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?
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.
This weekend I went on a social media binge. A social media binge is the moment when you forfeit sleep and the rest of reality for a few hours as part of the social media.
For the purpose of this particular challenge I set myself two pass times. The first of these was to twitter and the second was to seesmic. If you read previous posts you’ll find out what twitter. As to seesmic that’s another story. It’s close to being instant messaging with videos.
Normal video chats are live. I talk and as I talk you can respond and interrupt me. In seesmic you talk, type a title and share the video. After that another person speaks, presses stop and posts. Over the period of a few hours many more posts appear and as they do so the conversation evolves exponentially. All of these videos is available to every over member so there is a great degree of overheard conversation. This overheard conversation is where the fun begins.
I’ve seen girls dancing, guys act like zombies, discussions about literature and social media. I’ve seen so many things that it feels like the social media equivalent of a music festival. Watch seesmix clips on youtube to get a better idea.
Twitter is a great idea poorly executed as a result of which I wish there was an alternative. It’s a chatroom that can be used on multiple platform which is what makes it so interesting. The managment however have decided to cancel Api support, or at least throttle it. As a result of this conversation is floundering.
As a result of this action twitter has become notoriously unreliable and people are no longer able to keep up to date with what people are doing quite as easily. This has resulted in many of my favourite tweeters being far more quiet. Others have felt the need to leave the service.
I would love an alternative to help me keep a constant wave of consciousness of what friends are doing. The 140 character model is good. It’s a very efficient way of dealing with information. We’ve got many alternatives but none are conversational yet.
I love the conversations and how you overhear so many things. I would pay for an alternative that has a far more stable track record. Give me that alternative.
I’m disappointed not angry. There’s a really good product there but it’s so badly implemented I’m losing interest in twitter.
Dear twitter friends I have deleted my main account due to tired I am with twitter and it’s poor performance. I am in other places. I’ll catch you there.
Social networks and social networks are based on people connecting with other people. Twitter is a glorified chatroom masquerading as a microblogging platform. As twitter shifts from being free, to being paying, it is losing it’s appeal.
Fifteen years ago there was plenty of discussion about Social Media silos and the social graph, and discussion about ROI for businesses, PR firms and personalities. They always forgot about the user. They exploit the user because the user, in their eyes, is an addict. This attitude make it okay to exploit social media users, in their eyes.
I am not worried about losing bots. Bots make a lot of noise, but don’t help Twitter, as a social network. What bothers me is the phrase “Twitter data are among the world’s most powerful data sets.” Facebook said the same thing, and then we read about Cambridge Analytica, emotion experiments, phone draining potential and more. We also read from books like Mindf*ck that Facebook was used to manipulate people to vote one way rather than the other. We learned that FaceBook could not be trusted with our data.
Now Twitter is using the same phrases. As I see the changes made by Musk I see that Twitter is becoming a silo, like FaceBook and Instagram. Twitter is no longer a social network. Twitter is a data farm where we are expected to pay, for content to be pushed on us, rather than seeing organic tweets, and where our data is mined by untrustworthy groups.
Through his actions Musk is turning Twitter into a data silo that I no longer want to be a part of.
Techcrunch addresses the topic from the reverse angle. “Twitter’s new announcement might impact research in different areas, including hate speech and online abuse.” On the one hand Twitter is making it harder to police what content is posted whilst encouraging others, with deep pockets to exploit that data.
TechDirt thinks that this move will encourage developers to move towards Mastodon but Mastodon is just one of many alternative websites. I would go further. By blocking access to the API twitter is encouraging people to lose trust in the company. First it blocks the apps people used to post and read tweets, then it blocked the API for bots, and tools for checking account related information, for example “map my followers” and other functionality. With the decline of those tools such actions will need to be manual.
The Washington Times phrased it as “Twitter shutting down free access to its public data”. Twitter should have become Not For Profit. It should have been made sustainable, whilst allowing people to converse globally. It is now sliding in the opposite direction, to become a silo, for people who want to exploit the data to manipulate people, rather than help spread news, information, friendships and conversations. Twitter, by moving towards becoming a silo, is removing the features that made it the strong, vibrant community that it was.
The Instagram API
I posted over 4000 images to Instagram over the years, until FaceBook bought and then destroyed the app. I used to post every single day, until I found that the app felt more and more lonely, and more and more of a waste of time. It had switched from being a social network to being an influencer network, where loneliness was the cost.
I tried to play with the API, to use Instagram externally but because of the blocks in place I couldn’t access my own data, without first proving that I should have access to it. That is what encouraged me to spend a few days trying to import the Instagram JSON file to WordPress. It worked, and I was happy. I had found a workflow to recover my data, and use it for my own website, rather than to provide content for a platform that did not respect me as a user.
Twitter is now doing the same. If we can’t access the API to use twitter as we want, then it does encourage us to move along, to the new alternatives, or, as I am doing, to write blog posts every day. This is day eighty of writing a blog post every single day.
If it wasn’t for the community I would have dumped Twitter years ago.
Over a year ago I started using twitter and it had great promise. The public timeline was so slow that I would refresh it and there would be no new comment for minutes at a time. The service would auto refresh from the website and the community was small. The @ feature didn’t exist and no one I knew was using it.
Over a period of weeks and months more and more people started to use it and following was all web based without any api. Eventually people would begin using the @ symbol to direct comments to specific people and with the increase in traffic so the auto refresh broke, and was later removed.
Later still Api support was finally offered. We would get thousands of SMS a month and the term twitter bukake was coined. It was used to describe the act of suddenly getting twenty to a hundred SMS at a time as you emerged from the tube. After a while in Europe this was limited to 250 tweets a week.
Then it died. No more tweets would get to our phones and twitter would no longer have the appeal that it had at first.
It went from being one of the most interesting and innovative and interesting ways to communicate between people in various countries to something that everyone would imitate and equal.
That’s why I’m so disappointed that there are no SMS, that’s why I think that the twitter managment have really missed a great opportunity. I’m glossing over the months of failwhales and server crashes.
I miss the old twitter.
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2 Comments
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.
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.
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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.
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.