Sebbie on the Webbie

Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’

We all love Facebook, and a lot of us like Twitter, and now there’s the next one – I believe; FriedEggs.com. It’s kind of a combination of the two, and also updates both of the above if you wish it to.

Compared to Facebook

If you’re like me, you like to limit who sees your Facebook, but it doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have anything public to say. That is where Twitter or FriedEggs would come in. If you want to address a larger audience and get followers that are not your personal friends, this is it.

Compared to  Twitter

You will have more room to write, should you need it, and you can add multi media straigth into your message, kind of like on Facebook. You can also comment on a… an Egg? directly, or just “like it” just like on Facebook.

Compared to Both

You get a front page list of the latest eggs with and without photos/videos. I really truly miss this feature on both Twitter and Facebook, but the Eggs has it. I really like Fried Eggs as an addition or link to both Facebook and Twitter.

Follow my eggs. XD

It is of general knowledge that Twitter is hard to understand. Why is it so hyped, when there’s so little to do? On Twitter, there is two things you can do to make it valuable for you: Be interested or be interesting. If you can’t be neither, there’s nothing left for you on Twitter. You can’t go on polishing your profile endlessly, nobody looks at it more than once anyway. You can’t spend your time taking tests of what type of a flower you are or which movie you should see next. You can’t spend your time posting links to your friends who will comment and “like” them out of responsibility toward you. On Twitter, you have to get to the point and get it there fast or you’ll sink into the oblivion in no time. Frankly, even if you do get to the point fast, you still sink into oblivion quite fast, and that is bad for your ego. That’s why you have to be interested in what others are saying too, in order to “get” twitter. And you have to know what interests you, and what type of people interest you, or you will randomly follow people who really are not interesting to you. Would I be so bold as to suggest that Twitter is a tool for smart people with a healthy ego..? (Not counting celebs and companies into that though.)

What people with a fragile ego will do to attempt to fool themselves into believing that they are interesting, is to follow a lot of people hoping to get a follow-back, especially those that use auto-follow tools if they spot one, and seek ways to “get thousands of followers automatically.” I doubt very much that those functions have much to do with practicality, but a lot to do with ego stroking. (I’m sure they explain it to themselves that they are doing it for business.) They are for people who don’t think their tweets will get them far enough fast enough for their own liking.

It is also quite an ego-bashing idea to believe that people would actually be interested in what you are doing right now. It won’t take you long to realize that NOBODY gives a damn about what you had for breakfast (unless you are a celebrity) and you will decide that you “don’t get” Twitter. Some people might have decided before trying it out that they don’t get Twitter, because who in their right mind would be interested in the daily activities of millions of nobodies around the world?

Twitter needs to be redefined so that people actually know what to expect of it. To me it’s a tool to broadcast 5 types of messages: Headlines, questions, one-liners, aphorisms and celebrity updates. Everything else is pretty pointless to put on Twitter. I admit I may have missed a type or two, if you can think of something else that is useful on Twitter, please do mention them in the comments!

Computers, the Internet and social networks can be very confusing to new users. People wonder, if it’s professional for a teacher to be on Facebook at all, or if we can ignore friend requests from people we hardly know. Some people can’t see the difference between a business network and a dating site, which is not really that surprising as there are still people who don’t know the difference between an email and an Instant Message through MSN. (Or the difference between a book and a magazine for that matter.) It IS frustrating to those of us who have used all these things for years, but I think we have to be somewhat tolerant to the mistakes of an eager newbie, and just try to give a few tips here and there and hope the newbies find their way to them by accident because it would be too much to hope that they would actually google it… :p

If you have a newbie friend or relative who has just found the social web, you could find your favourite social network etiquette post and forward it to them through the medium they are most comfortable with.

Here are some of my tips:

1. Before you do ANYTHING find out what the site is MEANT FOR. Not all social networking sites are meant for the same purpose. The cultures between Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace and Match.com are very very different.

2. Once you know what the site is meant for, and you think it suits your needs, sign up and COMPLETE your profile. You will need a picture of yourself. It’s just nicer for everyone that way.

3. Before you contact a person, read their profile unless you already know them very well. Their profile will give you an idea what they are there for, and if they would like to know about you.

4. Before adding a person as a friend, consider your relationship with them. Is it appropriate for the site? Are you really interested in their daily antics? Are they interested in what you have t say? If you don’t know them personally, always tell them why you added them as a friend. (This rule doesn’t apply on Twitter though, you can follow anyone you like on Twitter.) Most of the time it is NOT the purpose of a social networking site to collect every other person on the site on your friends list. It doesn’t serve any purpose and it doesn’t make you look popular, it makes you look like an attention whore.

5. Don’t assume that people are using the platform in the same manner or for the same purpose as you are. (Related to #1, but not the same thing.) Especially on general social networks, like Facebook and MySpace it is possible that some people use it for dating and some for business networking. Find out what the person you are interested in is using it for and if you want to contact them for some other reason, be very respectful and make sure they know that you are aware that you have read their profile and that you are aware that you’re walking on thin ice.

6. NEVER invite people on a social network before you know if it’s worth it. Also, invite only selected people, not everyone on your address book! You probably don’t even WANT TO have everyone on your book as your friends so think for a bit. For example your happily married 60-year-old boss probably won’t appreciate your invitation to join LavaLife (a dating site).

7. (On Facebook & some others:) NEVER EVER invite people to use an application you haven’t tried out yourself. If the app doesn’t have “skip this step” on the invite friends -part, just leave it. It is probably not worth bothering your friends with! Also, consider who you send the invitation to when you do. The less you know a person, the less likely it is that they appreciate your invitation.

8. You don’t have to worry about ignoring friend requests or application requests. Normally these sites do not notify people about rejection. That would be a bad practise anyway if they did. The sites are not created to create drama but friendships. Of course, drama happens when there’s a lot of confused people around.

9. Don’t start a friendship by asking for a favour, like “Can you add me too” or “Can you retweet this” or “Can you visit my blog too as I visited yours?”

10. Remember that you are amongst PEOPLE, (who are not automatically your friends.) This may sound obvious, but it seems not to be. Consider what kind of message it sends to people if you select a screen name like “hugeDXXX76″ or “CheapAutoParts”. Speak to people online like you would speak to people offline. Don’t try to sell stuff to everyone you meet, especially not randomly. (Like I shouldn’t try to sell a wedding dress to a hetero sexual man for example.) Be respectful and friendly and at the same time, and do have a sense of humour.

If you are serious about your online presence or otherwise just everywhere and want people to recognise you outside your normal circles, avatar is the best way to do this. Online world relies heavily on written word and images. Images, I think we all agree, draw our attention more efficiently than text. This means, that when people are reading your words, they won’t necessarily spend time memorising your name but they will probably at least take a glance at your avatar. In addition, your user name might not be always available for every website you want to join, but your avatar will be. That is why you should have a bit of a think about your avatar. What do you want people to remember you by? There are some types of avatars that tend to give a negative impression of you at first glance:

Baby photo on man’s avatar. Probably the last time any woman told him he was cute.

Baby photo on woman’s avatar. A stay at home mother who has nothing else to talk about apart from her kids. (Probably uses a screen name such as “MomOf2″.)

Just the eye. Seeks a deep contact with people while trying to remain anonymous and appear soulful. Kind of works but is quite unoriginal and thus utterly forgettable.

Popular cartoon character – A male who is trying the “boyish charm” angle although it has never worked for anyone. We’ve seen enough of Vinnie the Pooh and friends already! Original cartoon characters by the man/woman behind the avatar, such as Tony’s are encouraged though!

Disproportioned photo - An avatar of a casual Internet user who hasn’t yet found the delights of Photoshopping. (Has uploaded a photo straight from the camera, without shaping it into a square first.)

Logo – impersonal. Is here to sell me something.

The vast majority of people prefer the picture of a person in an avatar over a logo or other graphic. People want to speak to people. If your avatar is listed amongst several others (like recent visitors list), the likelihood that you’ll get a click is higher if it’s your face in there. But, sometimes you need to put that logo up there. Another thing is, that if you’re using your photo, it gets boring after a while, and intolerable to you when you get a better photo of yourself. But the problem arises, that people get confused if you change your avatar. They won’t remember who you are for a while, until you say something really characteristic to yourself. I believe I found a solution to both of these problems. You are not likely to change your logo too often, right? So why not use that together with your photograph?

Here are some of my recent avatars:

See what I mean? There are elements in the avatar that stay constant while I get bored with the rest of it – me. :p This of course requires some Photoshop skills, but nothing too complicated. What do you think? If you decide to give it a go, please post a comment after uploading your new avatar to SezWho, or to Gravatar if you don’t use SezWho. (SezWho will override Gravatar on my blog.)

I find it funny. In a short time I’ve found several blog posts about some guy or gal who became famous for getting fired or told off at work because of something they said on Twitter or Facebook or some other place. The content is always the same. Screenshots proving this appalling behaviour followed by advice on what not to say publicly or publish online. Good heavens. If I would drag every flame war I’ve ever seen online, or every drinking party photo I’ve seen on Facebook onto my blog I could probably run a blog on just that topic alone. In fact, I think the first Internet term I learned was probably “flame war”. Who cares about them, seriously?

When social media expands, our humanity becomes more and more evident all the time. A lot of us don’t exist in two modes any more; the work persona and the leisure time persona, but these two merge together – and I find it nothing less than fantastic. We are all people, but the old business model has pretty much denied that. If we’re in business, we have to turn into Cylons or something. Ever smiling, ever patient, ever wise…

Hands up: Who can say they’ve never been involved in a flame fight online? I sure have. I always try to maintain my cool, but that is not to say I haven’t said things I probably shouldn’t have, but I’m only a human. If I was a famous or even remotely respected business human, I’d be posted about on numerous blogs with the caption line: “What not to say on Facebook”.

I am expecting that as the younger generations start taking over the businesses, we’ll all become more and more accepting of each others little failures of self control. I think all people, business or not, should be allowed to react to rudeness with a bit of anger and not be expected to maintain the clean exterior 24/7. Most of us get drunk every now and then. Most of us have said something we shouldn’t have, fucked someone we shouldn’t have and made the wrong people aware of those mistakes either by accident or knowingly. Just losen up people. It doesn’t matter.

I’ve been actively using Twitter for about two weeks now. I’ve been reading blog posts about it, checked services, downloaded “Tweet Clients” and what not. Somehow, the short-worded world of Twitter didn’t really open up to me that easily. I tend to be wordy, as you know, so the 140 marks -limit really didn’t do it for me. But, I think I finally got the gist of it – in the bloggers point of view.

Frankly, if I had stayed on Twitter.com alone, I still wouldn’t get it. Twitter.com is very basic compared to all the services surrounding it. Who has time to hang out on one site all the time anyway? Not me – and I’m not doing anything that important. Twitter is supposed to keep you up-to-date to the minute, but who on Earth has time to stare at the public Twitter update stream to come up with something even remotely interesting? So I downloaded a couple of desktop Tweeting programs to make it easier to update and follow. But quite frankly, even that didn’t really get me much anywhere.

Then I found Tweetlater.com and their keyword alerts. It sends me an email summary of tweets that have certain keyword in them, every 4 hours. I can quickly read it through to see what people are saying right now about social networking for example. Most of the time, they don’t say anything that interesting. It only takes that one tweet though, that will spark your interest and get you somewhere. The thing is that the bulk of bloggers don’t say anything interesting or helpful either. Most of the time, they write the same stuff over and over – 10 steps to successful blogging, 13 great tutorials, 15 rules to great web design blah blah blah, heard it all before and wrote about it already. It takes you a lot longer to check if a blog has any useful information to you, or anything you’d find remotely entertaining, rather than read through a bunch of Tweets.

Sure, you may miss a great article on Twitter because of a badly structured tweet, but if the tweet is good, chances are that the blogger can actually write – something that you can’t take granted these days. Being witty and to the point in 140 marks or less is a good test for your self-expression skills.
You’ll also be able to quite quickly put your finger on the latest trends. For example, I have a keyword “Finland” on my keyword alert. It took me one summary to learn, that postcrossing is huge in Finland. About 70% of Tweets concerning Finland were about writing a postcard to Finland or receiving a postcrossing-card from Finland. (After I learned this, I told Tweetlater to ignore messages about cards thank you very much.)

During the last 2 weeks I found out that promoting your blog on Twitter is more effective than StumbleUpon – at least if you’re a small-timer like myself. Stumble relies on thumbs up and your readers stumbling your posts, while Twitter… You tweet it, and if you’re lucky (good) someone will retweet it, because it’s easy. It takes about half a second compared to properly stumbling it (for the first time). My advice: If you have those share-buttons on your blog and you had to choose only one, choose Twitter.

Another important thing to know as a blogger, is that you can automatically tweet your blog posts by using TwitterFeed. In addition, there are few services that will update your Twitter status, but a word of warning… Avoid loops! I went tweet-rss crazy myself, and added every feed I could think of to every service I could, and ended up having the same update appear first on Facebook, which updated Twitter, which updated Facebook, which updated Twitter… And so forth. You don’t want to annoy your followers by doing that! I was lucky nobody reported me as a spam bot before I realised what was happening!

The most awesome thing about Twitter is that it is actually very social. A lot of other social networks could easily just drop the “social” off and be more accurate. Because there’s nothing else to do on Twitter than send messages to people and read them, you won’t get side tracked by millions of applications and editing your profile all the time. How many of you confess to staring at their own profile page thinking what else to add, while hardly ever visiting other people’s profiles? Twitter has stripped everything else off the menu and sticks with the main thing: Socialising. On Twitter, reading other people’s content is even more rewarding than sending out your own. That’s just fantastic.

And for some reason, hearing “follow me on Twitter” isn’t nearly as irritating as the normal “add me as a friend” even though you can’t possibly know who I am. Twitter is public by definition, so following thousands of people is completely allowed, unlike on many other social networking sites. So, follow me on Twitter, only if you want, of course.