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Yep – ten thousand tweets

Byrichard
Reading Time: 2 minutes

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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Mastodon has Eight Million Accounts Today
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Mastodon has Eight Million Accounts Today

Byrichard

Mastodon has reached eight million accounts today. That’s close to the population of Switzerland and two million less than London. Mastodon is growing because it was ready to scale up at the right time. As Musk and Twitter shift towards the Right, and as Musk perpetuates conspiracy theories, on a daily basis, so he prepares the idea conditions for other social networks and opportunities to thrive.


As Twitter loses users, and engagement so other social networks are more likely to thrive. Every day I check on Twitter, and every day I am repulsed by what he is sharing. Every day I feel that I should abandon Twitter. I don’t, for now, for a simple reason. On twitter there are conversations to be had twenty four hours a day, whereas on Mastodon, you have to wait for people to show up. That wait is a good reason to do other things, like return to Twitter.


What I am waiting for, impatiently is for enough people to leave Twitter for Mastodon, for Mastodon to be entertaining at all times, without long moments of silence. I am not convinced that Mastodon will be the ideal Twitter replacement. For now it is a curiousity that has the ability to scale up as required, within the current requirements.


Mastodon is to “microblogging” what WordPress is to blogging. It’s a way to create an instance of a service which you can either use in solitude, and yet access what others are discussing, or a way of having a small personal community. We’re used to syndicated blogs. The fediverse is almost the same, but goes by the name “federated”. In both cases it’s spread across servers, more flexible, more adaptive to demand, and easier to sustain. Wordpress and other content management systems could be written to take advantage of this distributed networks of communities.


That’s it for today.

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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.

Sentiment Analysis and Social Media

Byrichard

 

I have two opinions about sentiment analysis technology. The first one is that social media have already suffered greatly through the actions of social media marketers, PR professionals and “internet famous” individuals. This technology could lead to broadcasting without a human bothering to listen as the human is replaced by algorithms and data analysis. This will benefit data analysts.

I do feel encouraged by another aspect. Automation. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, Flickr and others will be self monitoring. I understand “Self Monitoring” to use data analytics tools, with Artificial intelligence to look for keywords and key phrases to create a human readable graphic to understand how brand perception is evolving over a period of minutes, hours, weeks and months.

We know the release cycle for apple products, Sony Products, expectations for the Oculus Rift and music festivals as examples. Twitter and Facebook have almost a decade of data about regional events, product releases and user reactions. If that data is processed then it could graph attention, interest and sentiment.

Current affairs affect how we perceive brands and products. If a social network was paired with sentiment analysis and current affairs imagine how it could react to the FBI V Apple debate. In the timelines of privacy enthusiast Apple products could be promoted as sentiment towards that brand progresses. In the case where people side with the FBI posts promoting other brands of mobile phones could be promoted in their place.

I love social media as a peer to peer communication tool and I hope that Sentiment analysis software will shift the social media practitioners’ focus away from getting followers to promoting their brand or products to people who are most likely to be receptive to the displaying of related information.

Hypothetically a group of friends could join a new social network, the friends they communicate with most frequently are suggested as people to follow and interact with. At this point no broadcaster, no media company, no brand are visible to the user. The purpose is for conversation, not broadcast. As people converse the Sentiment engine would analyse the tone and topic of conversation and according to this suggest related products. As data is collected over weeks, months, and eventually years so the software provides relevant information automatically, without scheduling.

Facebook, twitter, Sports tracker, Suunto and Google have ten or more years of data of the sports I practiced and events I have participated in. With that data they can see how passions grew and declined and how social networks changed from location to location and job to job. In effect social networks “know” me.

Social networks could ban animated gifs from my timeline and sensationalist writing could be avoided. I would be interested in a social network where I choose my friends  and then big data and sentiment analysis offer me the most relevant content. It would provide further information when we make positive statements.

When I joined social networks a decade ago they were blank slates in alpha or beta phases of development and we shaped social networks according to our conversations. Ten years later when you join a social network you are flooded with so much information that it is overwhelming. As it is time-consuming to pick and choose you either ignore the options completely or you select all of them and get noise. With big data and Sentiment analysis your conversation would automatically affect what you see, when and how often. As soon as you start being negative about specific things they fade away.

 

Cosmic Trip – Physical Video gaming – Throw it like a frisbee
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Cosmic Trip – Physical Video gaming – Throw it like a frisbee

Byrichard

Physical Video Gaming

Physical video gaming is coming of age thanks to the HTC Vive and related Games. Cosmic Trip is one of these games. You can use both controllers to prepare machines that will prepare robots for mining and defence. These two sets of robots are autonomous. The more resources you mine and the more robots you have. These robots are attacked on a regular basis so defence is important. The laser robots provide some assistance. You can attack the enemy bots by throwing disks at them as if you were throwing frisbees. Most people should find this instinctive.

In the last 17 hours more than half a million people watched the video on how to play this game. The game is still in development and building up hype for when it is released properly. The creator of the video above now has eleven million subscribers on youtube. When he produces a video eleven million people are notified that there is a new video to watch.

Out of those 11 million subscribers on youtube only 1.6 million follow on twitter and a quarter of a million on Facebook. Within the next year or two I would like to see social networks such as Youtube and others expand and become niche communities where people can find content of interest without using Facebook or Twitter. I found Jack Septiceye content when I was searching for VR demos. I use youtube rather than Twitter and Facebook because I don’t want content creators and sharers to tell me how to feel or why the content is of value. I want to make that decision for myself. Youtube and social networks that allow us to browse and discover content based on niche interests are going to become increasingly important.

Screen Shot 2016-06-21 at 08.58.19

The creators of the game have just two thousand eight hundred followers on Twitter and approaching one thousand on Facebook. When youtube personalities make videos about products they provide companies with a lot of extra visibility. You reach game players, people who want to see what new technology such as the HTC Vive can do and people who like to watch gameplay videos without necessarily being game players themselves.

Niche Audiences

Twitter and Facebook have focused on broadcasting rather than niche audiences. As a result of this strategy they have lost their stickiness. This leads to people spending less and less time on their social networks. This opens up opportunities for Youtube and other content aggregation sites. The more content you watch on Youtube the more recommendations you will get based on your taste. This cuts out the middle man, in this case Facebook and Twitter. We reduce the signal to noise ratio. We increase the user’s Return on Investment.

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The twitter back channels

Byrichard

Twitter is one of those places that takes some time to get the hang of but once you do it’s going to suck you in and won’t spit you out till you’re exhausted. It’s a little bit like seesmic except that in this case you don’t look like you’re so in love with your computer that you’re talking to it.

In reality twitter is just the surface of our interaction with the groups of friends we have met and made through this network. Twitter is first and foremost about short messages to say what you’re doing right now. Over time though it’s become much more. As more and more people started to use it so the want to comment on what people are doing increased. Overtime as more and more comments were made so conversations occured. These conversations are a little more complex than you may think. Initially conversations via instant messaging services like ICQ, Skype, Yahoo and others are about one to one communication. Twitter is about the overheard conversation. In other words as I’m talking to one person another person overhears what I’m saying and they want to join. Over time a community forms. Some call it the twitterverse, others the twittosphere, and some call us the twitterati. The result is the same.

It’s a community of people based around twitter. They are for the most part involved in the social media although a growing number of people are “tourists”, in other words they’re looking at this social networking system or tool and seeing how they can apply it to their own lives and business practices.

There’s another dimension. The invisible conversations that are taking place. With some people I have exchanged hundreds of messages in private, via direct messages. With other people it’s via google talk and in other cases via the skype chatrooms. In other words it’s a dynamic conversation across a number of instant messaging services. There are a number of uses. In some cases some conversations are too personal to have out in the open, with others the conversations are very focused and the community is a community through a skype chatroom or conference call. As a result there is a strong feel of belonging within certain communities.

Seesmic is one website and over time a community that has profited greatly from twitter, and I mean in terms of the members of the community rather than the wealth generated. As people created videos so a link with the video title would appear. As the “Seesmic” tag appeared more and more so a buzz was generated to create interest. As more people were invited through friends using twitter so more interest grew. It was also a two channel conversation. One channel being twitter where short messages could be exchanged easily and the second channel video where opinions could be exchanged through visual means. Quite a few parties took place then.

Many questions are also asked by those that use twitter. Some of these questions are easy to answer within 140 characters and a list of responses is left as a blog entry. It’s a quick method of getting a number of points of view efficiently. Occasionaly entire conversations come to life about a number of topics and multiple people talk to multiple people and after three or four hours results and conclusions are drawn up and a comprehensive blog post covering a range of issues can be written up.

Twitter is a simple way of keeping in touch with what friends are doing but it also creates links with people we would find very hard to get hold of using more contemporary methods such as facebook, e-mails and other. This is a glimpse of what the future of communication will hold. Skype, seesmic, gtalk, facebook are all there to add depth to the twitter conversations.

Getting an audience to film screenings
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Getting an audience to film screenings

Byrichard

Adam Aron, CEO of AMC recently made a generation of cinema non-goers angry with him when he said that he would allow texting to take place during projects. My generation, previous generations and the generations of the future complained on social media. Getting an audience to film screenings requires an understanding of what they prefer to do instead.

In the “Golden Age” of my cinema going life I would go to the cinema up to three times a week. I went this frequently because I lived close to the cinema, because we had two GBP Tuesdays and because it was something to do when other people were not available. Over a period of months I went to see more than 90 films. A consequence of this habit was over-familiarity with the codes and conventions of mainstream cinema. Since that “golden age” I have seldom been back to the cinema. When you know everything that will happen in a film within the first 15 minutes you get bored.

I know AMC through its television Series of which the Walking Dead is one. This is a series that I did binge watch when it was fresh and again when it was made available via netflix. Television series have better writers and better storylines than films. They also don’t overdo it with super hero rubbish and special effects. As these productions have storylines we care enough to watch one episode after another. Films fail to engage us in this manner.

When I was in London I went to a few screenings. The screenings I usually went to in London were at the Front Line Club. You would watch a documentary about current affairs and there would be a panel to discussion to discuss what you had just seen. In Geneva I found that the graduate Institute has started to do the same thing. I regularly go to such events because I like to complement what I already know by watching interesting productions and then listening to questions and answers sessions and learning something new.

Montagne en Scène is an example of what AMC should think of doing. They need to find and fund the production of films for niche markets. Montagne en Scène is an event where four mountain related films are projected to a specialist audience of mountain and sports enthusiasts. This niche usually relies on youtube and vimeo to find and share footage of their passions. By organising a special day these enthusiasts are encouraged to come to film screenings.

AMC is competing against mobile phones, televisions, Virtual reality goggles, tablets and Video on Demand via the World Wide Web. what they need to do is lower the price and make it more convenient for people in contemporary culture. Having panel discussions at the end of a screening is one way of attracting people. Lowering the ticket price would be another way. If they stopped making CGI films with no story then I would start going to the cinema again. This complain extends to the crappy films currently available, at least in Switzerland on Netflix. If Netflix did not have television series I would have stopped paying for their service months ago. If you treat your customers/viewers like mature adults then there is a good chance that you will attract them to film screenings on a more regular basis.

6 Comments

  2. It’s exciting to see what you’re thinking about with regards to Twitter. I think that the more folks who dive in and talk thoughtfully about it, the better we’ll understand why we’re all INTO it.

    Reply

  3. Richard, I think you made some really interesting points here about Twitter. I know I used it when it first started, and then really slowed down with it. I have started using it again a lot more because of 3 reasons–I have a BlackBerry and started using TwitterBerry, since it makes it easier to Tweet while on the run. Secondly, I find myself more open to sharing things in my day as my own public reflective practice (like autoethnographic and narrative studies). Thirdly, I recently switched my blog from MovableType to WordPress, and use Twitter Tools–this allows me to have my daily Twitter feeds get automatically added to my blog (so I do not lose my thoughts if Twitter decides it wants to become a walled garden).

    My biggest challenge is to figure a good way to skim the vast quantity of feeds (information overload) and get to the content (however I or you or anybody else defines it). As a student of media, you must face this as well!

    Reply
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