Has Twitter, the timesuck, won me over?

I joined Twitter in the early days of it's launch, but it wasn't until recently that I decided to delve in and  figure it out. After three weeks of living in the twitosphere, I am almost won over, BUT I am reserved about my praise.

Twitter is a great way to ascertain the heat on a new topic and to learn more about things you are interested in. For instance, in I have a search in my TweetDeck for GeoThermal. This allows me to see all realtime broadcasts from 12 million people tweeting that include the word GeoThermal. My friend @NASeason says that twitter for her is "more real time than Facebook, follow people without having to friend them, no more feeling strange about changing status 5x a day."

So why am I still reserved?  Because in my Twitter exploration I have found the time suck factor to be quite high and I am still waiting to see if it is just another fad that will be supplanted with newer, more superior technology e.g. FriendFeed which has better support for conversations.

My friend NASeason highlights exactly why I think the time suck factor can be so high... people do change their status 5x a day. That is a lot of content to consume or filter esp if you are following a lot of people.

One of it's primary drawbacks is that the conversational paradigm is nearly non-existant yet that seems to be the whole purpose of the tool. Weird eh? Not really.

The original idea was to be able to use SMS to tell groups what you are doing. It is easy enough to send a quick message, but to carry a dialog is another thing. The retweet (RT) paradigm allows your message to easily be fanned out to different networks of people which is cool because ultimately people forward your broadcast and expand your message to new networks of people. The respond to (@) paradigm is interesting; however, there is no straightforward correlation to what someone is actually responding to. The trail can't easily be followed between two people let alone groups.

I am constantly asking myself the following questions in my Twitter exploration:

• How can I optimize my engagement with Twitter to make my time investment valuable?
• Could I be using my time more effectively somewhere else?

Some things I have learned along the way that may help you if you decide to jump on the Twitter bandwagon.

• If you are new to Twitter, Mark Oneil has a step by step guide. Scott Hanselman also does a good job of explaining Twitter in a slightly more technical fashion on his blog post, usefulness of microblogging.
• Some etiquette 
• Use it wisely. For example, I spend a lot of time investing in and researching stocks. I was curious if the tool could help me more readily predict what was going to happen in the market. Mostly I found that the tweets were often just highlighting articles on WSJ, NYT, SeekingAlpha, etc. that I would have read more directly if I wasn't using my time to browse tweets. Occasionally though, a great article or point of view shows up that I would never have seen without a tweet. It is the diamond in the rough that I seek so I keep coming back.
• If you need to laugh search for #textthatgetnoreply on twitter, quite funny

Overall, I think Twitter is a simple, but powerful broadcasting mechanism that let's you follow topics and people you think are cool or pertinent in realtime.

Etiquette in Social Networking

Recently I have been diving into Twitter and trying to find out how I can leverage it in my daily life. One of the first things I did as a part of this exploration was to syndicate my Twitter feed to my Facebook profile. I quickly realized this was a faux pas.

Why? Because I engage with different social networking sites in extremely different ways and my audiences' intrests vary. Before I delve deeper into this, let's see how I classify my Social networking world:

• LinkedIn is my professional profile where my audience is my peers, potential clients and money making opportunities. This audience primarily cares about updates in my career successes and where I may be for networking opportunities using TripIt.
  
• This Blog is my professional voice, rants and chronicle for my hobby, kayaking. My audience has the potential to be anyone in the public domain; however, generally it is a mix of friends and professional contacts. If I had the energy, I would have two blogs, one for kayaking and one for my professional public voice.
• Twitter is a public dialog about all things with anyone and everyone that is paying attention to things I care about e.g. stocks, alternative energy, technology, the economy and other news. Very chatty forum and dialogs are announced to everyone following you or searching on a topic.
  
• Facebook is a semi-private dialog about my personal life and less public views. I think this forum can stretch to be far more emotional than my public forums would ever be.  Dialog updates are announced only to people who have actively participated in them.
  
• Yelp is where I communicate my public opinion on what tastes good and things I would pay for.

Some people have the same voice on on social networking sites and so they simply don't differentiate. But the reality is that most recipients of facebook status, tweets, blog entries, etc. actually do care. For instance, I am not into Farmville and I have blocked everyone on facebook that plays it. For me, I can only imagine how annoying would it be if Farmville announcements were on Twitter.

I don't want to see 10 facebook update status from a person a day. Twitter is a more appropriate forum for that. And sadly, when people syndicate their twitter feed into Facebook, their Facebook status is often nonsensical. For example, say you tweet "@johndoe I'd do a put at 3".  Your Facebook community cannot see that you have been dialoging with a guy by the name of John Doe about geothermal energy. The context is simply not there.

Facebook is a forum for keeping in touch with people I love or want to play with. It is my playground. I do things I would never do in public e.g. post a pic of my friend's child. I would even allow my niece to tag horrendous pictures of me when I was younger.

How do you answer and respond to the the question, what do you do? Are you the type of person who answers with details about your profession or your hobby? Do you roll your eyes when you ask the question and the person responds with their resume? For me it depends on where I am and what I am doing i.e. am I at a conference or on a river. When someone posts their work status on facebook, I generally feel sorry for them and believe they are working too hard and aren't happy in their personal life because their work is their entire life.

Sometimes the boundaries cross, but not always. For some people whose connections are synonymous in work and their personal lives, these variances may not be as relevant.

In general, unless you are a food critic, honestly, most people don't care where you ate on twitter. They would rather use Yelp to find out public opinion on the Sushi Restaurant in Fremont. By all means tweet about your review, but make your review count by cataloging it in the right place. On Facebook on the other hand, one can feel nostalgia and miss a loved one when they tweet about what/where they are eating. I am all about inviting myself over for dinner. And if I am making something sumptuous or going to a great restaurant, if I like you, by all means show up!

Another reality is, that while I may rant to my private audience on Facebook, I don't consider that to be a public forum where potential employers may see my cynical side. I don't want to be misunderstood in the public domain. My thoughts need to be more well articulated and complete in the public domain; whereas, my Facebook status is more contextualized based on knowing my character more intimately.

Personally, I don't like connections on facebook unless they are friends. I do have some colleagues on there, but that is usually because I have created a deeper relationship with them beyond the bounds of the office. If that relationship is not there, I would prefer they were following me on my blog or Twitter.

Each tool has a very profoundly different use for me and I recognize that my audience varies greatly in all scenarios. What is your social networking etiquette?

Is the blog dead?

Due to the amount of time I spend on Facebook, I am now syndicating my blog posts to it. Sadly they don't syndicate the comments back. It makes sense because they want to own the discussion i.e. the advertisement impressions. But sadly this means that my poor blog is losing views and lacks discussion. Ultimately, it means I sacrifice advertising dollars to Facebook.

With my Facebook time and recent exploration of Twitter, it seems that using the blog as a vehicle for discussion is now legacy or dead as some would call it. Most pull snippets from their blogs and post them on Twitter. Then most comments are simply tweets.

The blog is still a good medium to author articles, but lower expectations on direct syndication and discussions in the traditional comment trail.

Is Twitter the next Webvan?

Great article and especially great chart showing private vrs VC funded companies from the 90s and beyond. Will Twitter with ~155M raised to date be the next Webvan or PayPal?

Read what the Wall Street Journal has to say about it.

Will Twitter win me over?

I had a talk with Ray Valdes about my skepticism around the twitter business model. Don't get me wrong, I think Twitter has huge value. I just question the grandiose valuation of 15 Billion dollars. Why? Well for one, I don't see a legitimate way to advertise directly to users without pushing them away. The indirect approach isn't yet earning them dollars. And while there is a lot of potential up-sell opportunities, one would think, they would be in motion by now. There is a lot of money to be made by doing analytics over the data and selling it as research, but Twitter's openness makes me believe that anyone can do this. Perhaps I haven't read all the fine print.

Regardless, even if I haven't bought into the price tag yet, I still question it's value to me. As someone who was involved in the social internet from day one, I have been a very tentative user of the system. I registered with them early in the first year of their existence. But I never really enjoyed the short blast to the ether. And since then, even with all of the research I have been doing, I never find myself using it as a source. Simply put, I have always found the @ and # to simply be too much noise. Sifting through basketball, football, and what I ate for lunch info from people I'm not close too, doesn't add any value to my life. I much prefer the tidbits from my social network, once MySpace, now Facebook. And when I look at some of the folks like Scoble who seems to tweet more than write anymore. I must say, I still prefer his more well thought out rants to his tweets.

Sure if I was at a conference and wanted to know what I was missing in other sessions, I may just plug in. But other than that....

Hmm, but maybe I have been using the tool incorrectly. Maybe I am simply following too few people and not a broad enough sample or perhaps focused sample. Really, what I need is to get a broader perspective and do some analysis on what the conversation of the day is.

Why would I care about this? I have always seen the value of getting the news before the news hits the wire, and if I were responsible for PR at any company, I would be all over Twitter. But outside of work, in my day to day life, why would knowing the news a day before it is published be valuable? Day Trading!

So my experiment begins. Can knowing the temperature of the tweetosphere lead me to know what the news will be about a day later and thus know how a stock will move?

Let's see if Twitter can finally win me over.