This twitter WTF??

A friend of mine has been on twitter in the past and didn't use it much. Recently, he opened a new account and has been thinking of using it more and letting Face book cool on the back burner a bit---

So today he sends me this e-mail

"So today I open my Gmail and I have about 20 new people following me on twitter. I open one and its someone from Malaysia. All their posts are in Malaysian, or whatever they speak. So I click block. Then I go back to my email. ALL of the new followers are from other countries and none of their posts are in English. I blocked them all.  Just opened my email, there are MORE, followers from other countries. WTF"?

Here was my response: 

There is no need to "block" people, if someone wants to follow you, let them, it is like someone reading your blog, there is no urgency to reach less people, unless you are running a secret society. There are tons of people out there who will follow you with the only expectation that you will follow them back. They just want to be able to say "Hey look at me I got 25,000 followers in 3 months'! Uh ..whatever. The giveaway is somebody who say for instance  sells bridal gowns, and that is all they tweet about, suddenly out of the blue they are following you, The odds are they want you to follow them back. There are actually software programs that do this digital phishing. If after a week or so if you don't follow back they disappear. My own pet peeve is people who call themselves "social media experts". They want lots of followers to in fact prove that they are experts at what they claim. Invariably they have a blog and write about things like "Top ten ways to improve web traffic". These people LOVE the words TOP TEN!! I mostly don't follow these people because they seem to be all in a giant pit of silly sameness. Then many businesses will follow, (like restaurants), also wanting a follow back and they are looking for free advertising, and a cheap way to get their message out.

Either it is public or it isn't. There are things you can go on and "categorize" yourself. For instance you can put Aerospace, Photography and Cooking as your interests that you tweet about. Then people searching that might follow you. Also of course they search your Bio, if you have a blog put a link in the bio. There is an expectation if you have 10,000 followers you have more influence in the world than if you have  100. Of course if your 100 followers were heavyweights like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Steve Jobs, etc those 100 might be mucho more important than the 10,000 but that is another discussion. There are sites you can go on to actually buy followers and I don't know how that works. Followers are generally considered good unless it is offensive like maybe porn or spam. Don't be stingy many people are out there slack-jawed and hungry for your wisdom. it is all about sharing right?

You have to decide of course why you are on there, on twitter, and what you want to get out of it.

I have a dude I follow in Singapore (never met, don't know well), and we have had discussions about a variety of things. I think it is pretty cool you have people following you from foreign countries. Don't assume because they mainly write in a foreign language they can't read or communicate in yours. My neighbor is on twitter and she mainly writes in Japanese!

I have actually met up with people IRL that I have only known through twitter, which is weird but good. It is literally a digital community of your own building, it is a digital garden and it grows with the TLC you put into it and the way you tend it. You can be stoic and machine like on twitter or very friendly, open, and gregarious. Of course you know me, I am an opinionated, fairly fearless, wide-open warrior of the good argument, the good discourse, and I am not hiding from anyone. People in America talk about the disenfranchised 99%, well maybe they should make themselves heard a little more. I also like to bring interesting stuff to the table, interesting links, and stuff I do myself like this writing or maybe photos which I take. I have been interested in photography since I was a little kid so it leaks through the fabric of what is me. The more I use twitter the more I see the value in it.

So for me I use twitter more now to find out what is going on in the world, like right damn now, what's happening?? I use it like I used to use DIGG and Reddit.It is better though because it is more focused to followers because I pick and choose,  I fine tune my stream regularly-

 I use it for news about specific categories of things like Aerospace= @flightblogger and @runwaygirl get on the planefolk list

I use it for comedy so that= @robdelaney and @uncledynamite for instance get on the funny list

 I use it for local community so I have local #duvall people and #98019 people because the Snoqualmie Valley is it's own bizarre little ecosphere

You can make lists and put all the people and accounts on that list you want. So you can search for 'woodworking" or :"bloodwood" and then check those people out. You can follow them and add them to the list "woodworking wonks". If later on they get flaky you can delete  them to "deleted island". If however someone is truly priceless you might look at the people THEY follow, there might well be some gems in there. You can set up lists that are quite different then just pull up that specific list to see what is happening. You might want a list of "Granite Falls Residents", those people often discuss things you won't read about in the Seattle Times. Use the Find People search window on twitter. Put in Granite Falls just to see how many of your neighbors are on twitter and who they are, and what they are into- I bet it surprises you.

By the by, I think you have an excellent question and I am going to post this response as a blog post. Some people got the original notion that with twitter they were supposed to simply tell people where they were eating lunch, I delete those people. If they do the foursquare thing much and tell me they are "mayor of Woodinville Starbucks", I delete them. Another thing is you can have boring people on a list like "Granite Falls Folks" without Following them and vice-versa, does that help at all??

My number one rule is; don't bore people, their tiny fragile lives are short, and don't tolerate people who bore you either-- tweet on brother!

Happy birthday Ego!?

It is my birthday and I haven't blogged in a while. A school friend Mike K said that he had a blog and stopped because he thought it was just an ego jerk sort of thing, I have been considering this take on blogging. Sadly, I think he also deleted/threw away everything he wrote. Yes, I would be interested in reading his thoughts.

I often ask people what were the best five years of their lives and they invariably say high school or the five years after graduation. I wonder if this is why so many people only listen to the music that was popular when they were in high school?

So witness the picture above, found at my mother's, while discussing my current birthday. this is possibly the only known photo of myself and my two brothers where we all look somewhat normal, and somewhat happy as psuedo-adults. During this period of life I worked at Lockheed and had a secret security clearance, worked out and played basketball, I was on a very good softball team, even started wearing a diamond earring. In short I thought i was damn cool. I found the various women of Southern California to be surprisingly aggressive. I thought this period of my life I was maybe at "my peak". in fact if you would have asked me if I could turn the clock back to any point of my life I would have most likely picked this moment pictured,... HA!

Now looking at this picture, I think I look skinny and need a haircut. I realize my recollection of the past is circumspect. How odd to not even remember your own life with clarity. it seems maybe my life right now is the best I can be. Possibly wisdom does come with age. We can be forgetful as we get older but we have many, many more important things to remember as time goes on and we experience more of life. It seems clearly priorities now are much different than they were back then. Realizing this might be my best birthday present. The best might be living fully in the present.

Twitter= Sustainable value? YES!

Of what value is twitter to me?

Me; this 21st century Renaissance man, IMM (in my mind), with a multitude of interests and being very busy of course (don't we all say we are very busy?), what does twitter do for me? Is twitter unique, or just another social media fad that will soon be but a cool shadow in the alleyway of the unused, unwanted and unloved?
I use twitter as a search engine for what is happening in the world and it works very well indeed. With the "lists" feature I can list people, writers, who have their tight little grips on a certain niche of information.

An example would be the "aviation" field, I can follow @flightblogger, @runwaygirl and @Heather_Poole among maybe 25 accounts in all. this gives me a tightly focused news feed from people/sources that I have winnowed out to be valuable to possibly just me.
I ultimately do this myself every day. I hardly ever buy an actual newspaper anymore, I go online, from computer or phone, and scan several news sources for the bits that seem most tasty and useful. If I can locate others that seem of a like mind and they list/mention what they are finding of interest on twitter, it really saves me time, all the while giving me a different, broader perspective, and takes me to places I wouldn't locate on my own. Obviously, searching other people's list of those they follow on twitter gives me leads to the talking heads and info-generators that are tangential to my own life.

I don't see this same ability on; Facebook, Plaxo, Linkin or many of the other social media sites and see them as more of a white pages of who they are. Rated at the top of "social media" are also Reddit and Digg, and they are great but that news is unfiltered as to a particular group of people, and "Youtube" serves a different purpose as well. These sites are often what people put links to on twitter, I don't see them as supplanting twitter. Twitter's use, as far as tweets generated, is over a billion tweets a month http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/02/10/twitter-now-more-than-1-billion-tweets-per-month/ . Twitter continues to grow in importance regardless of what you may have heard. In the same way that snow in D.C. does not supplant the impact of global warming/climate change, so too does the fact that the "dude in the cubicle three over" tweeted for six months and stopped, does not change the fact of twitter's grip on modern news dissemination.

People have said many times that twitter is rubbish, and several embraced the Pear Analytics study that "40% of twitter is pointless babble" last summer, http://www.pearanalytics.com/blog/2009/twitter-study-reveals-interesting-results-40-percent-pointless-babble/ . Well this is quite true, however about 90% of the Seattle Times is; pointless babble, crap I have no interest or use for, ADVERTISING, and poorly written drivel. It is that 10% of shiny nuggets I look for and value.
If we discuss TV, then this figure of "pointless babble" goes to 99%, most especially if we are discussing a Television news broadcast. To calculate FOX News, a cursory understanding of the principles of Six Sigma would be of help.

So if your twitter is dull it is your own lazy fault my friend. Using many services such as Tweetdeck a inquisitive industrious person can have several columns of spicy, meaty topics, divided according to the users own desires and needs.
From the Iranian Revolution to the recent resignation of the CEO of Sun Microsystems, in this day and age twitter is usually the first source, the most varied and unbiased, and the one that can be tailored to tastes you find the most palatable.

So if you most post 'pointles babble" it's OK, I can live with it,go!