The Industry Review

Wow, again I write about Twitter. This is becoming a Twitter blog. Well, what can I say – I like Twitter, and spend a large portion of my time there – naturally it’s something I think a lot about. Next post won’t be about Twitter (my promise to myself).

 
Although I’ve seen articles that list useful Twitter sites (and/or tools), I find that many of them don’t have a lot of value. Consequently, I thought I’ll share my own list, which I’ve created for my own usage.

 

Tools:

I only use a single tool, TweetDeck, which is a fantastic tool that allows you to do everything the web interface allows you, but much much more. Phrased differently: the web interface is not really practical, you need something like TweetDeck to really be able to benefit from Twitter if you have more than a few dozen followers. What I particularly like is the ability to create ‘columns’ where only certain friends, or certain search terms appear – though you can still see the Twitter timeline if you want. As a result, it allows you to focus on what you find interesting, while still benefiting from the whole.

 
There are many free & paid Twitter tools, but I don’t find them useful (i.e. TwitterLocal, etc)

 

Sites:

1. Search.Twitter.com: a must. Twitter’s internal search engine. Brings you discussions that occurred in the past few seconds. Hey Google, can you do that?
   
    

2. Friend or follow: shows you the people you follow but haven’t returned your follow, and the opposite as well (the site refers to them as ‘fans’). Very useful if you like to get followed in return for following someone.
   
    

3. Backupmy.net: one of my favorites. Twitter only backs up your last 3,000 tweets. However, if you write a lot of interesting tweets, have multiple conversations you’d like to keep, or just like having your tweets stored, this site allows you to do this for free. I downloaded all my tweets and it was pretty amusing to see my first tweet back in March… I was so young and naive.
   
    

4. Twitter grader: I actually thought of dedicating an entire post to this site. This is a ‘grading site’ of sorts for Twitter users. Basically, based on certain factors (number of followers, number of tweets, number of retweets, number of recent tweets, etc) it assigns each user a score. Moreover, it allows you to see the global top users, top users in your country, state, and city. I think their algorithm is significantly flawed and has multiple problems. However, it seems to be popular, so I occasionally check myself as well. I didn’t write the post about this because I suspect this may be a post that only interests me (.. I am an ex-computer scientist after all, so algorithms still appeal to me). If there’s anyone interested, I’ll be more than happy to write why I think this site’s algorithm is so wrong. One day I’ll create a site that will really enable ‘measuring’ individual users.
   
    

5. Twitoria: allows you to find users that haven’t updated their pages for a given amount of time. If they’re not your personal friends, you may want to remove them from your list.
   
    

6. My Tweet Space: fantastic tool for creating Twitter backgrounds. Highly recommend, and many thanks for the good folks over there that allow us to use it for free.
   
    

7. Twitterfeed: allows you to feed your blog directly into Twitter. Some WP plugins allow you to do that as well, but this is another way. Although I don’t currently use it, I intend to use it in the very near future.
   
    

8. Future Tweets: allows you to schedule future tweets. I’ve only used it once and it seemed kind of cool, but didn’t really feel the need to use it since then. Maybe I’ll use it again in the future.
   
    

9. Topsy: a search engine for tweets – allows you to find out how many times a tweet has been retweeted. Pretty cool.
   
    

10. Stuff to Tweet: shows you the coolest tweets. Can’t say I’ve really used it, though at times it’s interesting to see what’s popular.
    
     

11. Revtwt: Although I’ve not used this myself, I think it’s fair that I include it just because many people would find it interesting. In short, the site allows you to make money from your tweets. I don’t think a lot of money, but if you have many followers, this can accumulate to a respectable amount, I hear.

 
Please let me know if you think I’ve missed an important Twitter site or tool. There are several more in my list I don’t find that useful, but I discover new ones almost on a daily basis.

Although I am a big proponent of gaining Twitter followers naturally, through interaction, without using any tools (read my previous post on gaining Twitter followers for free), lately I feel I’ve stumbled into – how shall I call it – a barrier of sorts.

 
Up until now I have been heavily using Twitter (as those who follow me clearly know), and I would say gained roughly between 80-100 followers every day I spent on Twitter. Often I would refresh my screen, and within minutes 1 or 2 new followers would appear.

 
However, this changed once I passed 2,000 followers. I was doing my own thing (if anything, perhaps even used Twitter more heavily), but suddenly I was not gaining more than 25 followers per day. This has been going on for roughly a week. Although I wish I could explain it by the fact there’s a labor day weekend here in the US (and overall, I see a decreased number of visitors in many of my sites), this seems too sharp a transition to be a coincidence.

 
Perhaps I need to explain again my ‘strategy’ (if it can be called one) for gaining followers. I simply talk to people. I RT people. I send articles and links I find interesting. And people follow me. I am not doing the ‘other’ strategy, that is, follow 500 people, and weed out the 2/3 that haven’t followed me back, follow another 500 people, and repeat the process. I know this works, but – well, it just didn’t seem to be necessary. Of course I don’t mean to say I’m not following anyone on my own – that is far from the truth, but that number is pretty small (20 people a day?).

 
Since I am primarily relying on people following me, which is what I call interaction, and this interaction hasn’t changed, it appears to me that there is another factor involved here.

 
At the moment I’m not entirely sure what it is. I do have a guess though. I’ve been told by a source I consider reliable that once a user has 2,000 followers, he can only follow 10% of his number of followers per day (if you know for a fact this is incorrect, please let me know). Clearly, this would significantly impact people doing the ‘other’ strategy. However, I’ve never even gone close to this limit. That being said, I would not be surprised if some of the automation tools take this into consideration and bias their auto-follow algorithms towards people with fewer than 2,000 followers since they are more likely to follow back. In other words, if you follow someone with 1,000 followers, he is much more likely to auto-follow you back (because he’s not limited), however, if you follow someone with 2,001 followers, the chances of him following you back drop because he’s subject to the 10% limit.

 
Does this make sense? I cannot think of any other way to explain it (besides labor day). If this is true then it heavily weakens my theory of interaction being such an important key element of Twitter, but rather reduces it to being a weaker, secondary force that can “push” you to some degree, but by itself, is insufficient. If this is the case, then Twitter should re-engineer some of their algorithms (i.e. I don’t think it makes sense for someone without any tweets and a single follower to follow 1,000 people), as clearly that is not their goal.

 
If you have any opinion on what I wrote, by all means, please let me know.

 
p.s. I went through the ‘top Twitterers’ list (or whatever it’s called) in the US and was quite disturbed by the number of people there I believe are bots (or semi-bots – that is, bots that are occasionally controlled by a human). Clearly their strategy is extremely effective. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, read my previous post. Just reinforces what I suspected before.

 
p.p.s. one question I’ve been asked online is “Why do you care about followers?”. Why? Well, it’s nice having a greater audience. More followers means more people noticing my blog. At the moment I would say 90% of the visitors to my blog come through Twitter – and my blog is one of my most popular websites! Therefore, it means more people reading what I write. Means more people responding and interacting with me. Means more friends I get to meet. Maybe if I had one million followers I would say “Jeez, I can’t handle this noise”, but at this point I’m nowhere even close to my limit in handling my list. There are about 40-50 people who I closely monitor, and whenever there’s a moment which these people aren’t writing anything (which is 95% of the time), I simply look into the Twitter Timeline and look for interesting tweets, or do a search for interesting tweets. I think that’s the entire point in being in Twitter.

This post was surprisingly hard to phrase exactly the way I wanted to. In fact, it took me three days to write, and during this time an event happened which directly related to what I was writing.

 
Before I begin, I want to quickly compare Facebook and Twitter.

 
Facebook: you have a list of friends, who see your status messages which you can frequently change, you can share with them photos, videos, email, a million applications & games, and even chat. You’re limited to 5,000 friends.

 
Twitter: you have a list of friends, who can see your status message you can frequently change, but are limited to 140 characters. You can send email, but again, are limited to 140 characters. You can see status of groups using the # tag (i.e. #quotes). You can resend other people’s status (Retweeting) which will result in your followers seeing this message. You’re not limited to a maximum number of friends.

 
I’ll admit that a few months ago Twitter seemed to me like a stripped down version of Facebook. Why would I need Twitter if I have Facebook? I mean, everything I can do with Twitter, I can do with Facebook, only better, right? That’s a view that most of my friends on Facebook seem to have. And like I said, until recently, so did I.

 
But oh, how wrong was I. If you’re a Twitter user that that follows at least 200 users you probably know what I mean. If not, please read on.

 
Once I started using Twitter more seriously I realized that Twitter and Facebook, although on the surface seem like two incredibly similar applications, are in fact completely different creatures. The difference is simple. In my opinion – and some readers may disagree – Twitter is not so much a social network, as much as a cross between a gigantic chat room and a search engine. Whereas Facebook is, well, a straightforward social network. Each is great in its own way – I don’t mean to imply one is better than the other, they just have different usages.

 
The way I see things, in Facebook the point is really staying in close contact with your friends. Seeing pictures of their kids. Getting a general update of what they do in their lives. All relatively slow paced. In Facebook changing your status more than, say, 5 times a day is almost considered impolite, whereas in Twitter some people change their status hundreds of times a day (which would be completely unacceptable in Facebook – I think they even warn you if you do this).

 
But that is the entire point! In Twitter the point is ultra-fast conversations between individuals and groups of people. The 140 limit is intentional: it (correctly) assumes that our attention span is becoming shorter, and consequently, enforces brevity – short and precise messages. In Twitter you can send a message to all your followers (which could be more than a million, i.e. @Mashable), or send a message to followers of a group, which are marked by the # symbol. So sending a message to #quotes will result in everyone checking this list getting the message.

 
In twitter, Retweeting is a large part of the culture: sharing something with everyone that you got. Or reinforcing that a tweet you saw by Retweeting it – kind of like saying “I also think this is good”. If I tweet something, and Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk) with his 3,270,965 followers decides to retweet it, then these 3 million twitter users will see it. That’s a huge difference between Facebook and Twitter.

 
But the biggest difference of all is essentially that of Twitter being a Search Engine. I only got this point when I heard Jay Berkowitz (@JayBerkowitz)’s excellent seminar. In Google, if you’re lucky, a site is indexed in 1-3 days. Sometimes sites aren’t indexed for months, and if you have a doubt, check out my own site: www.sciportal.com, kind of a website I use for testing various things (and the first domain I owned for commercial applications). It hasn’t been indexed since June 20th despite repeated attempts to force Google to index it using various methods.

 
So suppose I want to ask someone whether the new movie, District 9, is any good. All I need to do is go to search.twitter.com and search for ‘district 9’, and I will find hundreds of people who tweeted about it in the last 10 seconds. Can you do that in Facebook? Can you do that in Google? Most definitely not.

 
Consequently, attempting to compare Facebook and Twitter without considering all these facts is like comparing oranges and apples. It’s simply not the same thing and not even close.

 
The frustrating thing is that many Facebook users – again, yours truly was like this before – join Twitter and expect the Facebook experience. They are annoyed by the vast number of messages. Admittedly, it can and is overwhelming at first, and that’s why tools such as TweetDeck exist – to create order in the chaotic mess that the Twitter timeline is.

 
Today, a friend of mine “diplomatically” complained that I’m sending too many tweets and this is “noise” in his opinion. I “diplomatically” replied “too bad, that’s how Twitter works, maybe you should stick to Facebook if that’s how you feel”. He thought I was being sarcastic, but I was not. I explained him that what he sees as noise is what I consider a wealth of opportunity to meet people, to hear a random smart quote I can retweet, to get the occasional relevant article that I would’ve never seen otherwise. To meet new friends. And that to me, this is not noise at all, but the entire point of Twitter. I also pointed out that I follow more than 20 times the number of people he does (he follows 50 people, I follow around 1,100), and yet I manage not to be overwhelmed and in fact greatly enjoy the process.

 
His response was to unfollow me. I think he thought I’m trying to mock him, but I genuinely was not. Twitter is about interaction. If you want a silent, nearly static, social network experience, then Facebook really is for you. But if you want the “noise” that Twitter brings, the retweets, the group chats: the #FollowFridays, the #Quotes, the #Google messages – the chaotic mess that is Twitter, then you are going to love it in Twitter.

 
Personally, I love both. So I use Facebook in one way, and Twitter in a completely different way. And that’s how things should be in my opinion.

 
What do you think? In this article in particular I am eager to receive comments. Either way, don’t forget to follow me! 🙂