Tech Blog

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Many people have a love / hate relationship with this social media staple, so I thought I’d take a look at 5 of the things that most people either appreciate or vilify. Or maybe it’s just me

1) ‘Instant’ Direct Messages when you follow someone
You’ve been there. You are stalking someone else’s follow list and you pick off a few likely candidates. Then *bam* you find they’ve followed you almost immediately! Very cool that you caught them online. Not only that, within seconds they’ve also DM’d you with a thank you message and are asking you to ‘share’ your thoughts. Sigh.

I hate auto-DMS.

2) Keyword based spam that ‘mentions’ you
So, you’re having a great discussion in Twitter with 2-3 of your Tweeps(tm). And all of a sudden you notice that you’re getting ‘mentioned’ in tweets by people you’ve never heard of. They have maybe 10 followers, and almost always have professional model headshot avatar images and twitter names that end in 3 digits. And they’re including a link to something that’s obscufacted by a link shortening service you’ve also never heard of.

I hate Twitter keyword-scraping spammers.

3) An efficient way to make new connections and expand your network
Twitter is a broad-based communications channel. Lots of folks are able to listen to people they may share interests in, simply by paying attention to what’s being said by people they follow. Then by reviewing their ‘targets’ follow list (as in item 1 above) and carefully reviewing the content of tweets, it’s easy to determine who else would be interesting to follow.

I love the way Twitter enables finding new sources of information and entertainment.

4) Time and context shifting as people try and communicate with you when you’re no longer online
One of the neat things about Twitter and the desktop Twitter clients (Tweetdeck, Seesmic, etc) is that they enable you to timeshift your communication.

Sure, you log in to your client of choice and wait a moment while the API calls all the recent activity in the relevant column. Then, as you do with email first thing in the morning, you scan all the relevant activity in the appropriate column and catch up on what’s happened in the last while.

And what you’ve missed. Maybe I really didn’t need to know that ‘George’ was having gastro-intestinal trouble at 3:33 am and that he was also kinda mesmerized by the three repeating 3 digits in the time as he tweeted.

No, timeshifiting can be a mixed blessing.

5) Twitter isn’t a protocol
Communication over IRC is a Protocol. Communication over eMail is a Protocol. Web content delivered to your browser is in a specific format (HTTP and HTML) which are called protocols.

A protocol is, online, a way for software and hardware to communicate that is governed by a set of ‘agreed upon’ standards. Once the protocol is understood, anyone can use the protocol to communicate with the various software or hardware. Anyone can ‘speak the language’ of the software or hardware.

Twitter is not an open protocol. Yes they do have an API and a method for communication, but that is managed by Twitter, not by an independent body or community. Twitter dictates what traffic in their ecosphere looks like and what rules it must conform to in order to be ‘valid’.

Twitter also can arbitrarily change these rules to suit their own business needs.

Twitter should be a protocol.

Batter up!
Well, that’s my list...and yeah, I could probably go on, but why? You’ve got some thoughts...share them in the comments!