Broadcasting Brain

Twitter’s reliability continues to be spotty. How long are we going to wait for them to sort things out? Or at least publish a plan of attack?

This is getting way past ridiculous. Sometimes it seems like the damned whale will fall out of the sky if you breathe too hard on your screen or click on your mouse too fast.

While announcing two new directors/advisors (including Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com), the Twitterers That Be included the following paragraph in their June 24 post on the Twitter blog:

Project: Runway

Twitter will become a sustainable business supported by a revenue model. However, our biggest opportunities will be worth pursuing only when we achieve our vision of Twitter as a global communication utility. To reach our goal, Twitter must be reliable and robust. Private funding gives us the runway we need to stay focused on the infrastructure that will help our business take flight. We will continue hiring systems engineers, operators, and architects, as well as consultants, scientists, and other professionals to help us realize our vision.

You said it, guys. Twitter must be reliable and robust.

Which it still isn’t. Not yet.

I’m getting just a bit tired of waiting. How about you?

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PopeyesChicken @MarkDykeman time to change your chicken! 7 minutes ago from web in reply to MarkDykeman

Tomato Guy is more cheerful, somehow

Twitter is starting to feel like an essential part of the Web experience. I don’t know how long it was down tonight, probably only an hour (but likely more).

Yet, during that time I felt so disconnected from the Web that I found myself checking out Pownce (which I use a couple of times per week) and Jaiku (maybe once/month).

Random thought: why on earth did Jaiku build in the 140 character limit? And what does Jaiku mean anyway?

It’s funny how… quiet those other two services feel. However, it’s primarily due to the fact that I have less than 50 followers between those two sites, whereas I have around 800 with Twitter. Naturally it’s going to seem quieter.

One thing this experience shows me is that Twitter, or another site like it, has certainly become an almost indispensible comms channel. Well, it felt like it! I can reach a lot of people via Twitter that I can’t seem to reach any other way.

I think I’d be willing to pay some money now if it would keep Twitter up and running on a consistent basis.

How did you feel when Twitter was down Wednesday night? And what did you do? Does Twitter feel indispensable to you now?

EDIT:  anyone feel dependent on microblogging for good blog ideas?

Credit (original image): Silent Disco by Brixton

Grab a nickname, a cool outfit, and BAM! You’re a member of Twitter Club! Or, heck, come as you are and just Twitter with everyone!

You can talk all day long with your pals, share secrets and exciting things, and remind each other how great Twitter is! If everyone else just understood how cool Twitter was, they’d want to join too!

So why don’t more people join? It’s really cool… right?

The club of the 21st century

Setting (most of) my sarcasm aside for a moment, Twitter is like a lot of other clubs, such as:

• the Glee Club
• the Chess Club
• the Drama Club
• the Yearbook Committee
• the Rotary Club
• even some of the less popular sports clubs.

Granted, Twitter is a club that’s close to 1 million members strong, but I’m sure that the Mickey Mouse Club and the Merry Marvel Marching Society had some big numbers in their day, too.

It’s still a stomping ground with limited appeal; you have to like Twittering.

It’s not nuts and bolts, it’s flesh and blood. And words. Lots of words.

Lately bloggers write about the relevance of Twitter, its technical stability, and its potential to ever generate enough revenue to be a viable business. Twitter does have some useful, though limited functionality, and a devoted fan base.

However, if there’s any value to Twitter, it’s in the interactions and relationships between its users and, to a lesser extent, the information that’s stored there.

T-W-I-T-T-E R-C-L-U-B: Twitter Club!

Twitter’s really a big social club.

Picture a gigantic club house, not unlike a gigantic dance club and bar, where you can:

• drown in 500,000 simultaneous conversations
• listen to smaller groups in the “room” or network that you happen to be in
• sneak off into the corner with one friend and whisper short nothings (not necessarily sweet ones) into each other’s ears

Now, add into the mix a series of:

• actors
• salesmen
• fanatics
• politicians
• random buffoons…

 and the picture’s complete. It’s Twitter Club!

Not to say that Twitter Club isn’t cool or fun. It’s just that Twitter Club is also like a trendy nightclub where you can sit around and chat, in a limited sense, for free. You can pick up your mobile phone and call someone on the other side of this huge club and chat if you want.

There’s no bar, no real music, and there’s very little room to dance.

People love to hang out there anyway.

Yelling sweet nothings in a noisy room

That’s not to say that you can’t have some meaningful interaction at Twitter Club. It’s just that the odds are stacked against you if you try, much like trying to debate economic theory or existential philosophy in a disco when the mirror ball’s lit up and the music’s pumping away, while hordes of sweaty people try to shake their bodies to a beat.

In the end, a club will make it or close down if the economics aren’t there. However, if people still want to hang out together, twitch to some music, or just soak in the rare kind of vibe, they’ll go to a new club. This is probably what will happen if Twitter Club is forced to close, as long as people still like to hang out in similar clubs.

But why don’t more people come to Twitter Club?

The problem is that not everyone likes the same kind of clubs, the same social situations, and the same diversions. This, in my opinion, is why Twitter might not make it into the mainstream.

Not everyone wants to join a huge club like this.

Twitter Club can be fun, exciting, and rewarding, like many other clubs. However, the value that you extract from Twitter Club is related to the energy you put into Twitter Club.

A lot of people probably won’t like Twitter Club: they aren’t geared towards these kinds of club interactions.  It took me awhile to get into it and I’m less fanatical than a lot of members.

But we really want more people to join! How?

On the other hand… maybe it just takes some encouragement and a few friendly faces to get the party started. And isn’t that really what keeps clubs going? Not the locale or the architecture: it’s the people.

Maybe Twitter Club will stay intact and get a killer make-over. Who knows?

But… if your friends go somewhere else, chances are you will, too. It’s all about having fun… with them.

Wherever.

As some of you know, I use Twitter quite frequently as MarkDykeman.  I developed a decently-sized following on Twitter through my Twitter experiment.  Between reading Tweets and making them I probably spend 1 - 2 hours per day on the service.  However, I do all of my Twitter activities via the Web, either through the Twitter homepage or using Twhirl.  This leads me to an interesting thought.

If you read through the Twitter website and various accompanying literature it seems pretty clear that Twitter was intended to be used via SMS messaging from mobile phones or other portable communication devices.  The Web functionality almost seems like an afterthought in its original design.  I’m probably wrong about that, but there certainly seems to be an emphasis on SMS capabilities.

I took a quick poll about a week ago and of the dozen people that responded, virtually none of them used the SMS functions and did all of their Tweeting via their PC or laptop.

I find this interesting given the frequent issues with Twitter’s performance.  It makes me wonder if the problems with Twitter aren’t just an issue with the number of users, but because more and more traffic isn’t SMS. 

So, the question I have for today is:  how many people are using SMS to interact with Twitter?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

“There is only one thing worse than not being talked about and that is not being Twittered about.  - apologies to O. Wilde”

All of those years of watching Monty Python episodes, who knew when they would come in handy?

While using Twitter this weekend I witnessed a couple of debates between various Twitter users that I follow.  Leaving people and personalities aside, I don’t think that Twitter is a very good platform for debates.

• The 140 character limit really causes problems.  You’ve either got to make your point in 26 words or less or else continue a conversation over multiple Tweets which tend to get lost if you have a number of people in your timeline.
• In some cases, I believe that people’s responses were compressed to making a “sound bite” that would fit into the 140 chr. limit.
• The ability to adequately explain a point of view was just not there, particular if anyone watching the debate didn’t understand or appreciate the full context of the conversation.
• Regardless of intent, a number of comments were perceived to be ad hominem arguments, at least in part due to brevity (again, my opinion) and word choice

The thing is, Twitter provides a forum that a lot of people can participate in and thus, if nothing else, it has a share of attention that could be used to have debates of this type.

Maybe it would be worth creating a Twitter debate guidelines document of some kind.

Does one already exist?  I’m going to check this out.

During the past two days I’ve heard about two controversial news stories, important within their own communities, through Twitter.

Twitter is the word of mouth, grapevine, and “water cooler” gossip area of the moment.

What do you think?

A couple of days ago I described someone else’s Twitter experiment.  I decided to try the same kind of experiment:  start following a bunch of  people and see what happens.

I’m now following 1101 people (I’ve added well over 800 people this week.)

A total of 378 kind souls (an increase of at least 250) have chosen to follow me as well. 

:: waves ::

I’ve chatted with a few new people, read some interesting things, and notice that my blog subscriber count is up a bit.  It’s all good!

Background: during this week’s Twitter experimentation I linked to a lot of people, including Robert Scoble, who’s… well, I’ll feel silly if I explain this because 99% of you probably know who he is. Check Wikipedia if you don’t… please.  Suffice it to say he’s a famous blogger and tech enthusiast who’s now doing some interesting stuff for Fast Company and who has gotten a fair bit of coverage in traditional media.

Anyway, I made a comment about being followed by him in Twitter on March 4/08 and got an interesting response, so I thought I’d share this with you.

Here’s the deeper background:  I was rather amazed when Scoble started following me (which is like being added to a Facebook Friends list) fairly quickly after I followed him the other day.  It happened within minutes.  I was amazed considering that this guy has over 11,000 people following him.

So I wandered back over to his Twitter page and checked his stats.  Amazingly enough, the number of people that he follows is almost equal to the number of people who follow him.

I have to admit that I wondered if he was running some kind of application that automatically started following Twitter users who followed him, if such a thing even exists.  Who knows?  Doesn’t really matter, I guess.

I commented on this event and got the interesting response that I mentioned.  I copied these three Twitter messages directly from my Twitter favorites, you might find them amusing:

MarkDykeman I was actually kind of flattered when Scoble started following me shortly after I started following him; then I looked at the ratio…. about 5 hours ago from web

Now, it’s fairly common to put the @ symbol in front of a Twitter username to get that person’s attention.  I wasn’t actually interested in getting his attention, I was just, well, Tweeting.  However, not only did I NOT use the @, I didn’t even use his actual user name, as you will see below:

Scobleizer @MarkDykeman notes that I follow everyone. That’s true! Although I missed a few. I figure this should be two-way, not promotion only. about 5 hours ago from im in reply to MarkDykeman

See, the user name is Scobleizer, not Scoble.  So, somehow he was monitoring Twitter feeds and picked his name, without a @ to call out attention, out of… numerous Tweets multiplied by more than 11,000 users?

Probably not THAT difficult to do from a technology perspective, but still… the speed of his Tweet really surprised me.

This was the only witty comeback that I could muster:

MarkDykeman @Scobleizer Um, I don’t know what to say…. that your 11,000+ followers haven’t already read… about 4 hours ago from web in reply to Scobleizer

So,  you never know who you’ll brush up against on the Web.  And I got some free publicity out of his Tweet, despite how I might have sounded in my somewhat sarcastic comment, since the Tweet did go out to 11,000+ people…  And apparently there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Which all goes to show that this Web world is pretty cool and serves up the occasional surprise.

But if Elvis contacts me by IM, I’m probably going to freak out.  A lot.