Why I don't try to game Twitter: Because the only people I want following me are people who want to follow me. Tricks to get people to follow you are a waste of time. The followers you get that way are worthless. That's why I don't folllow-spam, or ask for followers, or trim my tweets to 120 characters for easy retweeting, or such nonsense. (via...
I don't auto follow either and I reserve the right to unfollow and respect everyone's right to do the same if my tweets are not of interest to them. (Applause!) in total agreement.
- Pearletta Wilson
i would make Twitter spit out a random Zen koan on page load.
- Karim
I don't see the issue with the current question. For certain users, it's still applicable. They should perhaps consider adding a second question though, with answers to each aggregated into separate streams. That way, you know what you're getting.
- TheLovableRogue
"What are you thinking?" is being push by @jayrosen from NYU. He has dubbed it "mindcasting".
- Meryn Stol
Over on friendfeed the question is "what would you like to talk about?"
- Robert Scoble
"<-- put shit in here" or better yet, remove the text and don't replace it with anything!
- alphaxion
I talk about pills or solutions to people's challenges. Fill a need. Ask "How can I help?"
- Shane Gibson
Thinking about it though, is the question even that relevant? People will continue to write about whatever they want regardless of how the question is phrased.
- TheLovableRogue
"what can you share that is valuable to your community right now?"
- Jason Peck
I like Robert's response. Rather than simply talking about "I'm brushing my teeth", it should be about "what would you like to talk about?". It's all about conversation.
- Kenneth
Why is it all about conversation? My mom likes my status updates.
- Daniel J. Pritchett
from IM
What are you thinking? seems to be the obvious one.
- Steve Lynch
from twhirl
The keyword is share. It needs be something like 'What would you like to share?' Ideally, though, I think Twitter should randomize 5-10 different questions (share/say/discuss/something about photos, etc), or run them sequentially each time the user logs in, so they get the full idea of what you can do on the service. And one of them should still be 'What are you doing?', as not every tweet can be a Pulitzer prize-winner.
- Shéa Bennett
twitter is different things for different users..I dont think we need guidelines for it.
- Samuel Lewis
from twhirl
Daniel - I personally think it should be about conversation because I think that it would be great to have more dialog rather than one-sided conversation. Your mom may like that your status updates but that's for Facebook, not for Twitter.
- Kenneth
For proper conversation we need one-click access to threaded tweets. I blogged about this essential feature, and some others I'd like to see, earlier today. http://twittercism.com/five-fe...
- Shéa Bennett
what's wrong w. someone using Twitter to say what they are doing? I mean I see where you are coming from that if everyone always did this type of tweet it would get old really reaaally quick-LOL. but don't you think the democracy, if you will, of being able to say whatever u want-in 140 char. is what makes Twitter so beautiful?
- Benin Brown
from fftogo
Yes, there's always a place for the inane, and of course the definition of what that means is a very relative observation. Believe me, lots of folk think tech is inane. *Lots*. :)
- Shéa Bennett
"What's on your mind?". It fits if you are posting a link or trying to have a conversation. *edit* of course, since I haven't used facebook on anything other than my blackberry in a long time, I completely forgot that was what they asked. oops :)
- Matt Thompson
from fftogo
'What have you done for others' might be cool?
- Nicholas Chase
Cracked up on Shéamus saying inane is very relative... you know my family???
- Jim Espinoza
I just commented on this earlier today: "Instead of answering Twitter's 'What are you doing?', you should answer 'What am I good at?'"
- Erik K Veland
What about not asking a question, but instead put an instruction - 'Post Your Update Here'? I've had dozens of folks new to Twitter tell me that the reason it took them so long to send their first tweet, was because they weren't clear on how to do it.
- Sharon McPherson
I think the question, although it may be an initial prompt for tweeps, becomes quickly ignored for other tweets. The earliest study on Twitter (a Master's thesis at the London School of Economics and Political Science in late 2007) indicated that less than half the tweets were actually answering that over-arching question. Here is the link to the thesis, if you are interested. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collect...
- enza (aka iVenus)
Some amazing stuff here! Thanks for your thoughts everyone!
- Brian Solis
Let's answer questions that force us to think about the updates we wish to galvanize action, response, connections, learning, et al, such as "what inspires you," "what did you learn today," “who should we pay attention to and why,” "what are we better off for knowing now because we follow you," etc. We need to stop tweeting "at" followers and start listening to the things that help us...
more...
- Brian Solis
Brian, I think that you have some great Ideas there about the Social Web, but getting folks to realize it's a privilege is going to be a tough one to get across. They don't even grasp that concept with Drivers License in California, and you have many, many police folk and a much over used court system reinforcing that idea on a regular basis.
- Brent - Loving Life
"NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Sometime in 2007, the recent grads that made up the core of Facebook came to a doleful realization: Yup, mom and all her friends are on Facebook. The following year it got worse: The once-exclusive club of the young was completely infiltrated by colleagues, bosses, neighbors and others who might not be amused when little Johnny gets tagged in a photo getting totally ripped with his pals."
- Seth Greenblatt
from Bookmarklet
Not sure that Bebo is really there for the longer term as it's users are really youngsters who then migrate onto Facebook - in my experience!
- Karen Purves
Is it just me or do MySpace pages all tend to be a chaotic mess? Even more so than Facebook. I've never felt the urge to join MySpace, but I got an invite the other day and am wondering whether it's worth it. What value does MySpace have to offer that I'm not already getting here and elsewhere?
I agree, Myspace can come across as a mess but what made it so popular was indeed that 'mess'. By letting users personalise so many aspects of the page Myspace gave users a freedom they didn't really have anywhere else short of creating their own websites - it would seem though that this 'mess' is what caused them to lose ground to Facebook though, which proved that userbility was more important than the re-skining your own page
- Sam Russell
Don't get me started on the HTML code and the Javascript and the external Flash apps...
- Jorge Escobar
Ah. So back in the "early" days, people enjoyed the freedom to decorate their space, but didn't maybe know what they wanted to do with it exactly. Then as social networking has matured, people have started moving over to places that just give them what they really want, even if it's with less flexibility. Fair assessment?
- Grey Drane
I liked the simplicity of Twitter. The other similar services all try to tack on way too many bells-and-whistles. Simple is good. And Twitter integrates with FriendFeed so nicely ...
- cerement
I think microblogging is here to stay. The community size will likely to grow, but there will be more consumers than producers.
- Harry Chen
Twitter will grow, but I doubt it will become mainstream. The average person will be more inclined to use social network status updates than a dedicated microblogging service.
- grag
Ben, Good question and I wasn't quite sure what to think. After doing a few quick searches it appears that Twitter has 2 million users (http://twitterfacts.blogspot.com/2008...) while Technorati is tracking 112 million blogs (http://technorati.com/about/). So, that is only 2%. Reading those stats makes me think, IMO, that microblogging will expand to at least 8% (or 9 million total users.)
- Czar
I also think it is here to stay. These services create a whole different angle of social networking
- Neal Jansons
I don't know how viable it will be on Twitter, but Plurk is gaining fast in popularity because of the simple fact that you can have comments like this (friendfeed). With Plurk you can know instantly if your announcement "registers" with the audience. And there is instant feedback.
- Telemill
I think what we all need to realize is that Twitter is not about microblogging (broadcasting yourself), it is about conversation (same as FriendFeed where conversation is even easier which explains its rapid growth). And I think in a year from now we will only see this trend sharpen: people will stick to the services that allow for a more efficient conversation instead of pushing your ideas and thoughts to people without expecting anything in return.
- Svetlana Gladkova
I disagree, I think micro-blogging (broadcast) greatly differ from the bi-directional / conversation we see here in FriendFeed and blogs. So the twitter's and IM products are here to stay. They have a unique and distinct user base.
- Susan Beebe
I think instant messaging is the target of micro blogging (and I agree with Svetlana when she says Twitter is about conversation)
- Romain Péchard
from twhirl
I just wrote a blog post partly connected to this. I think microblogging will survive - but not in and of itself. I think it will survive in concert with other services that integrate with it. It seems that everything is becoming more inclusive - therefore services that try to cause divergent behaviour (e.g. commenting directly on blog posts within the blogs) will probably fail. It's exciting to be around while this is shaking out though...
- Jonathan Beckett
I don't think of microblogs as replacements for traditional blogs, to me they're human-readable endpoints for publishing data feeds.
- Andy Murdoch
I think there's a benefit to microblogging - smaller attention spans. I don't anticipate its near death as people start to multitask more often and find that saying less means more.
- Tamar Weinberg
I think it's a little early to predict the death of microblogging. It's only now just starting to pick up speed.
- David Cohn
@Susan: I have never meant to predict Twitter would die - it's just that I don't see anyone values microblogging in itself - people tend more to use it as a conversational tool which has 2 part involved at least. So I don't care about Twitter as a microblogging platform, I care about it as a social network where lots of people I find interesting discuss things (same and even better goes to FriendFeed).
- Svetlana Gladkova
from twhirl
I don't think microblogging will die, but I do think it's telling that this conversation isn't also on Twitter. And if Twitter is about conversation, then FF is more Twitterish than Twitter. It's easier to follow a conversation here, and thus easier to converse.
- Brian Carter
@Stuart Forsyth agreed. microblogging is trending in the direction of other "micro interactions" - speed, efficiency, brevity - for better or worse.
- Dean Terry
I don't think microblogging will replace blogging, anymore than blogs replace books or TV replaced movies- I realize they are on different platforms, but take the metaphor- there are different media of different lengths for different purposes- some blog posts give me detail I need that I can't get on Twitter or FF; some are so long I print them out- some are too long and I never get around to finishing them- but I read books that are longer in less than a week...
- Brian Carter
I think micro blogging in part was just permission to create content that was more immediate and unfinished - with the idea that we create together. And it certainly will continue and grow.
- Tony
microblogging is here to stay, especially plurk where you can have dozens of simultaneous conversations. twitter is old fashioned, it's hard to go back and see what you've missed...
- Darren Daz Cox
A growing number of enterprises are building communities where their customers are; on Facebook. Starting to sense that we're in the early stages of a paradigm shift. Will the corporate website of the future be a Facebook app? Will Facebook become "the Internet" for most users or will it become the next AOL? Facebook reminds me a lot of AOL in the early days. Huge, passionate, and loyal community. We all know how AOL ended up...
- Tom Wentworth
The difference is, facebook is pretty open and facebook has the lessons of AOL to go on. If they try and close up, people will hammer on them. I think it's fairly clear that AOL got hurt from being the first. The times they HAVE A changed.
- Laurent Courtines
from twhirl
Summize's mission is to search & discover the topics and attitudes expressed within online conversations. Our home page currently features realtime conversations on Twitter. Also check out Summize Labs for prototypes that harness conversations within blog.
- Faizar
From the page: ""Cut through the fog of fear by listening to your intuition and discover your true passions," he says. "Trust that by following your passions, people, places, things and circumstances will appear almost magically to supply you with what you need.""
- Chris Garrett