A View from the Isle

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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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 !

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Oh Twitter. You can’t seem to catch a break can you?

Why aren’t you making money?

Why are you so unstable?

Why can’t you be like your older brother Facebook, he’s got a business model?

And now, why don’t users stick with you for more than a month?

When MySpace and Facebook were at the stage that Twitter is at today, their retention rates were, according to Nielsen, twice as high – and they’ve now stabilized at nearly 70 percent. Twitter’s high rate of churn will, if it continues, hamstring the service’s growth, says Nielsen’s David Martin: “A retention rate of 40 percent will limit a site’s growth to about a 10 percent reach figure … There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point. [Twitter] will not be able to sustain its meteoric rise without establishing a higher level of user loyalty.”
link: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: The fickle Twitterer

Yes, yes I know a large, stable, user base is key to a site’s/service’s success. That isn’t something I care to debate, per se. What I think is absolutely key here, and why Twitter is going to emerge on top in the end, is that Twitter isn’t just a service, it’s a game changing new way of messaging.

Facebook and MySpace weren’t extremely new, even for their time. You built a personal corner and then found friends to connect with. Not revolutionary, it was evolutionary no doubt, but not revolutionary.

Twitter on the other hand really has changed things. Something that isn’t email, isn’t SMS, isn’t IM. You still have friends you connect with, but it’s more about talking than staking a claim on the Internet.

So, fine, Twitter might lose people after a month. I think “losing” them is a little harsh. I’d call it “hiatus”, I have a feeling people will be back, just like unused and dormant AOL accounts, when Twitter hits the next big jump.

Twitter will become more and more central to rapid messaging and as such maybe “dormant” accounts might really just be places where people receive information, but don’t need to log into Twitter to get.

Let’s not cast Twitter in a dying phase just as it hits mainstream attention. Time will tell, and I’m thinking it will be told in 140 characters or fewer.

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Beyond the post Oprah-on-Twitter hype, the majority of folks I know and chat with on a regular basis are tweeting business as usual. So while Ashton, CNN, and Oprah were getting headlines and new Mac Twitter app was being chatted about in my Twitter stream.

Tweetie for Mac is a desktop app brought to you by the same folks who brought us Tweetie the iPhone app. The first public beta dropped today, and despite my attempts to get it early, I had to wait until today to give it a try. I figure I’m not the only one since there was a good amount of “Tweetie for Mac” related chatter on Twitter. Not surprising after reading several pro-Tweetie posts: louisgray.com: Tweetie Desktop for Mac Is Clean, Simple and Robust-Tweetie’s Desktop App for Mac Has Potential, Integrates Conversation Tracking | SheGeeks-First Look: Tweetie for Mac | Take A Plunge

The first thing that I knew would be a problem is the lack of support for grouping people you follow. This was no surprise given an earlier post from the Tweetie developers-Twitter Groups-which douses some seriously cold (and snarky) water on using groups. Personally, “unfollow people” doesn’t cut it as an information management strategy. Even if I only followed 100 people, I’d still want to group my tweets into News (CNN, BNO, ZDNet, etc), Friends, and maybe one other category. This is just smart information management. Yeah I could have say four accounts to manage my info streams this way, but frankly that would be a royal PITA.

When I launched Tweetie for Mac this morning I tried it with one of my work accounts that I use to push posts out into Twitter. Few followers, few updates, so the info demands would be small.

I will say that Tweetie didn’t disappoint in terms of UI and slick style. It certainly looks great. As expected, no groups, but well I pretty much banked on that so okay. I ran into a show stopper when I tried to add my primary Twitter account. Yeah I guess it doesn’t like long, complex passwords. After making sure that I had the password right after the first authentication failure, I chalked this up to a first-release bug.

My verdict: I’m going to wait for the next release so I can give it a full-on test. So what about my other preferred desktop apps Nambu and TweetDeck? I’m flipping between the two of them right now. Both of them have a groups feature and are multi-column layout enabled which are two key things for me as a heavy Twitter user, the problem I’m having is that Nambu is still a might buggy and has a memory leak somewhere because when I leave it open for a while, it can gobble up a gig of ram after a few hours. TweetDeck has a similar problem, which has been squashed for the most part I’ve found.

As far as UI I like Nambu better. Even though I can’t move columns in Nambu like I can in TweetDeck I can set up a four column layout and use the pull-down menu to change what is displayed in each column. Verdict: too close to call.

For me the lack of groups is something that kills a Twitter app for me. I just need them to organize info. Does everyone need groups? Of course not, not everyone follows 4800+ people. At this point I don’t know how I could cull the list, short of using UnTweeps, with that many pages to go through.

[Took a break for a meeting]

By the time I got back to my desk there was Tweetie 1.0.1 and I could use it with my primary, and ginormous, account. Again, it looks lovely and is very responsive, but without groups it’s not the app for me.

The question then becomes, are Twitter groups in a client a must-have option for a Twitter app or just for the edge cases?

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So an actor named Ashton gets a million followers and a talk show host named Oprah joins Twitter and the world rejoices. Twitter has hit that magic point of becoming mainstream.

Of course, there isn’t universal cheering, but that is to be expected. I’m sure the academic community was aghast when AOL users could send and receive email from the Internet proper.

The questions on my mind were echoed by Fredric on RWW:

Can the Mainstream Handle Twitter?

On its own site, Twitter will also have to explain its utility better if it wants to draw in all the potential mainstream users who will hear about Twitter for the first time today. Twitter, after all, still asks you what you are doing, even though that is probably the least interesting way of using Twitter. It is also important to note that Twitter, being the small company that it is, barely has any tech support besides its Get Satisfaction page, so a befuddled new users doesn’t have any place to go to ask questions about how to use it.

Can Twitter Handle the Mainstream?

This sudden mainstreaming of Twitter, however, doesn’t mean that Twitter has finally jumped the shark. In the end, Twitter going mainstream will barely affect most current users. After all, once you manage to unfollow Ashton Kutcher again, most of us won’t have to deal with Oprah, Kutcher, or any other celebrity on the service, though, who knows, you might soon be getting DM’s from your mom…

[From Twitter's Big Day: Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher Bring Twitter to the Mainstream - ReadWriteWeb]

I feared that Twitter would tank today, which would be a bad, bad thing if you’re going to be on Oprah. Twitter, however, has stayed up and seems to be functioning as good as ever. The larger question is: what now? To which I answer: Open servers.

The reference above to AOL was a lead in to this. Long-time internet users will remember the days of having several email addresses because CompuServ, AOL, BITNET, and EDUNET couldn’t reliably communicate and send email back and forth. Not an efficient way to communicate, to say the least.

Then came standardized email gateways, POP, and SMTP and an AOL address was as good as a .edu and email exploded into the mainstream. Now it’s micromessaging’s turn.

Right now the leading contender is laconi.ca (aka Identi.ca) and what it will take is for the servers to have a protocol mapping so that trishussey@twitter.com connects to my Twitter account and have tris [at] media2o.com be able to be mapped to a laconi.ca install. Just like tris.hussey [at] gmail.com works for email and chat.

What’s it going to take to get it working? More laconi.ca servers and more people using them and more clients out there to connect up to. Then…

We have to use them.

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All that is old is new again, or so we’ve been told. This weekend the Twitterverse has been slammed with a couple of bothersome worms that propagate rapidly using basic social engineering: we like to click links from friends.

Mashable [mikeyy: Second Twitter Worm on the Loose] and ReadWriteWeb [Twitter Worm Could Take Over Your Computer (in Theory) - ReadWriteWeb] covered this charming present from the Easter Virus Bunny over the weekend but it seems that most folks missed a basic point while pointing fingers at Twitter: we’ve seen this all before. Remember the early days of HTML email? Remember being told to just disable HTML email in Outlook Express and Outlook because just opening a bad email could infect you? Well those days are back, at least for the moment with this Twitter worm.

The “Mikeyy Worm” and others are so freakin’ clever you have to give them props. Basically you see a Tweet from a friend with a link to check out a site or later how to prevent infection and it goes to an infected Twitter profile with a charming piece of Javascript buried in it that infects your Twitter account as well.

Nope not your computer per se, but your Twitter account/profile. It propagates by putting the nasty code into your profile and sends out a tweet on your behalf to keep the whole cycle going.

Ah let’s virus like it’s 1999…

So is this Twitter’s fault? Of course it is.

Is this unexpected? Hell no.

Are we ever going to be rid of things like this? Also a resounding, hell no.

The problem is that most of these kinds of attacks use basic social engineering tools. Click on links from friends, click on links saying your account has been compromised, give “tech support” your username and password…they pray on trust and our assumptions of safety.

Yes, we all need to be careful and skeptical, but honestly not ever clicking on links from friends defeats the purpose of sharing through Twitter (and others) doesn’t it?

So we’ll all be more careful. We’ll make sure that we know how to quickly close off all Twitter related apps, blow out browser caches and cookies, and reset passwords. Man their could be a great AppleScript or Automator script in there…

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Well Allen might not be writing about Twitter every day, okay well I don’t either, but starting sometime last evening I stopped getting email notification of DMs or follows on Twitter, and that got my attention.

I didn’t realize how much I depend on Twitter for fast updates. Okay, getting notification of follows isn’t too crucial to my existence, but not getting DMs, yeah that causes a little problem.

Like last night I was meeting the crew from Molson for a beer (of course) and DMs were zapping back and forth…except I didn’t get them until I was home. Oops.

This made me realize how important Twitter has become to many of us as a rapid communications tool and info source, but it hasn’t stopped there. Jennifer Leggio commented recently, on Twitter of course, that she had culled 100 feeds from Google Reader because she doesn’t go there often anymore. I asked a question recently about Twitter and RSS and got a similar response, Twitter is becoming more important than our once vital RSS readers.

So we have a single point service that is becoming vital to many of us, which means when something goes off the rails, we notice.

I can’t help but wonder if now would be a good time for Twitter to take some of their money and set up a series of relays on major hosts across the Net. SXSWi is coming up soon-no I don’t know if I’m going-which tends to put a huge load on Twitter, maybe a little pre-planning would be good.

Of course many of us also rely on Gmail, and when it goes down we go a little nuts (and we tend to then go to Twitter to get updates). I think it is more than a little ironic that the Internet was built on the concept and mantra of reliability and redundancy, but many of us have chosen to rely on single point services for our communications.

Maybe it isn’t just Twitter that should think about backup plans.

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Yeah I love TweetDeck , it’s open all the time and one of the first things I installed on my netbook. TweetDeck is the only way I’ve found I can get much out of Twitter at all. Iain is a very talented guy and eventhough I didn’t “get” TweetDeck at first, now I do.

Om Malik thinks Iain getting $500k in angel funding is a sing of Twitter insanity, I have to strongly disagree.

[From Tweetdeck Funding…a Sign of Twitter Insanity]

TweetDeck freakin’ works. Everyone who I’ve turned on to it wonders how they lived without it. Every-freakin-one. To me that is the mark of awesome software. I should know, I helped guide Qumana when it was the blog editor of choice for many in the pro-blogging community. People just “got it”. This means to me that if people “get” TweetDeck, then there is something to it. I know Iain has plans for the app. I know I have ideas too. I see TweetDeck becoming more and more a central dashboard of information, so lets give Iain the cash to live on so he can make this app rock.

Premium version? Since I already donated to TweetDeck as it is, I’m pretty sure I’ll pony up for new features.

What’s your crazy idea for TweetDeck? Come on, spill…

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Duane updated his Twitter plugin WordTwit yesterday. It now checks your Twitter credentials to make sure they are correct. Nice touch. Playing with other stuff shortly.

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Here’s a great idea. Whenever someone follows me on Twitter I’ll send them a little direct message back thanking them or something. Okay maybe I’ll throw a link to my blog in too. Hmm, maybe a video? How about the product I’m selling…

You can see where I’m heading with this, auto DMs on Twitter. Sounds great, but honestly they are annoying. I try to follow almost all the people who follow me, but I’m more choosy now than I have been in the past. Why? I’m getting sick and tired of those DM pitch messages.

Don’t get me wrong, sending me a DM later that I can tell is more personal is cool. It’s a nice touch.

I posed this question to my Twitter followers this morning and got these replies:

That’s a pretty resounding: “they suck” response. Now I repeated the question and specifically asking my followers who do send out these autoDM what value they got out of them. Heck they could even DM me with their answer.

No takers.

This leads me to again wonder, why do it?

Are people clicking those links? Friending on Facebook? Signing up for newsletters?

I really want to know. I help folks with using Twitter for business, etc and if it does work then I can recommend it.

Yes, I can see how it could be useful.

“Thanks for the follow. Don’t forget to watch the live stream of the event” (for an event account, clearly).

“Thanks for the follow. Don’t forget our fundraising party…”

But just the hi and thanks?

But just hi and thanks? Not so much.

Bottom line: do you unfollow people who send autoDMs? Are you more careful following because you don’t want to get an autoDM? Do you use autoDMs and have found success with them?

Leave your answer below…

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Remember when the web was young and we were all really trusting of usernames and IDs? I remember being on a woodworkers email list or news group and someone had the name/ID “Norm Abrams”. People were all excited to think they were getting email from Norm of New Yankee Workshop. Yeah, well it wasn’t him.

Things haven’t really changed have they? When someone has the ID “trishussey” you expect it to be me, right? The thing is that it isn’t always, especially where celebrities and brands are involved.

Gillian Shaw of the Vancouver Sun wrote a pretty telling piece this week about big companies–like major banks–not even aware of people using their name on Twitter.

Stiennon said already there has been a rush to claim all one- and two-letter Twitter IDs, similar to the early rush on dot-com names. A search of other Canadian banks on Twitter shows that @BMO leads to Twitter user Brian Moffatt.

At PricewaterhouseCoopers, global CIO Michael Calyniuk, said he is looking into a Twitter site with the ID PWC, which he isn’t aware of the company having.

“We are doing this from a security standpoint,” he said. “PWC is trademarked.”

The appearance of @scotiabank on Twitter has that bank trying to get the name — which appears complete with the bank’s logo — off the Twitter site.

“I personally wasn’t aware of it,” said Frank Switzer, director of public affairs at Scotiabank. “We’ll investigate and take the appropriate action.”

[From Web world’s all a-Twitter about seizing big corporate names]

Twitter is just one place you have to reserve your name. StumbleUpon, Digg, Del.icio.us … the list goes on. Have you made sure that your name isn’t taken by someone else?

I go and sign up for as many social media services almost right away not always to try them, but just to reserve my name space.

Are you check? Is your company check?

Yeah you might want to.

Like now.

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Hi, I’m Tris and I’m addicted to Twitter…

I think it’s the fact that the messages are short and the flow of information is so fast that I just enjoy it. Rapid-fire, simultaneous discussions with tons of people at once (yeah “tons” isn’t terribly exact, I know). Twitter fills a niche between email and IM. Listservs and forums.

I’m certainly not going to be on the “Twitter solves all the world’s problems” bandwagon, but I do see it as something that works really well right now.

For example, as news of the F-18 crashing in San Diego was breaking, I caught a tweet from Rick Sanchez of CNN asking if there were people on the ground there (presumably to feed CNN with info). Could we really have imagined that even a year ago?

Scoble, though, has a beef with Twitter and Facebook that I don’t agree with. Scoble hates Twitter DMs and Facebook email, frankly I agree with the Facebook part. If you want me to ignore you message, send it via Facebook. On the other hand you want me to answer as fast as I can, DM me.

DMs are the “flash action message” of the Net to me. I get them, read them, and deal with them. Heck it’s only 140 characters. Yes, as Scoble points out, sometimes you need more space so I reply back with email me at… I also think the system where you can’t DM someone who doesn’t follow you but you follow them is kinda silly. Yes it does have a nice bit of protection in there, maybe a warning when sending “You aren’t following this person so they can’t DM back..” would be nice.

Ross Mayfield doesn’t agree with Scoble on the DM question either, but goes into the area of reciprocity that I don’t agree with, per se. Ross sees that replying is optional in Twitter, that you don’t have to follow back or respond to every @reply (could be misinterpreting him though on that point), I agree with not always following back (I don’t, but follow back most) however I try to reply to all @ replies when I see them.

Which brings me to the point of the post: where does Twitter fit into your communication stream? Is it a vital info point? Nice distraction once and a while? Just plain annoying?

Interestingly enough, FriendFeed still doesn’t hit my radar often. Now if TweetDeck had FriendFeed in it, I’d probably interact with it more. Scoble’s post on FriendFeed, I can’t figure out if he’s trying to be ironic or serious. Kinda like, no don’t blog unless you don’t want to earn money or express yourself.

Shrug.

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