Anil Dash has been presenting some really interesting information about the results of being on Twitter’s infamous suggested user list. He’s found that while it does drive up your follower count very rapidly, those followers don’t seem to be active in any way, in terms of responding, retweeting, or otherwise interacting with you. And other accounts on the list are confirming his experience. Today he follows up with the logical conclusion, which is that large follower counts are meaningless.
Why is this important? There are around 16,000 people on Twitter claiming to be social media experts, and I doubt that many of them are telling their clients that being on the suggested user list is not an easy route to Twitter success, and that raw follower counts don’t really matter, unless you just want to flex your e-peen.
All that said, you should of course be following rc3dotorg on Twitter.
Top Chef Masters winner Rick Bayless explains what he likes about Twitter:
On Twitter, I can do three things: I share photos of what’s going on in the restaurant (behind the scenes as well as finished dishes I’m really excited about); I share photos of cool food (and food-related things) I find outside my restaurant (markets, restaurants, events either in Chicago or away from home), and I answer some of the questions that are posted to my Twitter account.
Because I love being able to more fully open my world to folks through the Twitter portal and because I love being part of the community Twitter can create, I’ve decided to devote 15 or 20 minutes to it each day. That amount of time is typically what I can find while I’m waiting on a meeting to start or waiting for an elevator or drinking a cup of coffee.
Bayless, who is no doubt incredibly busy running three popular restaurants, writing cook books, and creating a television series on regional Mexican food, seems to have endless energy for answering questions of all kinds for people on Twitter. His output is impressive.
Tyler Cowen on Twitter:
Think of it as Google focused on one time-slice and giving the weight of crowd opinion no more than linear force. If an opinion is more common it will receive more tweets but otherwise your search brings up the splat, ordered by chronology, and thus it is more idiosyncratic than the first Google search page and often in a good way.
What’s interesting to me about Twitter is that it is different things to different people. Some people get lots of value from Twitter search — I hardly use it. But I find Twitter to be invaluable as a place to sound out ideas and keep in touch with people in my network. And I have very good luck seeking advice on Twitter.
I’ve installed the Tweetbacks plugin to try to capture tweets about blog posts as comments. We’ll see how it works out.
The Iranian government (or its supporters) are starting to use Twitter to spread disinformation. ABC News reports on a Twitter user who is retweeting items from their correspondent that he didn’t write. Marc Ambinder’s suggestion that people think like a CIA analyst is worth remembering.
As I’m sure you already know, I’ve created the rc3dotorg Twitter account so that I can let people on Twitter know when I’ve published something. One unfortunate side effect has been that it has complicated my workflow when I write new posts.
Normally I just compose the post in MarsEdit and hit the publish button. I’m sure the process could be greatly simplified, but for two things that complicate the process. The first is that I like to use short URLs that I furnish myself, and the second is that I like to compose the tweets by hand.
I publish this blog using WordPress, and I use the le petite url plugin to create short links. Most of the time I publish updates to Twitter using Tweetie.
So here’s my workflow these days:
The main inconvenience is opening WordPress in the browser once I’ve already gone to the trouble to write the post somewhere else. What I need is a tool that will allow me to access the internally generated short URL and compose a Tweet from MarsEdit that can be published whenever the blog post itself is published.
It’s looking like I’m going to need to write my own WordPress plugin to do exactly what I want. There are a ton of Twitter plugins, I think I’ll just have to find the right one and adapt it to my needs.
More later.
Over the past few months, we’ve seen a stamped of big media figures making their way onto Twitter. During the campaign we had folks like Ana Marie Cox and Slate’s John Dickerson. These days, we have everybody.
I wanted to call out the reporter who I think does the best job of anyone using when it comes to using Twitter — Mark Knoller, the White House correspondent for CBS Radio. If you ever wanted to know what life is like for a White House correspondent, or you want to keep up with what the President is up to on a daily basis, Mark Knoller is your guy.
His Tweets are well written, often funny, and almost universally informative. If you’re interested in politics at all, you should start following him immediately. When people protest that they don’t see the value in Twitter, Knoller should be part of the explanation of why they’re wrong.
Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill on why she tweets:
Second, as his bar graph showed, I tweet an average of 4 to 5 times a day. This has become a welcome discipline for me in Washington. As I am walking to a hearing, or riding the tram over for a vote, I think of what I want to tell the folks at home about my work or life. This, I believe, is a fairly decent way to stay connected. After all, I’m in Washington to work for them and this process reminds me of it several times a day.
The anti-Twitter backlash is stupid, but at least it has given people who enjoy or find value in Twitter a good reason to write smart things about why it’s stupid.
Alex Payne on online technical debate:
In practice, the conversations that are most widely heard in the tech community are full of inaccuracies, manufactured drama, ignorance, and unbridled opinion. In discussing these Internet-spanning debates with non-technical friends, comparisons to Hollywood tabloids come first to mind. It’s a time sink for an industry that should be a shining example of how to use the newest of media for constructive debate.
Tim Bray weighs in citing Sturgeon’s Law — 90% of everything is crap, which works both ways. Yeah, most everything is crap, but a bigger pie leads to more crap, but more non-crap too. A rising tide lifts all boats.
The “Dalai Lama” (aka @ohhdl) on Twitter was a fake. The account has been suspended.
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