Twitter

Or how to detect if someone is worth following in 3 seconds flat.

We've all been there. You find yourself on someone's twitter page. Someone you're not currently following. You've spent too much time on twitter that day already, so you leave it up to your gut to figure out. In a matter of seconds, you'll determine if you want to follow this person or not. You glance at their tweets. Maybe you don't even read more than 100 characters total. Maybe you don't even focus your eyes on the text. But in the end, you'll either hit that Follow button or you'll navigate away from the page.

Sound familiar? Perhaps you take a little bit more care when choosing who to follow. However....

You have to assume that whoever's looking at your twitter feed is in this situation. It's a fast-paced community. The adage of not judging a book by its cover gets thrown to the wayside all too often. Here are some tips that can be a point in either column.

1. All @ Replies. Yes, connecting with people on twitter is what it's all about. However if the entirety of your contribution is messages to someone else, it's not going to be an asset to my twitter feed, especially if they're each mid-twitter conversation snippets - too many lols (or variants thereof) as whole tweets is not a good thing. Short responses are good, but having them comprise all your tweets is just too much.

Exception: If the person is magnet for followers and has accrued thousands, then it's understandable that they could have several personal messages in a row. It's actually commendable that they take the time to go through their @ Replies and answering them. In this case, I usually take a few extra seconds to navigate to their second and third pages in order to get a good cross-section of what they are contributing on their own

2. NO @ Replies. This is broadcasting that your twitter presence is a one way street. No matter what someone may respond to you, you're not participating in the communal conversation.

Exception: N00bs. They just started out and/or are following only a few people. Can't fault them for that.

3. All less than 50 characters. Continual partial attention services like twitter and status updates get a bad rap for having too much inconsequential data. I don't need to know how you wish you had gotten more sleep, or hear about it in both the night and morning, or hear the same gripe on repeat every night. Yes, brevity is wit, and if everyone were like hodgman this wouldn't be an issue. A cursory glance at the tweets will reveal this. Complaining about the weather? Breakfast? DMV lines? Time to move on.

4. Bots. Very easy to spot. Are all entries the first 100 characters of a headline followed by a tinyurl link. Determining if I want a bot in my feed is all about one thing: frequency. Are they writing tweets every minute? I've hit UNFOLLOW on a good share of these feeds after they completely dominated my feed.
   Frequency is the first test. If I know it be too large of a presence in my feed, I don't want it in there regardless of how much I may like the source. If it's a source I care about that has that many updates, I'll most likely navigate to the site on my own to get it all at once. After frequency, it's just a question of how much you respect the source. I typically don't add bots that I just stumble on; I have to know the source first.

Strong exception: A feed that is partially a bot and partially a person. This tells me that Yes, the source has an automatic twitter service, but it also has someone manning the controls. This means that there is an opportunity for dialog. And what's more, this person is most likely a fullly dedicated resource to handle the source's day-to-day internet presence, if not specifically social media or even just twitter. Take-away: they're ready to listen.

5. Re-tweets / description + link. A big plus. You're taking what you find interesting and spreading it to a new group of users - about the best display of the twitter engine chugging. I'll gladly eschew the "No @ replies" rule if the user is committed to spreading informative links. Great example: elijahmanor.

6. Informative/relevant tweets in this small sample set? That said, don't necessarily write someone off if their most recent tweets cause a lightbulb to go off in your head or fireworks in your heart. You're not judging if each and every tweet of theirs will change your life but if their contribution will add to the value of your personal feed. You're like a college basketball scout: it's not "are they of value right now, given this small sample set?", but "Based on the cues I'm gathering, do they have the potentional to add value?"

Now take a minute to look at your twitter feed. What does it say about you?

We're three months into Into the Mantle activity on Twitter, and, already, the writing is on the wall. Id Est, Twitter can be used as a communications tool for our purposes in exploding certain topics and really getting to the meat of subjects and ideas directly with other responsive, and, occasionally, like-minded users.

The story so far: 218 updates since October 9th, 2008. That's ten twitter pages of updates from us. We're now following 393 while being followed (however scrupulously) by 179.

First Impressions? Twitter is developing into an environs where a user may create a microcosm of socialization entirely tailored to their tastes. News feeds, celebrities, and pop culture news sources all comingle and can be chosen to enhance this Web 2.0 room of one's own (Insert obvious cautionary reference to the dangers of an insular lifestyle and narrow scope on a person's good judgement [Try Silent Running on for size?])

Think of it as a pinball game. The Twitter universe is the pinball playing field, and you're the ball. You plunge headfirst into activity, whether using the popular search.twitter.com feature to find discussion activity, or simply check out who from your email addressbook has already begun the game. You add some friends or colleagues to start rolling. Maybe you tag someone with a greeting, or brush against a favorite celebrity blogger like hitting a bumper just long enough to take in a few details. But, because of the nature of the streamlined interface and character limit, you're off again in another direction just as quickly. Retweets and links are the flippers, sending you right back into the mix. You discover someone follows you, and you spend some time in ball lock, reading their past tweets and finding out more.

That's usually what happens in ball lock, you familiarize yourself with your new followers, and pretty soon you're in a multiball situation.

As exciting as it can be to successfully interact on Twitter, there is also the dread that occurs when the ball launches square in the middle of the board and you know it's just going to drop straight inbetween the flippers, resulting in a lost ball. The twitter equivalent? The dreaded unfollow.

We have noticed that our follow/follower numbers fluctuate, as we often find a user we follow to be sometimes overzealous in the frequency of their tweets [many would unfollow simply because of this, but there scripts available to filter out those you may not want to offend with an unfollow], just as those who follow us out of curiosity or interest in one topic we address may be dismayed that we move onto others, and
this may irk some into choosing to unfollow.

We've talked about our little Twitter victories on our podcast, in a segment called Twitteraction. The short yet charming exchanges, a knowing nod from a stranger, mutual pleasure in a common interest. Lately, Blake's Lost write-ups have been all the rage on the Twitterverse, and we've discovered a LOT of cool folks just by addressing some of the ideas from the show. Of course, we've had some less than stellar interactions with some (very few) who would rather spew poorly formed opinions as facts without the necessary bed of knowledge to support their statements. In those rare cases, it begins to feel like you are freefloating in space, in someone else's Mars Attacks pinball game.

Ever feel like you're inside someone else's game?

~dm