many interesting services as you point out in your post.
If Facebook is anything to go by then we may have to wait at least another year or two before twitter becomes anything more than a play toy for people like you and those those that we converse with on a regular basis.