Three Things You Didn&#8217;t Know

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Twitter Style Manual

August 20th, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter, social media

stylebook

Remember the days we used Twitter to answer the question “What are you doing?” I still do on occasion, but over time, Twitter has become much more than that. Now it’s a conversation, a sounding board, a think tank, and a place to broadcast my work.

There is no question that Twitter is a powerful tool. And as with most powerful tools, over time we have figured out what works and what doesn’t. Over at Social Media Today, Sherry Main has drafted a Twitter style-guide to summarize some key things we’ve discovered about using Twitter most effectively:

Observe proper spelling, grammar and case. “Typing in all lower case doesn’t gain you any extra characters,” writes Main. “Unless you’re fighting for space, use proper grammar.”
Links are great, but take the time to give a good description of what you’re sharing. “Think of it as a movie trailer,” Main says. “Don’t just post a link.” And please remember to mention whether something is work safe or not. A lot of people are using Twitter for business purposes and checking from their offices and they deserve the right to know what’s hiding inside that bit.ly.
Don’t just retweet everything that people are asking you to retweet, or assume that you know what a link is about without clicking through yourself. Take the time to make sure that what you’re putting out there has value–for your audience.
When you’re retweeting, keep the list of names short. You don’t have to link all the people it took for you to get a link, listing the person you source is enough. “If someone is interested in seeing who the original source is, they can click on to the person you retweeted, or do a Twitter Search of the phrase or link,” says Main. “Too many @usernames in a single tweet just becomes name-dropping.” And takes up the space people could use to retweet.
Don’t retweet everything. Change it up a bit–offer your own summary or take on a link and include a “via @username” at the end. That format still gives credit but allows you to share your own words so you’re not just parroting content in your stream. Your own ideas keep your stream original, even if you are passing a link that other people have already tweeted.
“Use hashtags (#) appropriately, and sparingly,” writes Main. Hashtags enable other Twitter users to search topics and engage in open conversation around them using Twitter Search. The danger of hashtags is that they can clutter your messages, so choose wisely.
Leave room for people to retweet you. The standard is 20 characters. I’ve worked with less and personally, I prefer to rewrite than simply retweet, but a lot of people don’t have that kind of time. Be good to them. Leave them some room.

I have a few more to add to this, and it’s about conversation. Twitter is a conversation, yes. But that doesn’t mean it should be used regularly as an instant messaging platform. If you feel some conversations fit your brand and the general discussion is useful to your followers, they should be had publicly. But if the subject matter isn’t a topic you think will benefit your users, the best option is to take it to direct message.

Messages like “LOL!” and “that’s interesting,” definitely fit into that category.

MORE
10 Basic Rules Of Twitter (And How To Avoid Being A Twanker) by Rohit Bhargava

Social Media isn’t going away, either get on the bus, or get left behind by MackCollier

Four-Step Plan for Getting Started in Social Media by David B. Thomas

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Tags: Social Media Today, Twitter

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#FollowFriday: A Great Idea Gone Fail?

June 29th, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter

When I first started using Twitter over two years ago, there wasn’t really a way to do things. Twitter had been around some time, but many users were still figuring out what we wanted to use it for. Times have changed since: we’ve figured out Twitter has more value as a conversation tool than a stream of status updates, we know the value of hashtags in keeping up with developing events, we have developed a way to credit those whose information we relay in our own tweets, and so on. But we’re all still learning.

Every once in a while conversation will erupt around a certain practice–should we follow everyone who follows us? Are “thanks for following me! Here’s a link to my site!” auto-DMs nice or spammy? Should we block bots who follow us or let them pump up our follower counts?–and the dialog that follows will help define yet another code for Twitter users.

This week, the topic is Follow Friday, otherwise known among Twitter users as #followfriday (or #ff). According to Sean Percival, founder of lalawag, the LA tech and entertainment gossip blog, #followfriday is ruining Twitter. For those not in the know, #followfriday is the Friday tradition of naming Twitter users whom you believe are worth following. Since the tradition began in January, it’s exploded and now many users, including Percival, have raised concerns about its tendency to become useless spam:

I actually think Follow Friday is a fine idea, but with any good idea it usually becomes warped and stupid. Truth is most of you are doing it wrong. Sometimes I get included in #FF post and click through to see who gave me a mention. There I find a dump of their other #FF tweets, blasting out some 20 names at a time with no context what-so-ever. Why should I follow them? Because you said so? Just do me a favor, click through here to read about Follow Friday from its creator, and learn how to do it right.

According to the creator of the massively popular movement, Micah Baldwin, #followfriday is about making one or two recommendations and giving a short explanation for these, not jam-packing as many people as possible into a single tweet–or worse, a series of tweets.

Solutions?

Usually on #followfriday, I select a theme, then offer users worth following according to my theme. The last time I did a #followfriday, I mentioned a group of empowered women in tech about whom I’d been tweeting using the hashtag #fempire. To give my followers an overview of this group of fantastic women, I involved them in my #followfriday in the following way:

An example of a themed #followfriday.

It’s occurred to me that this may not be enough. In a world where more and more people are joining Twitter and looking for quality content, it is our responsibility, when providing our followers with suggestions, to offer more tangible reasons to follow people whose content we enjoy. I would much rather offer one or two users in my #followfriday tweets with a good reason than spam them with all my best friends over and over.

How do compose a #followfriday tweet? Do you ever click through your friends’ #followfriday recommendations when no other information is given?

MORE FROM AROUND THE WEB

The Follow Friday (#followfriday) Manifesto by Grant McDonald (@chichiri) and Kay Ballard (@KayBallard)

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Tags: #followfriday, Twitter

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Twitter is a Spam Farm

June 17th, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter

“Twitter’s value is in links…. What happened when Twitter started, it was supposed to change the face of communications–what happened with all of that?” asks Loren Feldman, founder of 1938Media in his most recent diatribe about the tech industry. “It’s a link farm, it’s a spam farm. There’s no conversations. It doesn’t f*cking matter, you idiots, changing your location to Iran? Jesus, you’re f*cking stupid. Unbelievable! … It’s all a bunch of f*cking lies! No one cares about your Twitter. Just put up your link and that’s it!”

His outburst touches on several issues Feldman has with the 140 Conference, in particular comments made yesterday by Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures who talked about the power of Twitter in getting links out.

The 140 Character Conference (#140conf) focused on how Twitter is changing the way individuals and industries do a lot of things. From the use of Twitter in diplomacy to breaking news, from personal relationships to connecting with our favorite stars, the world is no longer what it once was and the 140 Conference sought to explore that.

Whether or not the conference is essential or even beneficial, I don’t know, because I did not attend. What I can say is that Twitter is a great tool. Yes, you can use it for links, but the key word here is not “links,” it’s “use.” Twitter is a tool. You can create a spam farm or you can create conversation. You can follow people who primarily communicate with links, or you can connect with people who generate discussions. You can command an audience within your industry or network with friends.

It’s entirely up to you.

So if you wake up and one morning and find yourself buried in horsesh*t, well, baby, I guess you’re a horse.

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Tags: #140conf, 140 Character Conference, 1938media, Loren Feldman, Twitter

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Spymaster: A Low-Maintenance Game for a 140-Character World

May 31st, 2009 by AV Flox in Twitter

Spymaster

It’s five in the morning and I’m exhausted but I can’t get offline. The reason? A Twitter-based game called Spymaster, much like the Mafia Wars app on Facebook.

Mafia Wars never spoke to me, but Spymaster, with its espionage-based tasks and activities, had an immediate draw. Using OAuth, the game is directly linked to your Twitter account, so there is no need to create another profile to play. You simply click through from an invite on Twitter and begin.

You can pick from a selection of intelligence agencies including the British M16, the American CIA and the Russian FSB. For doing tasks like collecting dead drops or assassinating an ambassador, you get experience points and money–in the currency of the agency you have chosen. This money helps you buy weapons on the black market to increase your attack and defense sums.

Because this is a social game, your attack and defense sums are also related to how many followers you have on Twitter and how many of them you can get in the game.

The more tweeps you bring on board, the stronger you are and the less desirous other players will be of committing an assassination attempt on you. (If they do try and win, they can take a lot of your assets. If they fail, they lose assets to you.)

The game has spread in popularity because of the use of notifications on Twitter, which bear a link to the game and the hashtag #spymaster. Players have the option of turning these notifications on or off, though leaving them on makes a player more money every time he or she does anything. Savvier users turned most off, but many more did not, causing #spymaster to trend quickly, drawing the attention of even more Twitter users.

As of this posting, 140 of my Twitter followers are playing the game. This number includes programmers, graphic designers, CEOs, journalists–all of us deep in our agencies and assassinations ploys, playing at work and long into the night.

How did it come about?

“We all sat around one day, and decided we wanted to do something really fun on Twitter,” says Chris Abad, CEO at iList, the company that created Spymaster. “Eston Bond has been obsessed with the whole spy genre, so we took all that obsession and random knowledge and ran with it.”

iList has developing Twitter-related technology for the past year, but this game didn’t come into being until a couple of months ago, Abad tells me.

“We all kind of knew people were going to like Spymaster,” he says. “As we played in-house, we found ourselves becoming pretty addicted (which subsequently made it a little difficult to stay focused and developing). However, I don’t think anyone predicted the ridiculous levels of growth we’ve seen since the past few days.”

They started sending invites outside the company late on Thursday of last week. Since then, the game has exploded.

What drive in us does it so deeply satisfy that we can’t put it down? I contacted a friend of mine at the University of Melbourne, Darshana Jayemanne, whose studies on social theory and recent work exploring the video game as a form of art are incredibly relevant to the topic:

How has social media changed the way we play?

Games used to have a ritual or ceremonial character, in which a community could reaffirm its sense of cohesiveness and perhaps correct for traumatic events (think of Hektor’s funeral games in The Iliad).

So many of our collective behaviors are affected by technology, it kind of takes the place of ceremonial forms in traditional societies. So it’s small wonder that we observe play-behaviors accumulating around these supposedly utilitarian devices.

Why is Spymaster gaining so much popularity?

The game is similar to some other stuff that’s going around on other sites, and there’s a lot that could be said in general about why these games work. In particular though, I think the sync between the espionage theme and Twitter in particular works very well–Twitter itself feels kind of clandestine, like you’re immersed in these minutiae of other people’s lives as well as sharing select bits of information yourself.

The Twitterverse exists parallel to the mundane
world, a bit like Mail Art or the Trystero in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The stress of just how much to share is central to the spy thriller genre in which various bait-and-switches, mirroring and foreshadowing techniques are similar to the feeling you get piecing together someone’s life from a stream of terse messages.

An unexamined life is not worth spying on.

The other thing is that we all tend to carry around more devices than any ’60s supervillain anyway. And we love to use them for fun as well as business, to use our devices in support of our vices. It’s a quasi-fetishistic activity, in fact, what Walter Benjamin would have called “the sex appeal of the inorganic.”

What drive does it satisfy?

It’s all in the design. Games are set up to organize desires around reward structures. So the design sets up the drive. Once you’re hooked to the reward structures, and can compare your success or failure to others (through points or money or what have you), it’s a self-sustaining process. Or so the designers hope. The “become a vampire/werewolf/zombie/banker/whatever” game apps on Facebook got old quickly–their scope was too limited.

Spymaster, on the other hand, is constantly developing.

“As the game unfolds at higher levels, the storyline will become more intricate and involved and there will be surprises along the way,” Abad tells me. “We really want to push more real-world cooperation and collaboration between players. Especially the experienced players who’ve mastered the basics and really want to get creative.”

Creating a successful game, Jayemanne tells me, “involves carefully gauging the resources you’re asking the player to invest among other things. With Spymaster, for example, they may have got the balance right for their platform. Unlike a video game where you have these huge overheads in terms of time spent playing, equipment investment, social ostracization and so on, Spymaster keeps it simple.”

It’s what he calls an “‘interstitial game’ which appears in the cracks between work and life situations rather than requiring the undivided attention implied in Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ theory.”

“With mobile devices becoming smarter and ever-more pervasive, these games will come into their own,” Jayemanne says.

Abad is aware of the importance of mobile technology. So far Spymaster can only be played on a browser. He tells me that one of the comments they most often hear (other than “can I play?”) is whether they have an iPhone app out yet. It’s in the works.

Now you can really kiss all your productivity bye-bye.

Comments by Chris Abad were appended on June 2, 2009.

Three Things You Didn’t Know

There will be more awesome games like Spymaster. iList has built a platform around this technology and, according to Abad, “intend to aggressively pursue this direction.”
Usually players are wounded in assassination attempts. But they can be killed. Killing them takes them completely out of the game for 15 minutes.
You can’t buy the title of Agency Director in the game with n00dz. According to Abad, only the product team get that title. You’re welcome to send them to me, however. If I like them, you can even come play at my safe house.

Of possible interest:
The Spymaster Backlash Begins by MG Siegler at TechCrunch

SPIELRAUM: Games, Art and Cyberspace by Darshana Jayemanne at the University of Melbourne

Photo montage features an image of me by Derek Overbey and an image of a steam pipe explosion in New York by Peter Foley

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