10 May 2009
Twitter aren't the bad guys
14/05/09 09:09 Filed in: twitter
Well, that was probably Twitter’s worst day so
far. The hour or so’s outage in the
evening we could understand but the idea that we
couldn’t use the system as we’d done
so far was too much for some people.
OK, you might not have seen it. To explain briefly: at the moment, if you reply to someone’s Tweet, they see your response whether they’re following you or not. Yesterday Twitter announced it would stop this happening unless they were following you - so if the first word of one of my Tweets was @stephenfry (to use a very famous example) he would see it but if he replied to me then nobody who wasn’t following me would see it. The @ signifies the message is directed to him.
Mr. Fry’s followers might well be mightily relieved at this, but celebrities aside there were a lot of objections. Suppose someone needed help with a bit of information and you were able to respond with something that would be useful to many people? Unless your addressee’s follower happened to be following you they would no longer see it. They’d miss stuff, the banter, the information, for many the whole point of being on Twitter.
Later in the day it transpired that the tweak was because the existing model wasn’t particularly scalable. So they issued a cover story about making life easier for users when it wasn’t about any such thing. That’s a bit naughty.
The real issue that came out, though, was about the anger of Twitter customers when they found they were being told about a change to the system that they didn’t much like. There was fury, a while stream of messages with the Twitterfail tag emerged - and all because people didn’t like a change Twitter had made.
Twitter’s decision to fudge the reasons for the change was of course a mistake. Never, ever talk down to your customers. I can’t help but feel, however, that a lot of users have missed a very important point about Twitter, same as the Facebook customers missed a couple of months back when it changed its interface.
It doesn’t belong to us. It’s someone else’s playground and they’re allowing us to play in it.
This is a bit of a tough message. It appears to go against the idea of social networking, of sharing, The fact is, however, that Twitter is a private company owned by its founders. Its value is of course in its ability to open itself up to others, which can lead to the illusion that it’s somehow ‘ours’ and that we can complain when it changes in a way we don’t like or of which we don’t approve. But in reality we can’t. We’re there by someone else’s invitation. We’re not even paying customers.
Of course, the wise owner will listen to his or her non-paying guests and won’t want to risk destroying their newly-valuable (they hope) piece of virtual real estate by angering them. Nonetheless the sheer anger, the irritation with the fact of being unable to control everything that happened on Twitter, that we witnessed yesterday looks a little misplaced to me. Biz Stone and his colleagues own Twitter and they let everyone else play with it. They may have been clumsy, they may have gone against what some people think they ought to be doing, but they’re honestly not the bad guys. They’re the little guys trying to make a little application serve the whole world. I don’t know them and this is pure speculation, but it could be that yesterday they started to feel a little overwhelmed by all this.
OK, you might not have seen it. To explain briefly: at the moment, if you reply to someone’s Tweet, they see your response whether they’re following you or not. Yesterday Twitter announced it would stop this happening unless they were following you - so if the first word of one of my Tweets was @stephenfry (to use a very famous example) he would see it but if he replied to me then nobody who wasn’t following me would see it. The @ signifies the message is directed to him.
Mr. Fry’s followers might well be mightily relieved at this, but celebrities aside there were a lot of objections. Suppose someone needed help with a bit of information and you were able to respond with something that would be useful to many people? Unless your addressee’s follower happened to be following you they would no longer see it. They’d miss stuff, the banter, the information, for many the whole point of being on Twitter.
Later in the day it transpired that the tweak was because the existing model wasn’t particularly scalable. So they issued a cover story about making life easier for users when it wasn’t about any such thing. That’s a bit naughty.
The real issue that came out, though, was about the anger of Twitter customers when they found they were being told about a change to the system that they didn’t much like. There was fury, a while stream of messages with the Twitterfail tag emerged - and all because people didn’t like a change Twitter had made.
Twitter’s decision to fudge the reasons for the change was of course a mistake. Never, ever talk down to your customers. I can’t help but feel, however, that a lot of users have missed a very important point about Twitter, same as the Facebook customers missed a couple of months back when it changed its interface.
It doesn’t belong to us. It’s someone else’s playground and they’re allowing us to play in it.
This is a bit of a tough message. It appears to go against the idea of social networking, of sharing, The fact is, however, that Twitter is a private company owned by its founders. Its value is of course in its ability to open itself up to others, which can lead to the illusion that it’s somehow ‘ours’ and that we can complain when it changes in a way we don’t like or of which we don’t approve. But in reality we can’t. We’re there by someone else’s invitation. We’re not even paying customers.
Of course, the wise owner will listen to his or her non-paying guests and won’t want to risk destroying their newly-valuable (they hope) piece of virtual real estate by angering them. Nonetheless the sheer anger, the irritation with the fact of being unable to control everything that happened on Twitter, that we witnessed yesterday looks a little misplaced to me. Biz Stone and his colleagues own Twitter and they let everyone else play with it. They may have been clumsy, they may have gone against what some people think they ought to be doing, but they’re honestly not the bad guys. They’re the little guys trying to make a little application serve the whole world. I don’t know them and this is pure speculation, but it could be that yesterday they started to feel a little overwhelmed by all this.
0 Comments
New audio facility
12/05/09 09:33 Filed in: technology
Something the social media has lacked so far is a
means of getting audio content onto the Web quickly,
unless of course you’re happy to use something
that’s tied to a particular model of phone.
It’s here that the guys from iPadio have come up trumps
with a system that will record from your phone,
upload to the web and then allow you to embed
the content in any website.
I interviewed new director Mike Brace - who has a lot to say about disability and getting around the Olympics with his blindness - about half an hour ago. We stopped chatting about 9.10 so whatever time I finish typing and RapidWeaver uploads this for me, that’s how long it took to encode and upload the lot. You can have a listen to the interview here (and don’t worry about the bit where I say ‘excuse me’, that’s when the dog started barking which you can’t hear on the audio but it was as loud as a loud thing from here!).
Disclaimer: They’re paying me to do the interviews I’m uploading both here and later in the week. But then I get paid to write everything I do except this blog (and I’m hoping the ads on the side will do some good in making this profitable eventually) so that’s not much of a disclaimer - I do believe this is an interesting area.
I interviewed new director Mike Brace - who has a lot to say about disability and getting around the Olympics with his blindness - about half an hour ago. We stopped chatting about 9.10 so whatever time I finish typing and RapidWeaver uploads this for me, that’s how long it took to encode and upload the lot. You can have a listen to the interview here (and don’t worry about the bit where I say ‘excuse me’, that’s when the dog started barking which you can’t hear on the audio but it was as loud as a loud thing from here!).
Disclaimer: They’re paying me to do the interviews I’m uploading both here and later in the week. But then I get paid to write everything I do except this blog (and I’m hoping the ads on the side will do some good in making this profitable eventually) so that’s not much of a disclaimer - I do believe this is an interesting area.
Digital Britain Debate
11/05/09 18:13 Filed in: Social
networking trends
An excellent extract from a debate on Digital Britain
here - the explanations are all in the video.
Social Networks and retail
11/05/09 13:06 Filed in: Social
networking practice
Some excellent work on social media in retail comes
from the Fresh Networks blog. People who
don’t like links (apart from a few members
of my family I can’t think of any) can
have a look at the video here:
To me there are a number of initial rules about retail and social media.
1. Use it as a test bed by all means.
2. If your customers aren’t using social media don’t expect them to start - keep a presence in your existing channels until it’s right to move permanently. It may never be,
3. Don’t just sell, sell, sell - the ‘social’ bit means engaging, not bludgeoning. So your model is Tupperware Parties rather than a High Street store.
4. Don’t underestimate the resources you’ll need - a blog with a couple of entries isn’t going to do as much as full engagement through Facebook or Twitter.
If I could bring out one suggestion above all others that’s not on the video then it would be ‘check your customer first’ - see what social networks they’re already using, if any. I’d follow this with ‘don’t guess, check’ - following an attempt to explain to my mother-in-law that I was writing a book about social networks and trying to tell her what they were - only to be met with a full and cutting critique of my Facebook page, which she’d inspected for herself and of which she thought I could be making better use. The moral is that your instincts as to what your customers might be using could well be wrong. Check, research, and tailor your social networking activities accordingly!
Retail 2.0 interviews from Sarah Eno on Vimeo.
To me there are a number of initial rules about retail and social media.
1. Use it as a test bed by all means.
2. If your customers aren’t using social media don’t expect them to start - keep a presence in your existing channels until it’s right to move permanently. It may never be,
3. Don’t just sell, sell, sell - the ‘social’ bit means engaging, not bludgeoning. So your model is Tupperware Parties rather than a High Street store.
4. Don’t underestimate the resources you’ll need - a blog with a couple of entries isn’t going to do as much as full engagement through Facebook or Twitter.
If I could bring out one suggestion above all others that’s not on the video then it would be ‘check your customer first’ - see what social networks they’re already using, if any. I’d follow this with ‘don’t guess, check’ - following an attempt to explain to my mother-in-law that I was writing a book about social networks and trying to tell her what they were - only to be met with a full and cutting critique of my Facebook page, which she’d inspected for herself and of which she thought I could be making better use. The moral is that your instincts as to what your customers might be using could well be wrong. Check, research, and tailor your social networking activities accordingly!