Whether Friends count more than followers

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

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?

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Glocals and twitter

Byrichard

Glocals is a local website to find out what events are going on where for the international community in Geneva. It regroups events in a number of cities making easier to meet like minded people.

The reason for which I mention this social network is the low input high yield results from the site. In brief you see an event, you turn up, you meet some strangers and through conversation they become acquaintances.

This is contrary to the way I have approached social interactions on the web. I have spent years now building trust, building relations with people in a virtual environment. As a result of this it requires constant attention, constant interest.

I am thinking of twitter when speaking about this topic. 70,000 tweets have given me very little return on the time I have invested. In effect twitter is not only a waste of time but just the wrong social network for Switzerland.

There are a wealth of people to be met through the Glocals site, some work in the UN system, others for global companies and yet more for other settings. People who have been in Geneva for just a few hours or days meet up with people who have been here for years.

There’s also the gender balance. Going to many twitter events you’re surrounded by men, by workaholics, by self proclaimed entrepreneurs. They are focused on work, and profit rather than friendship.

In contrast Glocals is a nice mix of men and woman, physically active people who go canyoning, sailing, running and more. It’s a well travelled international crowd.

The most interesting aspet of my experiences over the past two weeks is that just because a site is talked about extensively does not mean that this is the site you should give most of your time to. There is a good chance that there is a tiny site with only a few thousand users that will reward you by turning up to events. No need for all that virtual conversing. Turn up, chat face to face and you will have gained new opportunities. The result is a more satisfied end of weekend. I will continue particpating in these face to face meetups and twitter will be a secondary network.

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.

Keir Starmer’s Speech Today

Byrichard

This speech reminds us that English democracy is not gone, that there are moral people still around, and that we need to get the current Tory government out of power and go back to having leadership worthy of respect.


When you are at events you listen to speech after speech, and they meld into each other. Occasionally you hear speeches that stand out and are worth sharing. This is one of them. It reflects values that have recently been lost in several countries. We need to revert to good moral values. Pandemics are a marathon, not a sprint.


https://twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1488180224667832320

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Twittoholism

Byrichard

Twittoholism is seeing the world through twitter.

Rather than reading newspapers, books and other intellectual adventures you see the world through what others are twittering about. It’ a bit like a chatroom but you take this one with you wherever you go, from your bedroom to the living room, across town on the bus and even to your computer.

As you get a greater diversity of people so your twitterfull existence progresses exponentially.

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Mobile web apps and data transfer; Jaiku and twitter

Byrichard

So I disagree that The Mobile Web is dead. For many of us it is just coming alive. Given the speed at which these devices are evolving and price dropping, I don’t think it’s worth people’s time to build sofware that optimizes the experience. Rather, they should use their expertise to build exciting new applications that will run directly on these new platforms.

The mobile Web was born only yesterday

That’s the difference between twitter and Jaiku. Twitter is an old fashioned website and application that requires data heavy websites to provide you with content whilst jaiku offers a mobile phone that requires minimum data transfer from server to phone

Another big difference is the api. With jaiku you can download all messages without needing an api’s permission. That means you can get all messages. With twitter you need to be patient. Tha api only allows sixty requests per hour… That’s one a minute. With something instant that’s stifling the conversation

Over a month of using twitter on the mobile phone I would count 300 kilobytes or more per refresh whilst with Jaiku I require just 15 megabytes of data transfer over a month to follow the conversation. As a result I much prefer the forward looking attitude that Jaiku have taken. There’s just one drawback, the community is smaller.

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Likemind Coffee morning in London

Byrichard

Two nights ago whilst having a conversation about technology with Fooz on twitter I got a message from Jamie about the Likemind coffee morning in Central London that she thought might be of interest to me. I decided that I would go and it was worth the effort. From what I gather it’s held once a month.

It’s a meeting that started around 0830 and continued till 1030 where a few people from various backgrounds in the media came to talk about a variety of topics. It ranged from Facebook and those that influence discussions to Qik, twitter and seesmic. Of course other topics were also discussed.

I talked to Mark of Wishful Thinking who wrote the e-book Time Management for Creative People. He has some interesting ideas and his blog can be found here. Whilst talking to him he touched on a number of interestin topics of which i would like to find out more. One was copyright and music for example, recommending a blog or two I should read and from the conversation I am interested in seeing what he’s been writing about.

If I’m not mistaken (and I did meet quite a few people) I also talked with Lauralynne about the challenges of finding work but also about twitter, a subject I know well. Arriving at almost 400 tweets she has a very different to the whole twitter thing. When talking to people many of them are not sure what it’s about yet and that’s why talking to her about it was good.

I talked to her about how society is changing. Previously when you met people you would meet them in person, be friends with them for a few weeks or months and one of the two would move to another country or another city and so the link would be lost, hence the utility for something like facebook. It then progressed onto a conversation about twitter. I explained my view that twitter is not just about saying what you’re doing. Another person who was listening in asked us to define twitter. I defined it as a multiplatform chatroom that you can take with you. I talked about the key difference between IM and twitter.

With instant messaging you chat with someone and you’re telling them about things as if you’re talking and you expect an answer. With twitter it’s about the day to day life. Through following your stream they’re going to come through a lot of noise depending on how often you tweet. That noise is what makes conversations easy when you meet twitter friends. You’ve got three topics ready because you know about the good and bad things currently going on in their life. It means you’re friends offline. Live in a city like London and you meet these people and a physical world friendship can occur.

The motivation behind this point was the notion that technologies are helping to seperate people and I wanted to refute that argument with the points made above. If you go through some of my previous posts you can follow the progression of these ideas further.

I heard Mark Iddon talk about his blog about multiplatform content and it sounds interesting although I have not yet had the opportunity to visit the site. Another person I came across was Damiano whose blog Nitmesh sounds interesting. It is described as : “A comment on the imploding chaos of the convergence that hopefully entertains, enlightens, educate, reminds and shares ideas that might stand out and make a remarkable difference”.

Overall the meeting was good, productive. I arrived feeling both inspired and shattered. Normal, I got to sleep at 4am and got up at 630 because I enjoyed the thought of being able to have more conversations in person rather than via twitter or seesmic.

2 Comments

  1. You know me. I would rather read your blog and participate there, where it's not time sensitive rather than on twitter where people don't seem to have the time anymore.

    There is a mass migration of celebrities, especially English but I'm not sure that necessarily means more users. It just means more accounts for the time being. That's not a bad thing for twitter.

    I'm still on jaiku occasionaly bue because I find more tools that work with friendfeed it's more interesting to use that service at the moment.

    Thanks for the comment by the way.

    Reply

  2. I think the time sensitive point is a very valid one. Mico-blogs, whether twitter or Jaiku etc do not exactly lend themselves to 'catching up' and nor would you really want to, being that so much is relative to a particular moment in time.

    Reply

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