February 27, 2009
About a year ago I wrote my first (and probably only) post about Twitter so far, it was based around what I had learned from using the service up to the time of writing. During a conversation I had last week I thought about this post again and decided to look it up again… only to notice that much of it hasn’t changed at all.
It still are the Twitter users that make the service better both in adding features, applications and services. Think about features such as hashtags, RT, … mostly incorporated into most clients now. Some of you will be using Tweetdeck, I still hang on to Twhirl (that new search ‘activate’ feature is a killer!) but there are many many others. And finally things like Twitter Remote or Mr. Tweet are really powerful services. The last service is also good proof it really is the community that makes things better here, have you ever taken a look at Twitter’s own Suggested Users Feature?
People still focus too much on quantity vs. quality with constant chatter about number of followers, number of tweets, … and I still believe like I said back then that you don’t make better conversations by following everybody back. It’s just not true… and it’s therefore not all that suprising to see that people like Loic are actually cutting back on that.
Has nothing changed then? Sure it has. We’ve started to re-tweet aka RT, something I like and then again not. Sometimes a RT is expanding the network on a good topic which is good, sometimes it feels like the sender just wants you to know they’ve seen ‘it’ as well. And often it feels like the Retweeter’s reasoning is more to make sure the sender of the initial message notices you versus you actually trying to share interesting stuff to your audience. Like an alternative to an @reply almost.
Another personal change is that I’ve now (via the Live Writer add-on) linked my blog feed to my Twitter account, something I said a year ago is not done. I guess I was wrong, although it’s mainly the notion that people start putting something like {blogpost} in front of such tweets that got me convinced there’s a right way in doing this.
What else has changed? We got spam, auto-DM’s and a lot more tricks that try and build audiences by following and immediate unfollowing etc. Not sure who thinks that stuff really works but just like many other popular services there are some annoyances that we’ll just have to deal with.
Still very much hooked, so that hasn’t changed at all ;)
