Life Around the Twitter Cooler

I’ve been on Twitter, the web 2.0, social media, virtual watercooler since June 2007, although it’s only in the last few weeks that I’ve become particularly active and have gathered more than 740 followers to whom I’ve tweeted more than 3000 times (at the time of writing).

I use twitterfeed to tweet the headlines from my blogs and ping.fm for tweeting other interesting links, oh and do some straight tweets on the twitter site itself, of course. I’ve not yet used SMS on my cell to tweet. Using ping.fm means I can simultaneously add those particular tweets to my delicious bookmarks and send a message to my plurk feed, or any other social media site for that matter. Prior to Winterval, pinging with ping.fm had helped me boost my Plurk karma to almost 60, although it dropped because of reduced holiday activity and is only now picking up again.

I like to occasionally use tweetdeck to organize my friends and groups on twitter, it makes retweeting simpler, but I don’t use it exclusively. Twitter search is limited, but useful, whereas Tweetscan provides a few more search options for keeping track of conversations around the virtual watercooler.

It’s important to back up, and Tweetake lets you do that with your followers, friends, and tweets. Tweetstats does what it says on the tin, while twitterholic gives you all sorts of information, such as revealing that sciencebase is now #29 in the UK twitterhood.

All of this, however, brings me to an interesting point raised by my good friend Urs Gattiker of ComMetrics before Winterval. By the way, ComMetrics do social media analysis, although they’re still not using keyword-enhanced permalinks for their blog for some strange reason. Anyway, Urs suggests that I tweet too much! Well, I talk too much too, a fact anyone who knows me in First Life will vouch for. At New Year he direct messaged me to ask whether my recent reduced activity was part of a new strategy on twitter, no, I told him, just me being offline for the holidays!

This is what Urs had to say:

I am trying to figure many things out with Twitter including how I should use it. I love your science blog and I am a subscriber to that. But, I have been following you on Twitter but I can no longer keep track of it, it is simply too much for me 20-40 posts each day and a lot are @username where I cannot even figure out what was said by the user to you to make sense of it all.

It’s an interesting point he makes and maybe I should use the “DM” (direct message) option more frequently to hide the more esoteric responses. The trouble with using “DM” too much is that there may be several lurkers following a conversation who would then lose the thread if it went underground or worse you, as a tweeter, would become less visible in the twitterverse. Now, none of that really matters, but it does mean that people are less likely to find you on twitter if you’re too quiet and I like talking, so why shouldn’t I?

Also, in defense of prodigious tweeting, I am in no way the most prolific of tweeps, some of the people I follow tweet at least twice as much each day, sometimes in bursts of a dozen or more tweets. Moreover, I don’t tweet about what time I woke up, whether I’m taking a shower and what I’m planning for supper, almost all my tweets are about science and technology, news and views.

The point I’m trying to make is that Twitter is more like the chat one hears around the watercooler than a formal symposium. Hundreds of people come and go all day long and into the night. Dozens of parallel conversations are interwoven sometimes confusingly. The best way to cope is to simply ignore the noise, especially if it’s noise “@someoneelse”. Instead, focus on the golden nuggets of information, the insightful remarks on a topic of interest, and the link to useful external resources, that’s the way to enjoy the experience. Last thing any twitterer should do is to keep their beak shut!