What is Twitter’s Maximum Density?
March 31, 2008
Hey… it’s time for another – you guessed it! – post about Twitter!
‘Now, GeekMommy,’ you might say to yourself, ‘what is it with all these Twitter-centric posts? Seriously… you might as well rename this blog All About Twitter and have done with!’
Well perhaps… but while I love other peoples’ perspectives, I tend to write about whatever has me most passionate at the moment, and for the past few months, that’s Twitter. Mostly because I spend more time Twittering than I do blogging now. But that’s something you probably already know.
Even so, this post has been floating around in my head for more than a week now. Three things prompted me to take a self-imposed Twitter-time-out and write it though:
1) I keep having blog post ideas that I sit on for a day or two only to find out that everyone and his sister is posting about it now and there’s little point in my taking paragraphs of bandwidth to say ‘yeah! me too!’ So maybe I can get this one up before the blogosphere collectively thinks to post about it again.
2) A post this morning by Shel Israel [@shelisrael] about his own Twitter follow policy – reminded me yet again that I’d rather write this here than put it in someone else’s comment section.
3) A series of twitters by Jeremiah Owyang [@jowyang] made me think that maybe reason #1 was a little more pressing than usual:
My own Twitter activity has increased radically over the past couple of months… and while I’ve been pretty faithful to the self-imposed guidelines I listed here – I wrote those when I had maybe 2/3 the number of follows/following that I do now.
It’s amazing how fast Twitter is suddenly growing. After SXSW, there seemed to be yet another new surge of users. I know that it’s not just me, because of evidence like that above and tweets from many of my Twitterpals that they are seeing a huge surge in percentage of new followers – whether they are in the thousands of followers or merely dozens – the influx is definitely there.
So the other night I was having a discussion on Live!Yahoo with a couple of friends including @anjrued & @mrxinu about the maximum number of people one can follow on Twitter and still actually have meaningful engagement with them.
The inimitable Robert Scoble [@scobleizer] follows nearly 17,ooo users on Twitter as I write this. Depending on whose statistics you use, the average Twitterer follows somewhere between 8 and 25 other users.
At present, I’m following and being followed by some 800+ users on Twitter myself. I generalize it, because I know that a number of those accounts are, in effect, stagnant. Their owners have neither updated nor viewed Twitter in months. I wish there were an easy way to account for ‘active’ users, but I don’t really have a tally.
When I was down around the low 100+ mark, I remember thinking to myself “surely I can never keep up with more than 150! Even now, I log on and have pages and pages of twitters to ‘catch up’ on and am barely managing that!” What happened though, was that I actually changed my style of using Twitter. I stopped trying to ‘catch up’ and started trying to ’step in and out’ of the Timestream. Sure, I might go back a couple of pages to see what the current buzz was, but I mostly used things like the ‘Replies’ tab and Tweetscanned my own userID to see if there were tweets concerning me that I ought to pay attention to, and then jumped into the fray. This change in usage seemed to coincide with an increase in connections on Twitter. Granted, I owe a large part of that to the amazing Guy Kawasaki’s [@guykawasaki] Alltop.com – which connected me with as many new people to follow as it did bring me to the attention of new followers. But I never would’ve survived the influx if I were still using my old method of Twittering.
But now I come to the point where I think I’m reaching maximum density on the number of people I can follow and honestly interact with.
To me, Twitter is all about the conversation. Like Shel mentioned in the post I linked above, I don’t want to spend time on ‘non-real’ people. That means I’d like to at least have some clue who someone I’m Twittering with is. Even if it’s something as simple as “male, lives in Toronto, likes Linux” or “female, lives in California, 2 kids” I’d rather have some image in my mind about the person I’m talking with.
And it’s all about that last phrase, not “talking to” but “talking with.”
There are those who still believe that anyone not using Twitter solely as a status update platform are somehow “corrupting” it or trying to “turn it into a chat room.” To them I’d say, don’t bother to follow me then, I’ll drive you nuts. I’m not sure how one can utter the phase “Social Media” and somehow ignore that first word and expect people not to interact socially.
I’ve said before elsewhere that blogging reminds me more of public speaking with the Comments thread being the post-lecture Q&A session – and Twitter reminds me more of a public dialog. Anyone can jump in with an opinion at any time – and it is the weight of the words that matters, not necessarily the status of the person saying them.
That may be a bit optimistic – and I’ve been known to wear rose-colored glasses more than once in my life – but it is how I choose to perceive Twitter and how I choose to behave there.
So at what point do I have to adjust my “guidelines” for following back, as Jeremiah has done? At what point do I have to say – I’m sorry, but I’m not going to follow anyone else without trimming my own following list a bit first?
I’m thinking it’s fast approaching. Because my choices are to either change my expectations of Twitter and the way I interact there – or to start limiting the number of people I’m promising to interact with.
I just really hate doing that – even though I kind of know it’s inevitable.
Thought Burst
March 28, 2008
I had a dream last night in which I was having a conversation with someone I considered to be a ‘guru’ of sorts… no one I know in real life, probably a conglomeration of people.
What I remember was one thing he said to me:
“It’s hard to stand out if you’re busy trying to fit in. Choose to be outstanding or choose to be comfortable.”
I suppose it was just my subconscious processing something I already know – but it was good timing. Because I had been thinking about how much I didn’t fit in when I was in high school (probably the result of watching a few DVR’d episodes of High School Confidential before going to sleep) and thinking about whether or not my daughter will feel the same way.
In the end, I like being me. I may not be like everyone else – but that just means it’s easier to pick me out of a crowd.
If I have to sacrifice a little comfort for that? So be it.
Digital Divide
March 25, 2008
The digital divide isn’t always about income or age – sometimes, it’s about attitude.
When I first started playing around seriously with Social Media a few months ago – one of the things that delighted me was the number of folks I met who were over the age of 40 and yet still technologically savvy.
When I got my first account on Facebook, I was teaching. My students let me know about it, and at the time, you needed to have a University email address to sign up. Because I did, I got an account to familiarize myself with what they were doing. “Oh,” I said, “it’s pretty much like MySpace or LiveJournal, but with more of a yearbook sort of feel, eh?” They were surprised I not only knew what MySpace and LiveJournal were, but had maintained accounts at both for several years.
You see, to someone under the age of 25 in America, social media is a reality of life. Everyone knows the buzzwords. Even those without computers at home still text on their cell phones and know what IMing is and what the best sites to go find gossip about their schoolmates is. They’re linked in to the network in a way that previous generations would’ve never imagined possible.
But the older you get, the less likely someone is to have a clue what you are talking about. Sure, you say email or Internet and you’d be hard pressed to find someone who has no idea what you are talking about – but that’s about where it stops in some cases.
When I started blogging I was doing it ‘old school.’ Meaning I had a domain, some server space, and I’d type up an essay – code the HTML by hand, and FTP it up to my site. Then I’d send the half-dozen people who would maybe read it an email and a link and move on.
Over time, there was a blogger blog… then I got sucked over into LiveJournal – which reminded me more of my BBSing days in my youth, but where my age at the time made me one of the “old folks.” After awhile I discovered that I could have accounts all over the internet – from posting boards to blogging communities to social networking sites.
But it wasn’t until a few months back that I came across the term “Social Media.”
Yeah, I know, that’s not because the term wasn’t out there – it’s just a matter of not living in the Bay Area or working in those fields where I would’ve already heard it. But right away I “got” what the term meant. Because all along, I’d been swimming around in it – I just hadn’t ever thought of it as more than sort of a pleasant diversion.
Then a friend introduced me to Twitter – and as I’ve mentioned previously here, I got hooked in. But since I’ve already written all about that previously, we’ll make the assumption you’ve either read it, or can go look at it later if you’re so inclined.
What I’m finding though, is that while it’s very easy for me to explain this phenomena and my fascination with it to anyone under the age of 30… it’s nearly impossible for me to explain it to folks over the age of about 50.
That surprised me – as several of my Twitterpals are well past that age and have a better handle on it than most. Not that they are necessarily ‘technologically inclined’ so much as they are open-minded enough to have seen the possibilities and capitalize on them.
It didn’t occur to me that age could be so much of a factor in determining one’s ability to understand the appeal of this new ‘Web 2.0 frontier’ that we’re exploring.
But there’s a mental shift occurring when it comes to ‘new media’ that reminds me altogether of the revolutionary impact of rock-and-roll. Yeah, there were folks of all ages who ‘got’ what was happening with rock-and-roll when it showed up on the radios and record players all around the country. Heck, Alan Freed was in his 30’s when he was widely credited with coining the phrase rock-and-roll. You didn’t have to be a teen ager to get it.
But there’s something to be said for growing up with something versus having to adapt to it.
I, for one, plan on staying on the side of the divide that ‘gets it.’ Even if I am probably going grey under my latest dye job… Because if you want to stay young at heart, you can’t ever get old in your thinking.
Baby Got Follow-Back
March 13, 2008
Yeah, another unscheduled, unstructured post.
This one is because I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile and the lovely Susan Reynolds [@susanreynolds] spurred me on to doing it. She has a knack of doing that!
Okay, so it’s another Twitter-centric post here. (surprise!)
Basically, since I go to Twitter for the conversation, the stimulus, and the ideas it generates within me, my policy has been to follow back almost everyone that follows me… and to follow new and interesting folk whenever I find them. But there are exceptions. There are accounts I look at and don’t immediately ban, but don’t follow back. Here’s the list of reasons why:
Reasons I’m not following you on Twitter:
1. You have only 2 or 3 posts, are following hundreds of people and have only a handful following you. – You aren’t contributing to the conversation, you are listening to it. Come back when you have something to say. Otherwise you’re being kind of creepy.
2. You are followed by hundreds or thousands, but only follow a couple dozen people yourself.* - You aren’t there for the conversation, you’re there for the audience. If I wanted to be your audience, I’d go to your blog.
*exception: there are a couple (by couple I mean can count on one hand) of folks I follow right now who do this that aren’t following me as well, mostly, it’s because it’s someone who has information I want, if that stops, I will remove them.
3.You don’t really exist. Just a pseudonym, no bio info, no blog link, no photo.** – Sorry, if I’m going to put myself out there publicly and say ‘I stand behind this – so when you Google me 10 years from now, I won’t be ashamed you found this’ I expect the same level of trust from someone I’m interacting with.
**exception: I do realize there are reasons for having an online persona… if you have a blog, and a history, and are a real person using a pseudonym to avoid losing your job, being stalked, or something legitimate, that’s another story. But just a Twitter account and an ID is not enough.
4. You tend to swear like a sailor, only post dirty jokes, links to adult sites, or use Twitter like a singles pick-up bar. – That is *so* your right! Twitter is different things to different people – that’s just not my cup of tea. I’m surprised you followed me in the first place. I’m kind of boring in that regard.
5. You mangle the English language. – Now, I don’t mean the occasional omission of a word or obvious abbreviation to make that tweet fit into the arbitrary 140 character limit. I mean every post of yours uses things like LOLspeak (No, you canz not haz my attention) or text-speak (ur gr8 bt /thx! btdt) or l33tsp34k (omgwtfbbq! that suxxorz!) and you think I’m going to take the time to translate? Nope.
6. You don’t actually write your feed. – Sorry, if your timestream consists solely of links to your blog, your seesmics, your qiks, your utterz, or other external sites, no thanks. That’s not conversation, that’s link spam.
7. You’re a bot or a ‘project’. – Thanks, but I don’t care which political candidate you are working for… and no, I’m not going to prove to your friend that if you write a script to auto-follow thousands of people on twitter, several hundred will follow you back.
8. You only follow the opposite gender. – Sorry, I’m happily married. Not interested in providing you with another photo for your harem. I won’t just not follow you – I’ll block you on that one. Ew.
9. You’re trying to sell me something. – Okay, realistically, a lot of the Social Media folk are always selling something… whether it’s trust, or pushing a conversation toward a goal, or delivering traffic to new startups… that’s to be expected. But if you’ve got a retail website and the only reason you followed me and 2,000 other people is to send links about your latest sale/deal/bargain? No dice.
10. You never use the @ symbol. – Sure, it takes a bit for people to get how the @ functions in Twitter… but if you’ve been on there for awhile, and you have more than a couple dozen people on your lists, then you know that @ is the heart of the conversation on Twitter. No, you don’t have to use it every tweet. But if you don’t use it at all, then you’re basically just standing in the middle of the room shouting and hoping that someone realizes you are talking to them.
I’m sure there’s more. I’m also sure there are exceptions. I’ll probably edit this list as we go along – and if you happen to have any you think I should add, please speak up! Or if you post your own list, I’d love to see it – leave me a link in the comments.
There are about a dozen people following me that I have never followed back, and won’t, no matter how many times they ‘re-add’ me to get my attention. But in every case, the reason can be found above.
So – next I guess we go with figuring out the list of ‘why I add people before they add me.’ Yeah, I’ll get right on that. With my usual alacrity.
This isn’t your regularly scheduled post – but I’m posting it anyways
March 8, 2008
America’s Last Living Doughboy… last surviving American veteran of WWI Frank Woodruff Buckles was honored last week. At 107, it’s amazing to think of all he has seen, isn’t it?
My Nana is 90. She was born January of 1918 – while he was off in France driving ambulances. He was born around the same time as my great-Uncle long passed away.
I sometimes think of all someone like this has seen.
The advent of indoor plumbing… electric lighting… automobiles… radio… airplanes… television… going to the moon… computers… the internet… cell phones.
He lived through two “World Wars” – surviving both when so many of his friends and companions didn’t.
He survived the Great Depression – the McCarthy era – the Cold War.
He has lived thru 18 U.S. Presidents.
He was 44 years old when the current President was born.
Don’t get me started on the advances in medicine – or we’ll be here all day.
Amazing… isn’t it?
Place Holder…
March 3, 2008
Augh.
Okay, I’ll admit it. I love to talk. I love to talk about ideas, thoughts, concepts, events, emotions… I’m a veritable fount of words when it comes to talking.
But writing? Well, it’s like pulling teeth. Actually, it’s like trying to spin yarn out of the mushy fabric of my brain and soul… and I always feel worn out and reduced when it’s something substantial.
So there are 2 drafts of blog entries 1/2 finished… and there are notes for a dozen more. But this site mocks me because my most recent post is old enough to be growing mold. I know I need to post. I know I’m a bad, bad blogger. But I’m still going to go to bed early tonight leaving those darned things unfinished and this rambly old place-holder entry in their stead.
Because darn it, sometimes you just have to say *pffffbt!!!!!* to the universe and put off until tomorrow what had better been done today, or even yesterday.
Hah! I procrastinate in your general direction, noble writing ideals! And so I bid you good night!!
No seriously. I’m not promising anything, but I’ll try to get something done tomorrow. After all, my friend Scarlett says that Tomorrow is Another Day…
