Whisperings from Whispered Pearls

First, let me explain.

For those out there who aren’t currently on Twitter, don’t use it, don’t know what it does, what purpose it serves, let me explain that I can hardly imagine a life without Twitter. You add people that seem interesting. They add you if you seem interesting. Social etiquette of Twitter has decreed that if someone follows you, you follow them back. To do otherwise has been deemed rude. 

Out of all the social networks, Twitter was one of the ones I couldn’t imagine living without. In short, it is like a real-world IM service WITH the entire world. Kinda like AOL used to be way back in the early days of the Internet. Where you could tell where the sun was setting and rising by who was logging on. There’s England, now the East Coast, now the Midwest people, now the Californians, etc. Its biggest advantage so far, other than keeping those in your network intimately connected to you, is that you hear REAL time news in real time. The last California earthquake was Twittered, and beat AP’s reporting of it by 20 minutes. That, probably, is the reason I’ll continue to stay on it, cause no one else offers that. 

But, and this is a note to budding social networking gurus out there: when you come up with your great next social network, prepare for growth. Structure it into your business plan. And whatever you foresee for growth, multiply that by ten, and do that. Twitter stumbled badly lately when their servers choked from unexpected exponential growth. They also had a problem with bots creeping in and destroying business. Their answer for all of this was to limit the amount of followers a person could have. However, they didn’t tell anyone this. All of a sudden, you just couldn’t add anyone anymore. The first problem (other than being non-communicative, and what the hell is that for a social network? built on people TALKING to each other?) is that finding anyone to communicate your problem to is next to impossible. Hearing back from anyone is absolutely impossible. I’ve even Twittered directly to both of Twitter’s founders, and have heard NOTHING to this date. 

The second problem is that the whole thing is completely arbitrary. While it’s clear to absolutely everyone who uses Twitter that you are required to speak in bites of 140 characters, it is completely unclear exactly how many followers you can have. Or how many you can follow. At this moment, for example, I’d really like to add my sister, who arrived at Twitter after me. According to what they are telling me, I have to delete followers to add more. But how many? I had 3,106 people that I was following when all this transpired. (1,770 are following me.) Do I need to drop 6? 60? 600? Nowhere is this stated. Many have said to me, why do you need 3000 followers anyway? Why do I need 15,000 friends on MySpace? Why do there need to be limits? How many people are in the world? If I want the ability to talk to all of them, shouldn’t I have that ability? Sure, maybe many will only use Twitter to talk to friends and family, but I have a wide social media circle. The depth and beauty of Twitter is in the variety of people you are talking to, in my estimation. 

I have many more thousands who listen regularly to my podcast. What if every one of them wanted to read my Tweets? They probably couldn’t. It would probably max out Twitter’s system. I communicate with many people. People from all areas of the various social networks I belong to. People from many places all over the world. People I know intimately, and people I just met. Rather like life. Why limit that? Twitter saying, well, it’s set up so that you talk in 140 characters, you should be used to restraint, doesn’t really wash when you are talking about growing your business.

The ideal for any social network is to have as many people talking as possible, isn’t it? To say nothing of all the people IN my social network whom I promote (or promoted) Twitter to, on a daily basis. It’s frustrating, it’s counter-productive, and it’s causing me to use and promote Twitter less. I hope you’re happy, Twitter founders. And I’m going to keep writing and blogging about my dissatisfaction as long as these problems go on. That’s how social networks actually work. Who knows? Maybe someone out there will realize what Twitter’s doing wrong and be able to build the next Twitter. You let me follow as many people as I want, I’ll jump over there in a heartbeat. 

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Personal, Social Networks, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.