I’m a pretty heavy Twitter user but I have long argued that we need the equivalent of SMTP/POP for micromessaging as we have for email. I know Twitter is great and has a great ecosystem going, but it can’t last forever. Sure a lot of us have gmail addresses, but we can still send/receive email from people who are on gmail. Right now we don’t have that ability, really, with micromessaging/Twitter. It’s a closed box.

Early on in the whole micromessaging frenzy Status.net out of Montreal developed an open-source server for messaging. Their service is Identi.ca (the server used to be called Laconi.ca, but no longer) where I’ve had a profile for a long while, but haven’t used it in ages. Pretty much because all the conversations were on Twitter and I couldn’t use Twitter clients with Identi.ca as well.

Side note: Bloggers, skipping the really bad picture at the bottom of the post. The DH post is a “teachable moment” about writing good posts. What was the really important part of the post? That Status.net is available for one-click install. Where was it? At the bottom of the post after an eye-searing image that I wish I could burn from my brain. I totally missed it. If you have a point to make. Either make it first or don’t bury it in the post as an afterthought because otherwise people will miss it.

My use of Identi.ca might not change much (I do note that I can connect my Twitter account now for seamless back-and-forth messaging), but I’m going to start toying with the server myself. I’ve wanted to for a long while, but reading the Status.net instructions for DreamHost, well I just don’t have the time right now.

Until now.

I skipped over the tongue-in-cheek post on the DreamHost blog—The Official DreamHost Blog! » Announcing…PetStatus.com!—because it didn’t get to the point quickly enough (and was below a God-awful tattoo as the last image—you’ve been warned) that Status.net is now available as a one-click install now for DH customers. Good thing I subscribe to the email newsletter too or I would have totally missed it.

So later this morning I’m going to set up my own Status.net install and experiment a bit. Oh I know that we can’t have everyone with their own micromessaging server, just like we don’t all need our own email server, but I could have my own email server on DH and be on par with all other servers. My email would come and go just like it does now on Gmail. So what I hope is that, while Twitter might stay the “gmail of micromessaging”, other servers and services will crop up to interact with Twitter. Or better Twitter becomes micromessaging client like Gmail is an email client, and we all start being able to use a more universal and interoperable set of standards.

At least that’s the goal. If it happens will depend on us and hosts supporting a critical mass of additional services/servers.

Here’s to trying.

To really understand this post you need to understand a few things about me:

• I pour over my webstats to learn more about who my readers are, what they read, and how they find me.
• I love discussing the things I write about. That’s why I’ve written about them in the first place.
• After blogging for about six years now, I’ve watched social media grow and evolve a lot, especially in how readers interact with writers.

Since I pour over my stats on a near-daily basis, especially when I see a traffic spike, I have a good idea of how people wind up on my blog. More than half the time it’s from search and lately a good chunk of that traffic (about 15% of visits) is for my My 45 must have WordPress plugins post. This is awesome, since while my yam fries recipe is great, it isn’t what my blog is about in the greater scheme of things. The rest of folks come through links of some sort, most of those via Twitter. Nothing to complain about there. I think it’s great that people come to read what I’ve written.

Okay, a few more people clicking on ads would be great, but, I can’t have everything.

I’ve noticed something really interesting. It hit me over the weekend and all came together in the last day or so—there aren’t as many links from other bloggers anymore. I do get a few via Zemata—makes me wonder if I added the plugin would it add links for me even if I post remotely—but that’s about it. A link here and there.

Then there are comments.

I like comments because I get to continue and extend the conversation. Oh sure I know comments are a hit and miss thing. I tell new bloggers that sometimes you get tons of comments on posts that you’d never figure and ones that you’d think would ignite a firestorm, nothing. So I’m not going to be whining that no one leaves me any comments, that isn’t the point.

What I’ve noticed, is that “discussion” is measured in a currency of tweets and retweets, not links or comments. A quick (very quick, so not terribly scientific) scan of FriendFeed makes me think that’s becoming a ghost-town as well. Not long ago many bloggers, myself included, were talking about how we couldn’t keep up with the fragmented commentary that was going on around the web. Now I wonder if we’re having any commentary at all.

Sure the RT economy is great. I retweet posts I like all the time, just like I share them through Fever as well, and that is supposed to mean “This is interesting, maybe you’ll like it too.” but I’m not leaving many comments anymore either.

Huh.

I know that lots of blogs get lots of comments on some posts. Often so many comments that I don’t know if I want to dive into that pool. Which becomes a circular argument. We don’t comment when there are lots of comments because often there is no way to manage that discussion. Maybe we don’t comment for a similar reason—that coming back for the discussion is more effort than it’s worth.

And I don’t have any answers (sorry).

I would love to know what you think about a post. I would love to extend, expand, and elaborate on the topic. I also don’t want the discussion to become so unwieldy that readers feel they can’t comment.

Maybe if there were a way to have a Twitter hashtag for each post, automatically generated, that if you tweet with that hashtag that tweet becomes part of the post. Hmm, that sounds like an idea. Oh HootSuite, maybe that could be a little pet project? Dave? Maybe Melanie and PostRank are well equipped to pull it off.

Well I’ll just have to see what comes through in the comments, won’t I?

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• The Death of the Blog Comment? (markevanstech.com)

Something has been bothering me about Twitter lately. It has nothing to so with the service, the people I follow, or those who follow me, I think it has something to do with establishing the right atmosphere for me to be productive. I have found it too easy to get caught up in the stream, distracted, but also disconnected. Wanting to be there so I don’t miss anything, but at the safe time wishing I could tear myself away.

It’s not a good feeling. It’s not a healthy state of mind.

And as much as I rely on Twitter to keep me updated, I can’t have it pull me away from the things I that I know mean more and matter more to me. I took a break this weekend from working on Using WordPress. I didn’t really think about it. I didn’t start on Chapter 12 or record anything. I recharged and reflected.

I realized during this time that while I can hammer out a chapter in a day, I’ve been having trouble hammering out a single post a day. I’ve shrugged off considering or commenting on topics or issues I would have jumped on before. And I had to ask myself why.

I remember when I would post 3, 4, 5 times a day. I would read through my feeds and find an easy dozen things I was interested in and several of those would go into posts.

I haven’t been doing that lately. I haven’t been doing that, and I don’t like it.

Tonight, after realizing that gazing into my columns of Twitter lists and groups was hurting more than helping me, I thought that LazyFeed and RSS could fit the void. I realized as well though that my News list on Twitter (it’s public feel free to follow it) was just as important to me as RSS was. The conundrum didn’t last long, the single column mode in TweetDeck does just fine.

Is this a Twitter backlash? Could I be the start of a new trend in backing away from Twitter a bit? I doubt it.

To be clear, I’m not abandoning Twitter or deleting my account. I’ll still keep up and chime in from time to time. What I’m doing is realizing that by watching the flow of others go by, I was somehow losing sight of myself.

And I have far, far too much going on to lose sight of myself, that’s for sure.

Last night I had the rare pleasure of getting to hear Gillian Shaw speak to the Vancouver branch of the Canadian Authors Association. Gillian’s topic was, as you’d expect, social media and she did a fantastic job explaining it. Gillian delved into blogging (a wee bit) and (mostly) Twitter to a pretty diverse crowd of writers, and what surprised me most wasn’t what people didn’t know about social media, but what they did know about social media—but were wrong.

For example, a good part of the audience were aware of Twitter, but they thought that if you were on Twitter you needed to share everything about yourself. One member of the audience had a terrible run-in with Internet trolls, and another a victim of identity theft, so it’s understandable (and a good word of caution) that they had excellent points and questions about social media. However, it seemed to me that what was most interesting was that people’s perceptions of social media didn’t match many of the things that many of us find most useful.

Continuing with Twitter as an example, like Peter Wilson and Gillian, a lot of what I use Twitter for is information. With a whole column dedicated to information sources that I consider “news”, tweets when people have new posts, and other items that filter in, Twitter is my primary source for breaking news. Sure I still use RSS (thank God Gillian didn’t get into RSS, I think heads would have exploded), but Twitter is rapid and constant.

Then we run into the whole problem of “explaining” Twitter. Gillian, Peter, and I agreed that without seeing Twitter, it just doesn’t make sense. Twitter isn’t a hard concept; it’s not like multi-dimentional, multi-variate stats or anything, but I think we all (myself included) suck at explaining it without a computer in front of us. We live it, use it, crave it, maybe even are addicted to it, but we can’t seem to explain it. Why is that? Is it because we’re too close to it to see the greater whole? Is it that we try to encompass all of Twitter in a couple short sentences? What ever it is, we pretty much suck at it.

As I’m reflecting on this, I’m also looking forward to the first (re-)organizational meeting of Social Media Club, Vancouver, where I think one of the most important things we can do as a group to just help other people get it.

Explain why Twitter has changed how we all consume news and information. Explain why writers have both a lot to fear and a lot to gain from social media. If we think social media is great, we need to find better ways at showing the benefits of social media in terms that people get.

We don’t have to explain email anymore.

We don’t have to explain using the Internet anymore.

Now we need to explain how we’re building stronger friendships and connections with social media. We need to explain how social media can quickly galvanize people to a cause. Right now there are more tweets about helping the people of Hati than any other single topic. Of course you’d expect this, but the call to raise money started moments after the quake. Faster than the TV reported it.

I think only when we can clearly articulate social media to people who have basic concepts of the Internet, will social media be accepted by the mainstream and then become something more interesting than it is even now.

I was watching, and this is rare for me, Net@nite and Leo was telling Amber how Sony offered him $2000 to send out one tweet (one!) on a certain date. Leo didn’t see the email in time, so he didn’t send it. I gather the offer came from Ad.ly where Leo said he signed up for an account and set his cost per tweet very high, just so he could check out the service.

This got me thinking so I queried my Twitter followers:

Would you send out a single tweet for $2000? Clearly marked as an ad, for a company? Discussion @ambermac & @leolaporte @twitlive
and
Extension to this. If I sent out one paid tweet a day, would you unfollow me?
about 5 hours ago from TweetDeck

What I got back was very interesting…(reverse order, of course):

OnlineStrategy: Earlier today @trishussey initiated a good dialogue about Twitter ads. Here’s my take: http://ow.ly/VToz
jonjennings: @trishussey Wait, if you’re sending me $2K tweets then I want something in it for me. Fund a party + we’re OK. @hummingbird604 @johnbiehler
Miristee: @trishussey Yes I would unfollow.
shanegibson: @trishussey I think if their product and values are in line with you then it’s okay.
bbluesman: @trishussey yeah too bad we all ahve that 3 meal a day habit huh?
DebNg: @trishussey I wouldn’t unfollow you for one sponsored tweet. If all your tweets were spammy and paid links,I’d probably do so.
tamar: @trishussey i don’t think paid tweets are bad if you’re tweeting about something 1. interesting to you AND 2. interesting to your followers
DixonTam: .@trishussey One paid tweet a day is unintrusive. More than that, I would consider unfollowing. Tweet should clearly indicate it’s sponsored
shaicoggins: @trishussey Hey, Tris. How’re you? Congrats on the book. & on the Q: Depends on what I’m Tweeting. If I’m cool w/the msg, then *maybe*.
digitalkvan: @trishussey I have done paid tweets and have not had any “drama” from them including unfollows
KaerusGrp: @trishussey @ambermac @leolaporte @twitlive I believe I probably might as long as your doing it with full disclosure….tough call.
yurechko: @trishussey for $2k, I’d do it. For $200 I’d probably do it
digitalkvan: @trishussey Have you read this? http://www.shoemoney.com/2009/10/20/how-to-make-15000-00-in-1-month-just-by-tweeting/
wildsheepchaser: @trishussey “The trouble with drawing lines in the sand, is that they are so easily erased.”
gmarkham: @trishussey Paid tweets/sponsored/ads don’t bother me as long as overall value of the stream remains high.
ianiv: @trishussey Plus I already enter contests via tweets which are like ads and those don’t even guarantee I get anything back
duzins: @trishussey no, but anyone else, yeah…
ianiv: @trishussey I’d feel dirty, but for $2k I might do it. potentially loose some followers in exchange of mrtg payment?
bbluesman: @trishussey If we asked you for money one tweet a day would you unfollow us?
wildsheepchaser: @trishussey hell yes, but nobody is looking to me as authoritative voice on anything either, and I think that matters.
digitalkvan: @trishussey yes I would and have! I have also used these companies to run campaigns with great success
shanegibson: @trishussey depends what company.
duzins: @trishussey depends on the company and the ad copy…

What this tells me is that Twitter is reaching maturity and acceptance as something that takes time and adds value to people’s lives. The same thing happened with blogging not so long ago, and with pretty much the same sentiment. Ads are okay as long as it’s not over the top, reputable, and doesn’t interfere with the content.

There will always be people on Twitter, just like there are blogs, who’s sole purpose in life is to generate ad revenue. There are other folks, like me, who work hard, try to enrich the larger pool of knowledge, but also like to eat and have a home. I’m not at a point where I feel I have to stop using Twitter because I need to earn money. Twitter is an integral part of me earning money. It’s one of the key ways I use to promote myself, my books, my classes, and my work.

It’s tough to say what my number is. I did, out of pure curiosity, sign up with Ad.ly and set my price pretty high (much higher than their “recommended” amount). Regardless of whether or not I do take an advertiser up on their offer, I am very curious to see if I’m offered anything at all.

How can an advertiser evaluate any individual Twitter user? I’m not a celebrity, so there isn’t that kind of draw. I occasionally am caught saying something smart or witty (I said occasionally) and I have a fair number of followers with good engagement. I think I’d be a good bet for some tech product or service. I’ll just have to wait and see if any advertiser thinks I’m worth it. Which, ironically, is actually putting a price on you my readers and followers. They aren’t paying money for me, they are paying for your attention.

As I said, this is a good discussion to have. We need to just hash these things out. It’s new territory and like ads on blogs before, people are going to make mistakes, but that’s okay. It shouldn’t cost us. Much.

(Apologies to Dire Straights)

Call it the lazy web, wisdom of crowds, organic computers, or a hive mind, but I’ve seen in the last few weeks alone that asking a question on Twitter yields great results. Here is tonight’s example:

I use Twitter as my hyper-intelligent personal search engine #quote @zaibatsu

link: Twitter / Reg Saddler: I use Twitter as my hyper- …

There is a problem, of course, in relying on Twitter or Facebook or whatever social network du jour is out there and it has nothing do to with getting the wrong answer, it’s whether you get an answer at all. I know that a lot of us will help and answer friends, friends of friends, sometimes even total strangers when we can, but we’re just not around all the time.

Okay, enough of the downer stuff, let’s think about how we can do this better, how we can capture the questions and answers so they aren’t just passing whispers in the wind or drops in a deluge. Not long ago I need suggestions for a good Nintendo DS game. Not only did I get nearly instant responses (probably not that much slower than searching Google and reading the info I found), but I got consistent results that let me make a good decision (as it turned out, it was an awesome decision Mario Kart for DS is really, really cool). However both the question and all the answers are as good as gone. I would take me a tedious amount of searching to find my original question and even more to find all the answers. That doesn’t even pull the information together.

I know Google indexes all of Twitter’s public timeline, but with the scale of information that flows through Twitter at any moment, even a search engine like Google needs some context to help pull things together. If we have @replies for discussion and hash tags for search, I think we need another designator just for this kind of query-response connection. Maybe ?q and ?a to connect the dots? Yes, I know its two characters instead of one. I suppose you could preface or end with ^ instead? The point is, that in order for this information not to be lost, we have to find a way to curate it.

The question with the answer(s) doesn’t become a blog post. The person asking the question thanks everyone for their help and that’s it (most of the time, I know there are exceptions). I also realize that just ending a question with ^ and answers with ^ (or ^^) doesn’t connect specific questions to specific answers, but at least it’s a start.

It’s like when I was a lab geek counting fossil pollen, seeds, and other organic bits in samples. I asked my professors if I needed to count this or that. They always answered that if you don’t gather the data, you can’t analyze later. If we don’t de-mark some tweets as special, then we can’t build engines to analyze them. We can’t match a question to answers from that person’s followers if we don’t have an easy way to pull them out in the first place.

Okay, I’ve had my time on the soapbox. So…

• How should we denote a question
• How should we denote an answer
• Who’s going to find a way to connect them together?

And can we start now…

Sometimes, especially after this week’s Twitter DNS debacle—Internal Twitter Credentials Used in DNS Hack, Redirect-Twitter Email Security Blamed for Latest Hack—, I wonder if Twitter really has what it takes to make it in the long haul. It certainly took them long enough to get basic scaling working. At least now a simple Apple announcement or single conference won’t completely take Twitter down. If this is the second hack that Twitter has suffered because of, I’m guessing here, poor email and password management then do they have the management chops to succeed?

Reading GigaOM this morning on startups, and thinking about something to limber up the writing muscles, the number #3 startup killer struck me as something that maybe Twitter hasn’t been very good at:

3. Failure to Weed or Seed Soon Enough

We’ve written about how to hire, fire and mentor and why to remove underperformers quickly for superior teams. Our message is simply that you can never eliminate underperformers soon enough and that you should always be looking for superior talent. Superior people make excellent technology and develop appropriate processes.

[From Top 10 Internet Startup Scalability Killers – GigaOM]

Has Twitter been holding on to people and practices too long? Have managers been reluctant to be hard asses? Sometimes when you have been given responsibility for something, you need to step up to the plate. Case in point.

To write Using WordPress I’ve reduced the time I spend with M2O but I still have responsibilities over the servers and such. Earlier this week I emailed everyone that we had to be serious about passwords. I had been thinking about Twitter and written a lot about making good passwords for Future Shop and the book and realized that I knew that at least a few of the passwords people used were bad. Like epically bad.

Yesterday afternoon, thinking about it again, I realized that most people take password security about as seriously as drier lint so I did something that probably earned me a lot of curses: I forced everyone to reset their Gmail passwords on their next login.

Yep, probably damn freakin’ annoying. I didn’t stop with active team members either, all active email accounts that had been set up for people (believe me there is going to be some house cleaning again in that department come Tuesday). Are people pissed at me? Maybe. Frankly I don’t care. I realized that if I wanted to avoid a Twitter-like debacle, I needed to put a stake in the ground and say that this is serious business.

I don’t know if Twitter feels the same way about their system or service. I wonder if Ev, Biz, and Jack still think of Twitter as a lark. Millions of people don’t think Twitter is a lark. Millions of us rely on and use Twitter as a key informational tool. I think we need to remind the folks at Twitter that it isn’t a lark. That having lax password security isn’t a good thing. Again the call to decentralize Twitter should be ringing in our ears. We need redundancy. We need a server that people can install themselves. Maybe Twitter should bite the bullet and make a deal with Google to allow Google Apps for Domains to host replicant Twitter servers and build an actual architecture like we have for email.

I think until Twitter steps up to the plate, gets serious, and is no longer a single-point-of-failure service we have to question whether Twitter can really make it.

How many “friends” on Facebook do you have? Twitter? Foursquare? LinkedIn? If you’re like me probably “lots” is a safe answer, but there’s a problem with the term “friends” or “connections” because we use these tools to define our personal, professional, and informational networks many of the people on these lists aren’t really friends at all. I’d venture to say that, for Twitter especially, the majority are less than even acquaintances. My friend (and I mean that in the sociological way) Chris Brogan probes into this sticky problem as he culls his “friends” list on Facebook:

Our friend behavior matches what software developers have designed. It’s not exactly written by sociologists. In some ways, the software forces us to behave in certain ways. In others, it opens up new ways to think and build relationships. It’s a mix of benefit and drawback (like all innovation, I suspect).

[From The Problems With Friends Lists]

I’m often tempted to go through Facebook and “unfriend” a lot of people. I think there are probably close to a hundred people on that list that I might not have talked with in over a year or even at all. Having lots of “friends” or connections on social media/networking sites is supposed to be a badge of power, honor, and influence, but at the moment I’m wondering if this practice is diluting our real friendships.

I have a private Twitter list (now thankfully synced and managed through TweetDeck) that I call “Friends” and another called “Colleagues”, these are my two most important lists, even more than my public News list because these are the people with whom I interact with both professionally and personally. I’ve found myself lately looking at my Friends list and asking…Is this person a “friend” or “colleague”. This isn’t a slight, it’s just a fact that early on my definition of friend and colleague (I used to call the column “Folks”) was pretty broad, so now I’m reining things in. I’m moving people around into different bins in an effort to better match the social media definition with a sociological one.

It’s that connection that you need to keep your friends closer and enemies on Google Alerts.

This is just a private compartmentalization though, I’m not “unfollowing” them on Twitter, I’m just shifting them around. Yes, there are a lot (the majority in fact) of people who aren’t in either of those two columns, which isn’t surprising is it when my current following list is over 5000. What about something far more (semi)public like Facebook? There, as Chris says, the idea of “unfriending” someone can have huge sociological overtones to it (I’m so unfriending you on Facebook now…), but frankly I don’t think it should in most cases. Maybe it isn’t a bad thing to go through an be able to say “do I know this person?”. Mark Evans’ post today on social media and the loss of privacy which I have to agree with and the realization of that made me look at Foursquare very differently recently. A number of people, including 6S Marketing’s Chris Breikss pointed out that Foursquare is so personal that maybe a little caution in accepting friend requests might be in order. Do you really want that person to know where you are? I know that I can’t really use Twitter or any social network as a soap box or unfiltered dumping ground of the stuff that rattles around in my skull. It’s public anyone can read it. So and while I might really want to say something, chances are that I won’t.

Now that the genie is out of the bottle, I can’t pull it back. I can’t make my tweets private and maintain credibility in social media. Not only that when I want to say something in public I wouldn’t be able to. It’s the crushing reality that now more than ever, knowing who your real friends are is extremely important. It’s that connection that you need to keep your friends closer and enemies on Google Alerts. There are people who you want to share a lot with, and others you don’t. And while this has always been the case, I think at present with our world-wide culture of over-sharing, we might need to reflect and pull back.

Ask yourself: Who is most important to you in your life? Who do you want to hear from and be heard by? Who is a friend, and who is a mouse clicked connection? Who do you really know? Any maybe most importantly…

Who really knows you?

Way back in 2005, when “business blogs” were pretty rare creatures, those of use who were pushing the boundaries and getting some of the first businesses to actively use blogs were telling businesses to start blogging only if they were serious about getting input from their customers. If they weren’t ready for that kind of interaction or weren’t willing to put real resources behind a blog, then just monitoring social media right be the right choice for them.

I feel compelled to say right off the bat that if you aren’t interested in genuinely engaging with your customers (spamming with links to your website or special offers does not equal engagement), don’t use Twitter for your business. But if you are ready to start a conversation about your company, it can be a powerful tool to develop your brand and add many loyal customers to your following.

[From Social Media Today | 10 tips for taking your business into the Twittersphere in 2010 ]

Recently I’ve been seeing more and more “Using Twitter For Business” and “Make Your Product Fan Page on Facebook” posts and frankly there is little difference between the advice we were giving companies in 2005-2006 and now.

The crux of the issue is that social media (blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc) all work under very similar guiding principles of communication, listening, sharing. Maybe the frustration people have with the onslaught of “social media consultants” is that a lot of people try to make social media something that is radically new, horribly complex, and fraught with peril for the uninitiated. Sure, in the great scheme of things social media is a pretty new way to communicate, but it’s no different than what has been going on over the past four years. What’s different now is that the tools are getting more sophisticated and the toolset itself has grown larger. When before a business blog was the primary social media tool, now we have Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare … and who knows what’s coming next.

Here’s my advice for businesses then (as tool agnostic as possible):

• Listen first. See what people are already saying about your brand online. Do searches of Twitter, Facebook, blogs and just read for a while. Get a sense of what the issues are (or not) before you jump in.
• Start slow and get a social media mentor. No, social media isn’t rocket science, but there are manners, expectations, and social etiquette that you should understand. Lots of great (and well meaning companies) have a rough start at first just because they make a few faux pas. Just having someone to help not only show you the ropes, but also introduce you around goes a long way.
• Make a commitment. “Do or do not. There is no try.”-Yoda. Put resources, time and value on social media. Look, people are out there talking about your company, brand, or niche, joining in on the conversation can bring you great personal and professional success. Success in social media is just like success in life: overnight success takes years (time). The world will not radically change overnight. Just be patient. Give it time.
• Bring it close to home. Think about stepping into social media yourself. Connect with friends on Facebook. Read blogs about your hobbies. Use Twitter to get the latest news (or gossip). Social media isn’t all about work, it’s supposed to be fun too.

That’s about it. I’m skipping all the details about setting up blogs or Twitter accounts or Facebook fan pages. Those are just tools. If you understand the mechanics of painting a room you can learn how to use a brush, roller, or sprayer as you go.

If you’d like to learn more, or would like me to be your social media mentor, you can connect with me on Twitter, leave a comment here, or send me an email at tris [at] trishussey [dot] com.

It seems that the “Twitter in the news” cycle is set to a two week rotation. Maybe the law of conservation of twitter news …

Regardless, Twitter was in the news recently that Twitter has peaked because its Comscore traffic data dipped in October. Oh how the pundits, jumped on that. Well the pundits who didn’t really read the data. CNET shows that at least someone is reading the data with a critical eye:

It seems that these figures, blessedly inconsistent as they are, are not taking account of all the third-party and mobile methods of keeping everyone up with your eating, drinking, reading, philosophizing and socializing.
But is it also possible that some people will simply never participate in the Twitter phenomenon, finding it either annoying, uncool, or even too much effort?
With Twitter intent on becoming more businesslike (why does the word ‘more’ seem slightly redundant here?), 2010 seems destined to be the year that the microblogging service becomes either de rigueur or dazed and confused.
Will Twitter become a permanent habit or a disappearing, perhaps even elitist, fad? I’ll tweet Nostradamus and ask him.

[From Has Twitter peaked? | Technically Incorrect - CNET News]

See, Comscore measures website traffic. TweetDeck, Hootsuite, Siesmic, none of those hit the website for traffic. So, in fact, I would read the dip to be good news for Twitter. Sure, people aren’t going to the website, but they are becoming more sophisticated and using tools that help them manage their Twitter streams.

The point is that you just can’t read data blindly. This was something that was beat into me going through college and grad school. As a scientist we learn to never to take data at face value. You have to understand all the parameters around it. When I heard that Twitter dipped in October I was interested, then when I read that the data source was Comscore then I knew that the data could be interpreted in at least a few ways.

No, I’m not saying that there are people who have it out for Twitter. Saying that “Twitter dips in October,” makes for a great headline. I would add “…But is that the real picture,” just because that would indicate that there might be something more going on.

And there is.

Twitter isn’t the be all and end all. I’m not going to be Twitter cheerleader. I think microblogging-micromessaging has changed how we’re sharing information, and for the better.

So next time we get some Twitter traffic data, let’s take a good look at the data first.   

As many of you know I’m in the midst of writing my first book (zapped off three more chapters yesterday!) which is entitled “Six Easy Blogging Projects” and one of the last chapters in the book is creating a “Lifestreaming blog”. When I was putting the book’s outline together I had no idea that I was actually on to something that would become quite timely by the time the book hits the shelves.

My long-time blogging friend Steve Rubel has announced that he is giving up on blogging and moving towards lifestreaming–Micro Persuasion: So Long Blogging, Hello Lifestreaming!–which you can find on his Posterous-powered lifestream–The Steve Rubel Lifestream – Daily links, insights, photos, videos and more on emerging technology.–where Steve is dropping bits and pieces from the things he finds online.

Now equally good friends Louis Gray and Jeremiah Owyang feel that blogging isn’t dead and there is still a place for long-form writing–Blogging Is Still the Foundation In A World of Streams – louisgray.com & Is Blogging Evolving Into Life Streams? « Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang | Social Media, Web Marketing–and I happen to agree with Jeremiah and Louis, mostly.

I’ve been using Twitter to capture my musings more and more of late and blogging less and less. Okay, recently I’ve been blogging more but that’s beside the point. What I’ve found recently is that while Twitter, and I have yet to try Posterous but clearly I need to soon, is great for short bits, 140 characters is rather limiting.

So I see my blog as the place where I can detail my thoughts in a little more depth. Like Louis and Jeremiah, I also see my blog as the cornerstone or anchor to my online presence. Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed are great, but none of them allow me the control over my online presence like my own blog does.

I think Louis’ graphic illustrates how blogs are the cornerstone, anchor, hub…whatever very well.

As I’ve been prepping for this book and the classes I’ve been teaching I’ve been experimenting with different workflows. Next on the list is Posterous. What of FriendFeed? Considering I haven’t wandered over there in a significant fashion in months, I’m not sure where to place it. FriendFeed became a serious chaff generator. Far more hay than needles.

Granted, I’m sure that I could find a better way to manage it, but that is something for another day.

Are there two camps forming? Is there a “I blog” vs “I lifestream” separation going on? I certainly hope not. We need both kinds of information flows to keep things going. Steve won’t have much to share with Google Reader if we don’t write posts. Scoble won’t have fodder to comment on in FriendFeed if we don’t help to generate it.

Yes, the quick update and summation of a link, thought, etc is great sometimes, but we still need posts of more depth to flesh out and expand on ideas.

Well at least I think so.

Are you blogging more? Are you lifestreaming? There are a slew of questions growing from this centering around how we consume news and information now, but let’s just leave it at this for now.

In 2005 it was live blogging, in 2009 it’s live tweeting, letting people know what is going on at a conference has changed a lot in a few years. Back in 2005, it was pretty easy to keep the back channel private and public discussions (relatively) on topic. Now because a conference hashtag can take off in less than an hour, back channel discussions suddenly become not only public, but uncontrollable.

I saw Sarah Perez’s write up on RWW this morning about a new service called ParaTweet which is trying to put some control on the discussion:

f you’ve ever been to a conference or some sort of large event, you’ve probably seen a live Twitter stream in action. Up on a big screen in a prominent place, often the stage itself, the live stream tracks the relevant hashtags or keywords about the event, be it a conference, a panel, a meetup, or some other sort of heavily-tweeted gathering. But sometimes there’s an issue with displaying the raw, unfiltered tweets in this way: they can be disruptive. All it takes is one Twitter user trying to be funny – or, worse, a troll saying something rude – to take the discussion off course.
link: A New Way to Mute the Backchannel: ParaTweet for Live Events

If I’m reading this right, what you’d do is make sure that only ParaTweet was displayed on conference monitors, etc instead of Twitter search or Twitterfall. While I this makes sense, the idea of “controlling the conversation” is a little overblown.

Of course the conference organizers can’t “control” the conversation, but what the can do is try to limit the public presentation of it. While this is a good idea, I think there is a huge potential to backfire. What if a controversial topic at the conference takes on a life of its own and the conference organizers don’t want it presented? You can imagine rogue TwitterFalls and searches appearing.

That said, I think for a conference environment it will be something to try, if nothing else to give a cohesive view of the conference. I’d pair ParaTweet with Twitterfall so folks can see the firehose and the filtered version.

Chirp, chirp.

At the price of sounding like a broken record, discussion about Twitter being “mission critical” or too important to have down time is a red herring. The fact is that what is really needed is for more Laconi.ca servers and connectors between them, Identi.ca, and Twitter. Email works because there are few single points of failure. Yes, those of us who primarily use gmail get grumpy when it goes down, but there are lots of alternatives.

So while Twitter made headlines this week because the U.S. State Department asked them to delay their downtime to help people posting news from Iran, this isn’t Twitter’s problem, it’s ours.

This all adds up to the Twitter Conundrum. The owners of Twitter and other social-networking sites aren’t likely to buy highly available, highly secure, redundant systems and storage of the type common to 24 by 7 production data centers. Their business models simply won’t support big enterprise gear. But does that stop the federal government from stepping in and saying “sorry, you can’t go down right now, not even for a few hours?” No. Twitter, YouTube, and FaceBook have created windows on the world, windows that could in fact change the world for the better. You can’t fail (whale). Here’s the conundrum: No one presently pays a fee for posting to these sites. You get what you pay for or, in this case, you don’t get what you don’t pay for. You don’t pay for and therefore don’t get guaranteed availability or data integrity. Is the federal government now willing to subsidize Twitter so that it can function like a production data center? Probably not. Are users willing to pay a fee to get a guaranteed level of service? Again, probably not, at least not in the near future. Owners of the social-networking sites have managed this conundrum by rolling their own. They get cheap, or even better, free infrastructure and make it work. The power implicit in what they do with the scarcest of resources is truly awesome. Now, as they’re sites become embedded in the fabric of society, can they keep that model going? Perhaps, but they will likely need our help. Remember, e-mail was once a frivolous application.
link: Is Twitter now a critical app? | Data-driven – CNET News

We’ve become addicted to single point source sites that are the be all and end all for a niche. Facebook, MySpace, Twitter…I know that I’m guilty of this as well, but we need to try to think bigger here. What I really want to know is how Twitter is going to maintain a system where lots of people want to join to at least try it out. Wouldn’t letting or building something more decentralized work better?

Maybe it would have been easier for Iranian protestors get out if they had a myriad of services to choose from and those all talked to each other.

The problem is of course is establishing/nominating a server as the “standard” and ensure that we all play nice with each other.

Gee that should be easy right?

Yet another post about Twitter’s much studied demographics. Like most cool, new (or newly mainstream) things people want to define it. To study it. To dissect it like a hapless amphibian and figure out if by looking inside we can understand it as a whole.

We’ve heard about the 60% drop off rate (which means that a 40% stay, which is still pretty damn good and there is no metric for people who come back in a couple months) and now we’re hearing that the majority of people don’t tweet, but use Twitter as a source of information:

Although this may sound strange at first, Twitter really is more like Wikipedia than, say, Facebook. Twitter is not so much about connecting with your friends, it’s about broadcasting information. Although it doesn’t necessarily take much creativity to create a tweet, only the most creative users actually persist in tweeting every day over a longer time period. However, Twitter is also similar to a instant messaging tool, which should have a very different curve, with a larger proportion of users contributing to the number of overall tweets. It seems that Twitter’s micropublishing component is winning over its chatting component.
ink: Twitter is Not Your Average Social Network

Wow, you think? Twitter is one of those tools that is almost completely flexible. You can use it to gather info, send info, chat, read, discuss. There aren’t “rules”, per se, on how to get the most out of Twitter, but there are some tricks that help you get the most out of Twitter more quickly.

• Follow news feeds like CBC, BBC, CNN, ZDNet, etc. These tweet feeds give you great value with little effort. You’re not going to get a firehose of information, just a nice steady flow.
• Group the people you follow. Regardless of whether you use Nambu, TweetDeck, PeopleBrowsr, or Mixero you need to put people into bins in order manage the flow. I “follow” about 5700 people, but can only really track a fraction of them. I group friends, news feeds, colleagues, and TwitFic into separate groups. This gives things context and focus.
• Find your friends and affinity groups on Twitter. It’s a lot easier to use Twitter when you can “listen” to people you know. Most people I know who left Twitter and later came back, left because there was no one there and came back because their friends were there.

I flip through my Twitter channels to keep an eye on things. I add and remove people from groups to tune the info. Yes, I spend a lot of time with this, but you don’t have to. You aren’t likely to follow 5700 people, so your challenges won’t be like mine. Find the people than topics you’re interested in, read, listen, retweet, reply, then you’ll start to feel connected.

Twitter can be great or boring. Twitter really is what you make of it.

Sometimes I wonder if the river of information we swam in during 2004, which became something more like a fire hose in the past couple years, has now become one of those super storms that people tell their grandchildren about (I remember the summer of 2009, when data moved faster than computers could store it in a cache…). Reflecting on how quickly something “made” the news back in 2004 (when both Steve Rubel & I started blogging), it might take a day before something reached critical mass. Today Twitter provides a multiplicative effect that truly makes my head spin. The difference now is that whereas in 2004 you had to write a post to build on the buzz, today you just retweet the original post (as I did with Louis’ post I’m citing here). This I think has made us pretty lazy really. Are we not writing? Are we not reading enough?

Or is it as Steve suggests, blogging is “slow”:

Meanwhile, Steve Rubel, author of MicroPersuasion, who has been blogging on that site since early 2004, said that to him, blogging seemed “slow”, when contrasted with the lightning fast communications seen from tools like FriendFeed and Twitter. He made the analogy that when you take the time to compose a blog post and you launch it over the wall, that readers have to look it over and make a choice as to whether they will respond, or if they will simply hit ‘J’ in their RSS reader and move along. In contrast, he said sending a note to Twitter was like introducing ants in someone’s house, making them immediately take action.

link: Today’s Real-Time Web Makes Blogging and RSS Seem “Too Slow” – louisgray.com

Looking at a screenshot from the hot Twitter client Mixero you can see in a glance the amount of information present. News, friends, replies (I hid DMs, sorry guys), all in one place I can skim, click, skim, RT in seconds:

I would wager that this isn’t always a good thing. I would wager that what we need is the web-equivalent of the “slow food” movement. Something where we take a few minutes to read a post, consider a post, then write our own opinions of the post in something greater than 140 characters.

I know that I’m fighting an uphill battle here. I know that even my own info gathering trends fly in the face of the “slow post” movement, however what if we paused and wrote more?

Naw, that won’t work, we might get more original ideas and lord knows that we don’t need anymore of those in this world !