40 posts tagged “twitter”
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Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience
Gregor Hochmuth
61 comments »
Twitter
isn’t for everyone, and you may have dismissed the service a long time
ago. But regardless of your own use, it’s hard to dismiss the
phenomenon itself and the passion of so many that has built up around
it.
No matter how long the outage du jour, Twitter users continue to stay attached to the service despite an ever-changing backdrop of alternatives.
Blogging isn’t for everyone either. But unlike blogging, Twitter enjoys a far a greater variety of users — they include people, many people, who would never think of starting a blog and people who would never touch an RSS reader. The 140 character limit is a plus for Twitter, but it isn’t all.
What explains the Twitter phenomenon then? What produces the positive feeling and the strong attachment among those who tweet? And moreover: How can other systems learn from this?
The answer lies in understanding Audience.
Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to
your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go
to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not,
assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the
circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone
else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower
count.
This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)
Blogging on the other hand has no such clearly defined audience. An aspiring blogger who hasn’t crossed the chasm speaks into the void. Direct feedback can only come in the form of written comments (a relatively high barrier of effort) and it’s diminished by spam and vocal trolls these days.
FeedBurner’s
subscriber count only provides the equivalent of Twitter’s opaque follower count and MyBlogLog didn’t solve this problem either.
So it’s not surprising that the majority of blogs are
abandoned — the most-cited reason being “No one was reading it.” No one
might be following your Twitter stream either, but Twitter is designed
for network effects to take hold and given the natural reciprocity
among groups of friends, it’s likely that most people have at least a
handful of followers they know.
Back to Twitter: Why Audience works
Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides
real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all
previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it)
and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter
because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages
and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and
references in future conversations (online and offline).
Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create
cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson
from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving
the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has
missed the full power of Audience so far.
Facebook: Designed for Audience? Not so much.
Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let
me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about
self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression
isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”
Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.
Sharing with the News Feed: Did it ever reach my friends?
Facebook was the first major social network to introduce the News Feed
concept, which has since become a standard sauce for stickiness in many
places (although not StudiVZ surprisingly).
But Facebook’s implementation of the News Feed doesn’t capture the full
power of designing for Audience: While Twitter distributes every
message consistently, Facebook decides algorithmically which update is
shown to whom. Algorithmic filtering is nice in theory, but such
black-box behavior is simply unpredictable for the user.
“When I post new things, will my friends actually see them?”, one might
wonder. And conversely: “Have my friends posted something that I’m not
seeing? The news feed is cluttered right now with people I don’t care
about.” Anything that’s unpredictable produces a feeling of uncertainty
— and that’s never a comfortable feeling.
Even with Facebook’s recent attempts to introduce smarter
filters, users only have relative means to customize their feed (more
of this, less of that). Furthermore, there is mostly just one kind of
feedback that users can give on the News Feed: comments. Imagine a
concert, in which you could only leave written notes as you left — no
clapping, no booing.
Because users don’t really know who’s listening on Facebook and who isn’t, the platform hasn’t been embraced as a place to publish proactively. Publishing events or photos is mostly push-driven (and generates an email — “you are invited to an event” or “tagged in a photo”). But for everything else you share, do you know if it ever reached your friends?
Who capitalized on this gap? FriendFeed.
It’s the same setup as Twitter, but with more content: You know who’s
listening and you choose the people you listen to. A useful premise but
it also has a catch: the word “more”. Too much content, too many people
— which is exactly the problem that Facebook is trying to address with
its algorithmic feed. But what’s a solution then? It’s not the “middle
ground” and it has nothing to do with smarter filters.
credit - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/10/why-twitter-hasnt-failed-the-power-of-audience/
Atomkeep is a service that lets you sync, import, and merge your personal profile data across multiple services. It's trying to solve one of the many side effects of service saturation by giving people a central place to manage personal data on a pretty grand scale, like say every popular service you're using right now. Changed your address? Don't bother logging in to each place to make the change. Instead you can edit your AtomKeep profile (which contains nearly every conceivable field) and then push it out to just the services you want, or all of them at once. You can also bring in your profile data from any service you're signed up for, and merge it in to your Atomkeep profile to push back out to other places. It's actually incredibly simple to manage. One thing to note is that Atomkeep doesn't hang on to any of your passwords. It's nice enough to keep your username for each service, but that doesn't make having to re-enter your password across four or five of the 23 available services any easier. Ideally, future iterations could adopt a system similar to Roboform orPasspack, with a master password that supersedes your account password to unlock a treasure trove of log-ins. As the service scales to integrate more and more sites, this is going to be the one thing holding it back from being truly user friendly. In addition to its core profile service, you can also take all your social profiles and stick them on a badge that can be dropped into blogs or e-mails. Other users can then click on any service icon and be taken straight to that profile as long as it's public. There's even an option to drop in your resume, which can be pulled in from services like Facebook simply using your work history, or a fully formatted version from places like Monster and LinkedIn. Related: Ping.fm blasts messages to five microblogging services at once [via Lifehacker and ReadWriteWeb] Manage your profiles across multiple services with Atomkeep, a simple profile management tool.
July 24, 2008 — 09:30 AM PDT — by —
Seeing
as how Web services today are becoming more and more multi-faceted and
multi-functional, particularly in the social networking and social
media space, it really is open to debate what is and what is not part
of a specific segment of the market. Where blogging starts and where
networking ends, for instance, is a gray area that has grown ever
larger with time. Mobile utilities in particular have evolved to
contain powerful assets that accomplish several tasks at once.
Good ol’ run-of-the-mill blogging: TypePad and WordPress
If we burrow down to the core of the blogging world, there are several platforms which sport robust frameworks, and many of them are free to use. WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Live Spaces, are just a few that sport mass userships and audiences. But only two currently reside as native, officially-released applications within the iPhone/iPod touch paradigm. They are, as we noted recently, TypePad and Wordpress.
WordPress arrived with its own utility after TypePad had introduced itself to users. Both have received good reviews so far. And why not, really. Both aptly manage the basic tasks of posting and editing blogs, and each enables the user to upload photos from a library or take new images via the iPhone’s onboard camera.
I have already offered my own impressions about both applications, and happen to favor TypePad’s application a bit more than the WordPress release because TypePad provides support for English and French, but both essentially get the same job done similarly well. Neither path will lead you astray. Quite honestly, as I said before, one’s choice of application will naturally fall to whichever platform one prefers as it appears on the desktop, and whether one has invested much time in either setting.
Micro-blogging
There
are even more choices in the microblogging realm, and if photos are
one’s main source of intrigue, the list is even more voluminous. So
let’s dig in. To start, there are the Twitter-specific applications: Twitterific, available for free and ad-supported [iTunes
]; or as a paid-for premium version [iTunes]; Twittelator [iTunes]; and Twinkle [iTunes].
My experiences, coupled with feedback from others tells me Twitterific is the most pleasant, as it has the benefit of housing a browser within.
If you’re one to click on URLs posted by friends, this is definitely a convenient feature. And in my trials, it has proven quite reliable. It is most useful due to the fact that it makes any transfer out of Twitterific and into Safari Mobile unnecessary. Once you’ve taken a look at whatever webpage you were directed to, you can close the browser and immediately carry on with reading incoming feeds. No need to repetitively enter and exit applications.
Twinkle is aesthetically pleasing, no doubt, and it adds a location dimension to facilitate conversation among users within a given area. But the application has been known to crash regularly. According to Tapulous, Inc, the creator of Twinkle, an update should arrive this Friday, July 25, to fix bugs and “other minor problems.”
Miscellaneous and (even more) multi-functional
Here’s where it all comes down to personal tastes and desires. Some applications will connect you to numerous services for easy, synchronized posting. Others will help you satisfy only your tendencies as a photo blogger. Some will help you connect with friends, micro-blog a bit, and even post duplicate hellos and how-are-yous to Twitter. That’s because… well… it all comes back to Twitter, doesn’t it? Without further adieu, here are some items for your consideration listed in no particularly prearranged order.
LifeCast [iTunes]:
Manage your day’s events in organized fashion. Want to keep what you do
for work and for play exclusive? No problem. LifeCast is about keeping
things tidy. Also, non-English speakers will enjoy its slightly
multi-lingual reach. French, German, Italian, and Spanish are all
supported. Also, if you’d like to post text to Blogger, you may. The same goes for Tumblr (photos, too). Geo-tagging comes with.
Bluepulse [iTunes]: We gave this a brief review
some days ago. And while it wasn’t my personal cup of tea, it’s
something that others have shown an affinity for. If you’d like
something Twitter-esque (with a Twitter connection, to boot), albeit in
a way that allows you to message multiple people of your choosing —
rather than, say, everyone on your friends and followers list(s) — this
one’s a treat. The layout may take some getting used to, though. It
appears designed to make existing Bluepulse users comfortable when
making “the switch.”
ShoZu [iTunes]:
If this one were to be described in a single word (not yet recognized
by the grammar police), it would no doubt be “awesomeness.” You need
only look at the list of supported sites and services to get a grasp on
what this ShoZu
is all about. It is the Swiss Army knife of online social interaction
(so far as photo uploads and status updates and things are concerned,
anyway).
Pownce [iTunes]: Despite what the heads at Pownce
say, this one’s original intent was most definitely to give Twitter a
little slap-slap. Which seemed like it might’ve been possible, until it
didn’t. For what it’s worth, it’s still a nifty service. If you want it
on your iPhone, the download is available.
Kyte [iTunes]: Mobile photo blogging is super cool, for sure. But mobile slideshow blogging is exponentially more kick-ass. Kyte makes that happen. For this one you might need to take a few minutes to craft something nice, but it’s worth it.
Clowdy Photo Blogger [iTunes]:
The name says it all. It also lets you see photos taken “nearby” to
where you stand. A number of downloads currently available in the App
Store do this as well, but Clowdy works the photo realm exclusively.
It’s free, and it’s all of 0.1MB large.
Graffitio [iTunes]:
This operates with the same location-based concept as Clowdy, but it’s
text-based. The best way to explain it is to offer an example. Say
you’re at a restaurant. You can check Graffitio to see if a
Facebook-like “wall” has been created for the place. If so, you can
post a public message to it. If a wall doesn’t exist, create one. If
enough people participate in the experiment and visit various locations
regularly, it starts to become a rather interesting series of
whiteboards.
Speaking of Facebook, the Web’s largest social network (arguably) has its own application [iTunes], as many have already learned, and in some respects, it’s about blogging, too. If you’re one to routinely update your status, and your friends do too, what’s to say you all aren’t blogging? And with the recent update to the application, introduced late last week, you can post to your own wall as well as those of friends. Upload photos seamlessly too.
Twitter app Twinkle shines on Apple's new device
One of the things I've noticed in the emerging wave of iPhone applications is that many of the highest rated applications could be found on the App Store's illegitimate precursor--Nullriver's application installer. Several of these applications have been under almost constant development for the greater part of a year, long before Apple made the SDK available. In the case of newcomer Twinkle, that extra time really shows.
You might remember our hands-on with Twinkle back in April. Its claim to fame is that it mixes in location-based services with Twitter, not only letting you tweet with your location to show to others, but also see what users around you are up to within various location radii. Other Twitter apps on the iPhone have location as well, but none add this extra level of exploration. One of the perks of legitimacy is that there are more people using this than before, making it beneficial as long as you live in a place with high iPhone saturation.
Location isn't the only improvement though, the application now has far more user-friendly error handling. Whether you've got a bad connection or Twitter is down, it'll let you know with grace (this weekend's S3 outages and Twitter downtime didn't help). It's even got an amusing whale tail in reference to Twitter's now infamous icon of service failure.
The legitimate iPhone version also adds in a new profile feature that is quite cunning. Tapulous, the creators of Twinkle as well as Tap Tap Revolution (also formerly a jailbroken iPhone app), have created a universal profile system that goes across all of its applications. This means if you've registered in one program, it will port over your credentials to the other.
In the case of Twinkle, this new profile system ends up being a little confusing because sorting through tweets from those around you presents your Tapulous account information, while regular Tweets just link off to your Twitter account with that specific profile picture.
All in all, Twinkle has retained much of its original spirit with this new iteration. Over the weekend Tapulous sponsored a scavenger hunt to take advantage of the application's photo-sharing feature. More things like that are likely to attract newbies of both Twitter and the iPhone. Below is a quick demo of it in action.
Twinkle Demo from Josh Lowensohn on Vimeo.
iPhone Apps We Like: Twitteriffic is Best Twitter App
Over at the still-going Apps review marathon,
we've touched on three Twitter apps that bring the service to iPhone
2.0, with varying degrees of success. Twitterific's version for the
iPhone is as good as their OS X desktop client with a beautiful
interface, and it's free if you don't mind the ads ($10 to make them go
away).
By comparison, the other main free app Twittelator is a bit more buggy (can't connect to server errors, etc) and is far less pretty. Neither can notify you from the background, though, so for timely updates a lot of people will still be using good ol' SMS to let everyone know when dishes are being washed, meals eaten, etc. One thing: Twitteriffic still not quite as good as the free jailbreak app Twinkle, which allows you to filter tweets by people who are within a certain distance of yourself. [App Review Marathon]
credit - gizmondo.com
iPhone app hands-on: Twitterific
Posted By benwilson On July 15, 2008 @ 10:08 am In Applications | No Comments
The [1] Iconfactory has created two versions of Twitterrific, its [2] Twitter client for the iPhone. One is an advertisement supported free version while the other is a Premium version that’s advertisement free. The latter sells for $9.99.
The iPhone version of Twitterrific will display all recent posts (”tweets”). These include all replies and direct messages from [3] Twitter. The application has been designed for either left or right handed use and allows easy attachment of photos, locations and favorites.
Like the desktop version, Twitterific for the iPhone is easy to use and has a clean interface. The App uses coloring to differentiate between Tweets and direct messages. In the default interface, direct messages are a tan color whereas the Tweets are blue. A nicely done hints system has also been implemented.
The program takes advantage of location services and like many other
early iPhone apps. If a tweet is received from from nearby, the user is
presented with highlighted link that launches Maps. The app also has a
built-in mini-browser that lets you display some links and
@screen_names. Lots of built in pop-up hints are also included.
Craig Hockenberry from the Iconfactory offers some tips, comments and known issues for the App [4] here.
credit - iphoneatlas.com