On Thursday, a colleague, Rob Cottingham, asked me via Twitter "Are they real people being dropped? Or does Twitter do periodic sweeps for spammers and wipe 'em all at once?" It made wonder what happened to Mr. PharmacyMan who used to follow me on Twitter and seems to no longer be amongst my followers, along with 300 others.
CNET published this article reporting on two reasons why followers are going down. Apparently there was a database glitch where followers were dropped (that was fixed). The other "Twammers" are twitter spammers. Here's the official update from the Twitter Blog and more analysis from Read/Write Web.
In the NpTech FriendFeed Room, Marnie Webb pointed to and commented about this post about the recent Twitter issues, "Why Twitter Must Die." The post talks about how Twitter's loyal fans have stuck around through technical failures (like Fail Whale):
While this looks like simple codependence, Twitter’s users haven’t stuck around through the service’s flailings out of blind loyalty, brand attachment, or gratitude. They’ve hung on for something quite tangible: their commnities.
On Twitter, users create their own communities over time, choosing to follow or be followed by others. This is the secret sauce of social media. Each user’s community is different and unique to the service. In fact, to the user, community is the service.
Earlier this week, I participated as a guest on an NTEN Webinar by John Kenyon and when we discussed Twitter - there were questions about whether it is best to use Twitter as to distribute information about your organization's programs or as a conversation tool. That's a conversation happening in other nonprofit spaces on the Web.
I've analyzed my use of Twitter and its impact on my blog and I have found the latter approach to be far more effective in building an audience for my blog (RSS subscribers) and other efforts. But yet I worry about having a community linked to a platform.
So over the past few months, while I'm still using Twitter, I also do a lot over at FriendFeed. (Alltop recently created the Frienderati - the list of the 100 top users - if you're wondering who to follow) Jeremiah Owyang (who also wrote about the Twitter dropping followers issues) shared an insight about his own Twitter/FriendFeed patterns.
If you’re creating, or critiquing a lot of social content on the web (or are a creator/critic/collector/joiner), you’ve probably noticed that it’s disjointed – content is spread all over the place. If you are regularly creating, rating, ranking content on more than 5 social websites, you should also consider aggregating all of that on Friendfeed.
He goes on to point out the conversational or discussion orientation at FriendFeed -- the commenting on threads and rooms.
I've really been enjoying the FriendFeed NpTech Room (thanks Jcolman). Right now the noise level is lower than Twitter and there is more conversation around the intentional items shared. I'm also finding a few other rooms related to my interest of value.
As Chris Baskind points out in his post about Twitter, platform, and community:
There are plenty of great alternatives to Twitter these days, and more in the pipeline. Move your communities over. Create new ones. If you’re on more than one platform, all the better. But clinging to Twitter’s smoking ruin is both servile and counterproductive. You and your community deserve better. Our future communities on other services deserve better. Twitter must die.
Are you investing in community building on Twitter alternatives? Why or why not?
Beth,
I think that we have to join and engage in many communities on the web -- just like we do in real life. There will be overlaps, sure, and I don't think it's just about importing one group of friends from service to service. I think it's about finding the people who are active users in your topic areas on a given service (active twitters may be different from active photographers and so on) and then engaging in them.
This isn't just about platform failure it's also about getting diversity into our communities and providing people with multiple entry points for those communities.
I think that friendfeed can be a way of aggregating your community activity but it may not be a way of aggregating your community. I'm not sure that we have that.
Posted by: marnie webb | July 26, 2008 at 07:31 AM