I tweeted that because...

Is TwitterGroups what i really want?

Twitter is a mess once you start mass-following. Some people will doubt mass-following is useful and will advise you to concentrate on the persons really important to you. But that is not what twitter is all about. I'ld even say that if you want a service like that you should focus on something like Facebook instead. Simply because Twitter is not really good at it.

What Twitter is really good at is to reflect the current opinion and voice of the world regarding a topic. If you are into that, mass-following suddenly makes sense.

The usage pattern for successful mass-following is easy: Know your topics and for each single one of them find at least a dozen persons that tweet about it in an interesting way.

Of course there will be some persons among the ones you follow that you really want to stay connected to. That's where the wish for Twitter Groups comes from.

The Twitter Group Idea is that you  group the persons you're following into sets and later use these sets to filter your twitter news stream.

But is that really what you want?

• First of all i'ld have a problem to build the groups.
• Second, the persons on your list tweet with different frequencies and won't get equal shares.
• Third, Twitter does not support groups, so you can only emulate something like that inside an application by
    a) reading the complete stream and filter it -or-
    b) pulling the updates from the members inside the group one by one and merge them.
  No matter if you choose a) or b): The Twitter API will get in the way, as the number of requests you are allowed to send in a given period of time is strictly limited.

I pondered all that during the last days and found out that what i really want is to check some accounts important to me one by one. That's much easier than a full-fledged group feature. It's properly supported by twitter, as each single stream has unlimited history for tweets and thus API limits don't get in the way immediately.

But how do i know which accounts to check? A Twitter-Addressbook is needed that allows for groups. Inside a browser that is easy to achieve with bookmarks and folders:

Inside a client like Tweetie it could be an easy-to-do add-on that doesn't cause twitter-traffic.

I guess a client that properly implements this method would really have the edge over all the others. Because we do not really want to see the activity of a group as a whole. We just don't want to forget to check the updates of ALL members of a given group. And one by one is fine with us.

What about feelings?

Transporting Text Messages via Microblogging is easy. But what if we want to share an emotion or feeling? How do you transport that with 140 chars max?

Some of us create a photo or painting and send it as a link via twitpic.com:

Some of us join blip.fm, listen to music there and share the link to the soundclip or video:

But if it's twitter only, i prefer to quote lyrics like that:

All techniques have the same purpose: You find a text, sound or visual representation equivalent to what you feel, and share it hoping that others will feel the same and understand.

I think that's why we call it "social".

Retweets are important, too

Seeing only my face here all the time feels incredibly boring. I don't like that. So it's good that someone invented ReTweets, otherwise i would not know what to do about it.

New concept: From now on whenever i RT something, i will not collect my re-tweet like this... 

...but will use the original post instead:

So when you see someone else's face on this site you know that yours truly liked something a lot and retweeted it immediately.

Today thank you to @Mike_Wesely for quoting Harry S Truman and thus reminding me what it often is that gets in the way of achieving something important for a team or group. You made me think, Mike!

Tweetdeck is fine but this Group Feature's broken

Tweetdeck is wonderful. It gives us a brilliant feature that is missing in Twitter itself: It allows us to create groups so we can focus on subsets of the ones we follow. And it works. At times. When all you want to do is tweet. But i don't find time for that often. And that's why the feature is broken for me.

Complaining is one thing. I understand why it currently has to be this way. It's not because of Tweetdeck itself. It is because of Twitter API Limits. The API simply doesn't allow to filter by groups. And on top of that it limits number of requests per client. This is why client providers like Tweetdeck can't do much about it.

 

I hope that Twitter one day introduces groups in the same way that facebook did. It works like a charm there so there has to be a way.

Can't believe it's 5000 already

I can't believe it's my 5000th tweet already. I had a very slow start on twitter and it took me almost a year to understand what it is that people that like it really do there.

The trick is not to get all your existing friends there.

The trick is neither to generate a huge base of followers so your voice gets heard.

I think the trick is to look for your topics via Twitter Search, identify the tweets you like the most, and to follow the people behind them. Don't use mass following tools. Don't follow randomly. In the long run it will get you nowhere.

Instead: Find the ones that entertain you the most. And because the ones i follow entertain me constantly, i thought the best thing to tweet about for my twitter jubilee is to thank them for it.

The start of something new...

Twitter is fast. Messages are small there. Sometimes you have to really concentrate to get your message across in the way you intended it. But that's not that easy all the time. Especially if one of your twitter patterns is to share ideas the minute they appear so you can flesh them out in a blogpost later.

Some say Blogging is dead because of MicroBlogging. I think that is not true. Microblogging steals two things from Blogging:

1. The comments, because conversation should not be in the hand of the blog owner alone.
2. The keeping of quick notes, ideas and scribbles.

Not all tweets i write each day are important to me. But some are. I want to collect them here so i can give some more info on the inspiration behind them and to be able to reflect on them in a moment when i find the time ... and they are already "long forgotten" on the wonderous platform that Twitter is.