Social Schmoozing

Poll: Is Streaming On Twitter “The Next Big Thing?”

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 at 1:59 pm and is filed under 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Poll: Is Streaming On Twitter “The Next Big Thing?””

1. ellenbrandtphd says:

   July 21, 2009 at 9:29 pm

   Derek,

   I’m on the verge of quitting Twitter for good because of the safety issues.

   Plus the overall political implications – or pretend political implications – of what is going on there.

   What good is a system where a group of people with a particular political view immediately brand newcomers as OK-or-not-OK, based on nothing but very short first impressions.

   If you are branded as “not OK,” you are then subjected to everything from extreme character assassination to a steady stream of malware as bad as what used to occur on the Yahoo financial boards.

   Moreover, I believe it is the exact same group of self-appointed Masters of the Universe who are controlling these armies of mostly very young, possibly very naive, “script kiddies” on Twitter who used to control them at Yahoo.

   In the latter case, the actions of these game-playing, blithely naive “script kiddies” were more responsible for the near-death of the world financial system than most yet realize.

   Let them have free rein on Twitter, and maybe this time they’ll destroy the Internet!

   This could not be more serious.

   Ellen

   Reply
2. Chad McCullough says:

   July 22, 2009 at 8:53 am

   Well, I think Ellen has taken it to the extreme, but I can understand how she feels. I created a Twitter account with the idea of using it as a way of staying in contact with my client base and, hopefully, adding to my client base. It hasn’t worked out so well for me. All I seem to get are people wanting to follow me that have no interest in my consulting business. I’m sure Twitter is a useful tool. Maybe I just need to learn how to use it for business purposes and not just a way of letting my friends know what I have been up to?

   Reply
3. derekshowerman says:

   July 22, 2009 at 9:35 am

   Ellen,

   My suggestion is to find the niche you want to walk within Twitter and stay there. As the business world evolves into a more transparent society, it is going to be incredibly important to keep your focus narrow and on point to the business drivers that are important to you. Politics are everywhere! As is people who have a “master of the universe” mentality. Discard it and build the relationships that matter. The ones that bubble to the top. Once you pick an objective and a reason to be on Twitter, the easier it will be to use and…yes tolerate.

   Chad,

   Share nuggets of information with the keywords you want to be found for. Create a keyword list and try to include them in 60% of your posts. The other 40% should be geared toward personal interest. Cycling, food, etc. Don’t try to add new clients. Just be smart and show what you know!

   Reply
4. Derek says:

   July 22, 2009 at 11:51 am

   While I don’t necessarily share Ellen’s orange-alert view of Twitter, she and Chad do raise some interesting points. Particularly around finding the right people and channels via Twitter with which to interact.

   It is increasingly difficult to parse the people who follow me on Twitter. At least for now, I am fairly liberal with my follow-backs. As long as someone appears to be sharing reasonably interesting stuff among their most recent tweets, I’ll follow back on a probationary basis. I’ve also gotten better as I’ve been on Twitter for nearly a year now at not just following back because someone mentions ‘social media’ in their bio.

   If I see someone in my stream consistently who is not adding a whole lot of value or simply posts banal updates about their breakfast cereal or (worse) posts excerpts from Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations on a regular basis, I have made peace with simply un-following such people. No hard feelings, that stuff’s just not for me.

   The spammers and people who ROFL-copter their way through Twitter are here to stay and a fact of life we are all going to have to get used to. They clog up the searches with spam or useless content which is tangentially-related to the hashtag at hand, but Twitter could only remain tightly focused for so long as its popularity grew.

   I’m hoping that we will soon reach a saturation point and then perhaps even see a decline in Twitter usage as those who are just trying it on for size get bored and move on to something else, leaving a more focused user-base. Maybe that will happen, maybe it won’t. But at the end of the day, you’re right, DS: you must now work hard and be tightly focused on identifying those on Twitter to whom you wish to listen, who can help you (and vice versa!), and with whom you want to interact; the firehose of data alone will not do that for you.

   Fortunately, tools for Twitter are slowly allowing more granular data parsing which allows me to filter out at least some of the noise. But we are still in the stone age of Twitter clients in my opinion. Most are primitive and crude slick as some may appear and the options even for the more “advanced” clients are still full of gaping holes.

   As with most apps for any use on the internet today, those that will survive and win will be those which allow knowledge workers to cut through the noise and the massive data flow with which they are bombarded every second of the day to identify the content and connections with other people which will help them succeed and be happy.

   Reply
5. Filtering the Twitter Tidal Wave « Derek Peplau says:

   July 22, 2009 at 1:14 pm

   [...] posted much of this originally in response to Derek Showerman’s post on problems with Twitter, but I think it really can be its own blog [...]

   Reply
6. Zoran says:

   July 28, 2009 at 1:14 pm

   Thank you! I would now go on this blog every day!
   Zoran

   Reply
7. Eremeeff says:

   August 24, 2009 at 5:15 pm

   derekshowerman.com – da best. Keep it going!
   Thanks

   Reply