How Twitter's Staff Uses Twitter (And Why It Could Cause Problems)
Twitter has captured peoples' imaginations like nothing else on the web in years. It's growing fast, gets talked about all the time in other media, has fostered a huge developer community and gets used in more ways than anyone could have thought possible. It's a great tool for journalists, for students, for knitters, for marketers and for people in many other walks of life.
What if the people working at Twitter Inc. aren't using the service the way many of its power users are, though? We've examined the posting and following habits of people on the company's staff and found that Twitter team members don't follow very many other people, they aren't following many of the top developers in their own community and they don't even Tweet very much. This could be cause for concern among power users who depend on the service as it exists now, much less for those hoping it will be developed for even more powerful use cases.
Twitter co-founder, Jack Dorsey, said this week that he hopes the service will someday be just like electricity, something everyone uses but few feel the need to talk about. To follow that analogy, if you were someone who used a heavy duty washer and dryer in your home and found out that the electric company didn't employ people who regularly used any appliances bigger than a toaster - wouldn't you be a little concerned about the long term viability of your power supply?
Here are a few data points we've picked out, followed by a response we got from Twitter CEO, Evan Williams, when we asked about these issues.
Twitter's employees don't twitter very much. Looking over recent messages posted by the 49 people at Twitter Inc., you'll see that the group as a whole averages about 100 to 150 messages per day, or 2 to 3 per person per day. That is very casual use. It's ok to use Twitter mostly for listening, of course, and there are lots of people for whom 2 to 3 tweets per day feels like a lot. There are many, many people for whom 2 or 3 posts per day indicate health issues or alien abduction though (they usually tweet far more than that) and shouldn't those people be concerned that no one at the company can relate to their experiences and needs? To be fair, some Twitter team members may never tweet while others tweet all day long and will stick up for the rest of us that do too. On average though, Twitter use at Twitter HQ doesn't look like our experience with Twitter.
Twitter employees don't follow very many other people. Twitter staff members tend to have a huge number of followers, but they don't follow many people themselves. When we checked a few weeks ago only 2 out of 49 Twitter team members were following more than 500 people and no one was over 1k. That has since changed a little, it appears there are four staff people following 500 users and CEO @Ev is now following 1002.
That's very unusual behavior on Twitter. Most people on staff are being followed by more than 1,000 people, many by tens or hundreds of thousands. To see how unusual that is - there are a total of 300 Twitter users who list themselves as living in California and who have more than 5,000 followers. 80% of those people are following 1k or more in return.
There are approximately 20 people on Twitter who identify themselves as fans of knitting and who have more than 1k followers. Every one of those extra-popular knitters are following more than 500 people themselves.
That means that while about 8% of Twitter staff (a popular group) are following 500 or more Twitter users, 100% of the popular knitters on Twitter are following 500 or more people. What's up with that? (Stats compiled with the use of Tweepz, a great Twitter search engine.)
See also: the people most followed by Twitter staff.
Twitter staff members aren't following top Twitter developers in the community. The Twitter API was the crown jewel of the company in the early pre-Oprah/Ashton days. Are the developers building on top of that API a valued part of the Twitter community though? We expected to see Twitter staff following some of those developers, but the numbers indicate that they are not.
We made a list of 8 of the top 3rd party Twitter development projects around the web (through our own perception of market leadership and a trip to delicious.com/popular/twitter) and then we found out who worked on those projects by searching the Twitter directory Twellow. We then cross referenced the list of people followed by Twitter staff members with the developer names for companies including Tweetdeck, Tweetmeme, Tweetie, Tweetgrid, Tweetstats, Seesmic, Tipjoy and Stocktwits.
The conclusion? 8 out of 49 people at Twitter are following someone associated with Tipjoy. It's notable that Twitter and Tipjoy share common investors. 4 out of 49 people at Twitter follow Loic Le Meur of Seesmic, but he's a Silicon Valley celeb. 4 out of 49 people at Twitter follow people working on Tweetie, the most popular Twitter app on the iPhone. One person follows members of the Tweetdeck crew, by far the most popular desktop app for using Twitter. One person! (That's Doug Williams who does.)
None of the other leading Twitter developers we looked at were followed by more than one or two Twitter team members. That sounds to us like Twitter isn't engaged in "that special Twitter way" with its own outside developers.
Evan Williams directed us to the @TwitterAPI account regarding this issue (and thanked us for pointing out that he wasn't following the Tweetie team yet) but @TwitterAPI is following almost no one - it's just a customer service line for developers, arguably not an active participant in the developer community.
Why Does This Matter?
Is it important that Twitter staff doesn't include power users as we understand the term? Dave Winer once explained quite simply why the question of how Twitter is going to make money is important, a related question:
"it could turn out, when Twitter reveals its business model, that it's something we don't like. We won't know where we, the users, fit in -- until they tell us how they're going to make money. And when they tell us, we may not like it."
So too, if Twitter staff has a different understanding of its own technology, it's liable to make decisions that negatively impact those of us who have radically different understandings. Twitter staff appears to use the service to communicate with their friends, with people they already know. That's just a part of it for many of the rest of us; people also use it for serious business, for research, for alerting the public at large about important news - for all kinds of different things.
A difference in understanding between Twitter staff and power users may have been a big part of the recent blow-up over changes made to the public @ replies (a major issue!). Twitter's particular vision for what many of us hope will be a long-term wide-open platform could have big consequences for things like bulk data analysis and historical archiving. Things could get real messy.
Think of the analogy above again: let's say you use large quantities of electricity, in unusual but important ways. A power company that understands and supports that when it comes down to the smallest details is important. Twitter as power is not an unreasonable analogy - it's a technology enabling a big new form of communication. A Twitter decision that gets @ replies or searches wrong for big users would be comparable to a WordPress (or Blogger.com) that gets decisions wrong concerning support for trackbacks or ping server relationships.
What Does Twitter HQ Have to Say About This?
We emailed Twitter about these discrepancies between the way they use the service and the way that many power users do and CEO, Evan Williams, was very gracious in responding. We'll post his reply below for readers to consider for themselves.
"Hi, Marshall.You bring up some interesting questions.
As you know, there are lots of different ways to use Twitter. Many people fall into the trap that you should follow all or most people back out of a sense of politeness or so-called engagement with the community. But the fact is, having more followers does not give you more time in the day (as much as I'd like to sell that). At a certain point, you're not actually reading any more tweets by following more people -- you're just dipping into the stream somewhat randomly and missing a whole lot of what people say.
That's fine, but I believe people will generally get more value out of Twitter by dropping the symmetrical relationship expectation and simply curating their following list based on the information and people they want to tune in to.
I follow almost 1,000 accounts. Among these, yes, there are celebrities (because I'm interested in how they're using Twitter as well as what some of them have to say). There are Twitter developers. (You mentioned a few I don't follow -- there are several that I do.) I try to follow all Twitter employees, some potential employees, industry leaders, friends, family, and other people I care about, people (or organizations) who make me smarter, or people who make me laugh. It's hard to know if this is the *right* set of accounts to follow. And I'm constantly curating my list. (In fact, I'm now following @atebits since you pointed it out. Account discovery is something we need to work a lot on.)
1,000 feels to me currently to be about the right number -- but I still miss a lot. And other people (like Biz and other folks in the company) are comfortable with a much smaller number because they don't want to miss as much.
Also, keep in mind that a following list does not reveal, necessarily, what one is paying attention to. Hundreds of people give me feedback by mentioning @ev -- which I check many times a day. I also have saved searches for "twitter" and other related terms.
On the topic of developers, Biz and I aren't a fair gauge on whether the company is paying attention to them. We find them incredibly important, but we aren't able to pay enough attention to them, so we've hired people to do so full time. You'll find the @twitterapi account replying to developers all day long, for instance. And that's just one of our communication avenues.
I hope this addresses your questions.
Ev.
That's a good response, but it sure seems to be based on a different understanding of Twitter than many power users and early adopters would offer. The idea that not following people is the best way to avoid missing things is very counter to the approach that other people take. That's what groups are for, something hugely valuable that 3rd party desktop clients offer and the Twitter web interface does not. Ev and Biz Stone don't appear to use desktop clients, though. Will they continue to offer the kind of technical support that desktop app power-users need? How about even better technical support to foster even more innovation? Those are the kinds of questions that arise when this service provider appears to be using its own service in a manner so different from the way that journalists, marketers, professional networkers and other power users use it.
You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Sean Ammirati, Doug Coleman, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro, Steven Walling and Lidija Davis.
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I hate to sound trollish but this examination of the way the twitter team uses their own product speaks volumes about how they're unfit to run the company anymore.
From the @replies fiasco to buying Values of N and then shutting down the "I want Sandy" service twitter has yet to apply any sort of logic to their product.
Couple that with a vast disconnect between business acumen and their seeming inability to moentize (I and countless others have suggested things like bringing I want Sandy back or even letting users pay to have more than 100 API calls per hour).
The fact that there is a scheduled downtime at 8pm pacific shows that twitter is successful in spite of the twitter staff not because of anything they do.
I honestly hope they do decide to sell the business to someone that has some idea of how to run what should be a massively profitable site.
Interesting article Marshall and you definitely had my attention in the beginning, but Ev did make some good points. Also, maybe it's a good thing they aren't too busy using Twitter. Gives them more time to work on the service infrastructure itself. I'm definitely with you on the @replies change. I miss seeing random @replies. It was a great way to discover new people to follow. In fact my follow activity on Twitter has been hindered by this change. It was my primary method of finding new, interesting folks. So maybe Twitter staff can use their free time not tweeting and following and get that functionality back =)
I don't think this is as big an issue as the article makes it seem. From the very start, we have known what the Twitter developers suggest that Twitter be used for: "Twitter is a service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?" Following thousands of people doesn't really correspond with the "friends, family, and coworkers" portion. In addition, many Twitter developers may think that two or three tweets per day counts as "frequent".
Should Twitter whip out a business model that the majority of the community does not like, we will all move to identi.ca or some other microblogging provider unless Twitter would change its policies to appeal to the majority.
There really isn't that much to worry about, I would think.
Great post Marshall - and you make some great points. I agree that we don't have to follow everyone back however, and even as a "relative" early adopter, I'm very, very selective who I'm following back anymore. I'm leaning towards waiting for conversations to develop, then relationships, then follow-back - which is probably why I'm still under 1000 followers. ;) But I think @ev has some good points.
But your point, trumps his. Either they need to use Twitter the way others are using it, or, may I suggest they create a user's advisory group to give input on future development/changes.
Twitter staffers using their product the way most people do (as opposed to power users and early adopters) has worked well for them so far. As important as it is to keep the most hardcore users happy, it can be dangerous to cater to them too much at the expense of your larger user base. The big flaw in this article is assuming it is normal to follow 1000+ users. I'd guess that the vast majority of active Twitter users follow far less than that. Twitter should (and seem to) be focusing on creating a better experience for those people, while making sure the service doesn't break down too badly for the outlying power users.
Good lord, this is a long post...saving it for bed time reading :)
Great post. You would hope there would be some basic leadership by example. After all, who better to help us understand how to get more out of Twitter than the creators and employees themselves. Based on your stats it doesn't seem like one of the fastest growing community apps on the planet cares much about building its own community. On the other hand, to be fair, there is some merit to @ev's claim that following too many people makes it hard to discern those you are most interested from others. On FriendFeed my favorite list has less than 30 people on it and it's where I derive the most value. His point therefore seems valid in terms of how he gets utility from the platform but yours is as well in terms of what message it might send on the surface. I guess it's a structural problem with Twitter. If they had the same ability to segregate subscriptions as FriendFeed it wouldn't be an issue.
Posted by: Mike Elliott
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June 5, 2009 3:40 PM
Twitter staff ARE leading by example -- their example even shows how they expected it to be used (and what it was engineered to handle?)
Posted by: Joel Bennett
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June 5, 2009 3:42 PM
Correct me if I'm wrong but I would say that "power users" comprise less than 1% of Twitter's users and it's a dumb idea to cater to 1% of your users. Plus, the "power users" don't use Twitter in a meaningful manner that promotes what Twitter is about.
I think you're getting a bit worked up over nothing. So Twitter staff don't do a lot of following or Tweeting and use it different from others. That's up to them - no one is forced to follow everyone or tweet lots. Some people email lots, some don't. The beauty of the medium is that you can tailor it to what works for each individual. I don't follow people because they tweet a lot, I follow people because when they tweet, it's interesting.
Or, get this, perhaps they're too busy actually working on improving Twitter to actually tweet,,,
Sad that the decision makers at Twitter have such contempt for us users, the very people that have made them all so wealthy and successful.
And its surprising the power of their own product isn't being used by the staff in any meaningful ways for community management, technical support and just cause its fun to connect with one's users.
Success breeds contempt, ala Microsoft, I guess. Killing off discovery through @'s should have been our first clue that Fonzie has his water skis on.
When I read @ev's condescending response above, it sounds as out of touch as Senator Ted Stevens famous "tubes" speech. The printed word doesn't convey if he was being sarcastic in that response, so I can only assume his dismissiveness is genuine.
I really hoped @ev and @biz would different and not be like this, but whatever. Thankfully the series of Tubes that is teh interwebz is a *fickle*, *FICKLE* mistress, the next new hotness is always just around the corner and the Twitter staff can watch Rome burn just like Frienster did.
Mark, you bring up what's clearly a really big issue. I'd argue though that Twitter is important not just because millions of people are using it, but because it's transformative. Who is pushing the envelope on that transformation? Power users are. Both groups are essential as constituencies, in my mind.
Oh no, Twitter's staff isn't using Twitter like we full-time bloggers too! To be serious, I think you miss the point that Twitter can be used in any way you like and is big enough for multiple types of usage. Twitter staff doesn't need to be "power users" to understand and use Twitter. Heck, I'd rather have them programming fixes than tweeting 5% of the time.
Posted by: Ben Parr
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June 5, 2009 3:47 PM
@Joel Bennet I see your point. I hadn't thought of it that way. Without the ability to segregate who they're following they lose utility by following more just for the sake of following. So maybe it's the other way around and we're just not following their example. Well said.
Posted by: Mike Elliott
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June 5, 2009 3:51 PM
I'm just going to assume that anyone who says "who cares, why does this matter" without responding to the section subtitled "why does this matter" didn't read that part of the article. Thoughts on why this matters are in there, though. :)
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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June 5, 2009 3:54 PM
If you worked at a McDonald's, how many McNuggets would you eat on a daily basis? I'm guessing not too many.
When Twitter is your job, you'd probably not tweet for fun.
Mark makes an excellent point and agree that Twitter's long term sustainability relies on transformation, but not from power users. Power users will adapt, albeit while complaining in the process - consumers are finicky. These power users, especially marketers and PR, will happily adapt if Twitter begins catering its product to more consumer users.
IMO, looking beyond the noisy 1% will help the company build a long standing product that average, Internet users can find value in. While engaging with brands is fun and provides a wealth of monetization value, none of that is going to be relevant if brands are just engaging with brands or industry professionals. How can there be a diverse conversation if it's a silo of happy, compliant power users?
Not saying the two are mutually exclusive but, Twitter is more fun exchanging banter with friends versus pitching products.
Cindy, it's not just about marketers. Twitter has great business uses for people in any field and if it gets pared down to really support nothing more than banter among friends, instead of being an inclusive open platform, that will be a real loss.
Also, since when do people think that founders' original intent is what's most important about a startup with traction?
Has anyone thought about the possibility that maybe the dev's are too busy building twitter to tweet? Tweeting and keeping up with 1000's of followers can be an incredible time sink. I have tried, i started cutting down my list recently.
Marshall you bring up some interesting points, but I don't know if I buy into the comparisons between Wordpress and Twitter. I get the publishing line of thought, but I don't know if I agree.
Posted by: Brandon Mendelson
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June 5, 2009 4:02 PM
Brandon, by that I mean the architecture of connection. Trackbacks were key to blogging, they were how people found out about eachother along with comments, and the @ reply is that same kind of thing. Now that's getting messed up.
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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June 5, 2009 4:08 PM
Twitter is remarkably responsive to any developer using the APIs. I have never seen any company being so well organized and so communicative.
But it is difficult to communicate about tech. issues in 140 characters. Therefore Twitter uses, like everybody else, electronic mailing lists for that type of communication. They have employees that are dedicated to the communication with the large community of programmers that are building additional services using the twitter API infrastructure. These are the real power users for Twitter and they are treated with respect.
Marshall, nice provocative post for a Friday afternoon. I've noticed for a long time that the Twitter principals don't use the service in the way that others, particularly power users do. And that's because as @BenParr says, "Twitter can be used in any way you like and is big enough for multiple types of usage."
@Ev's email on his own Twitter use seems well thought out and makes a lot of sense to me, given his schedule. To each his own, but I don't think Twitter's direction would be any different if @Ev followed the 800K people that followed him or even a much smaller number like 25K people.
Where I'd agree:
- It's important for the people developing the Twitter platform to understand how users are using Twitter.
Where I'd disagree:
- It's necessary for the developers to use Twitter to find out how users are using Twitter.
The goal here is really for the developers to understand the needs of the Twitter community so that they take the product in direction that improves the user experience across the spectrum of usage patterns (power users, casual users, etc...)
Where I think you've mistakenly made an intellectual leap: your assumption was that just because the Twitter team is not using Twitter like the power users are using Twitter, they won't be able to develop for the power users or to understand their needs.
This is simply not true. Notice that the @ replies fiasco only lasted 24 hours. Users told Twitter how they used the service and Twitter responded as a result of this feedback.
Feedback, interviews, and surveys are all ways to understand your users without needing to be your users. Oftentimes, observing them from a distance can actually give a better, not worse, picture of their needs.
Perhaps some Twitter staffers are experimenting with the concept of matching their Twitter streams with the Dunbar number theory, or the idea that humans can only maintain quality relationships with about 150 other people. Yes, tools like Tweetdeck and Tweetgrid can allow power users to follow many more people and group them to pay attention to only a few. But in those cases, perhaps the follows become meaningless, and the large numbers of followings and followers mean nothing for real relationships. The approach seems a rather thoughtful experiment in how software and people interact, rather than a short-term market-driven quest for bigger and more. It resembles the Freedom application developed by Fred Stutzman at UNC -- the inability to connect to a network often gives a user more freedom to create, think, focus and code. It's interesting to examine the difference in how Twitter staffers use Twitter and how _some_ power users conceive of the service, but it seems too early to call this difference a problem, unless you...
Thank you for clarifying that point Marshall. I understand now, and it is a point I agree on.
Posted by: Brandon Mendelson
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June 5, 2009 4:27 PM
its only "internet marketers" and "gurus" who feel the need to follow everybody that follows them.
However the average user doesn't. If you want to spam users, sure go ahead and try and follow everybody who follows you. But when you start doing that, you stop using Twitter as a communication tool and it becomes just another marketing outlet.
Josiah, that's not correct. The @ replies situation is still a mess.
Anthony, I follow 3k people (out of 10k that follow me) and don't spam them.
One more vote for the "mountain out of a molehill" crowd. There is no "right" or "proper" way to use Twitter. I think Marshall's definition (and expectations) are far too narrow.
However, the idea of a board of inquiry for usage patterns is very good. Such a board could alleviate the fears of minority user groups (like pro blogging power-users).
Well, I believe that Twitter staff is constantly working on Twitter, so maybe they don't quite fancy tweeting..
Anyway, I agree with the ones who said the @replies situation is a mess: seeing random replies was the best way to discover interesting stuff (I mean, many people discovered my blog thanks to random replies) and I think Twitter should do a step backward.
I also agree with Marshall when he says "That's what groups are for, something hugely valuable that 3rd party desktop clients offer and the Twitter web interface does not.": twitter.com interface should be highly improved in order to:
1- provide a good search feature;
2- grouping;
3- better DMs.
Hope they will read RWW's comments :D
My main concern:
The Twitter staff may not be keeping good track of the developer community. While most developers are simply interested in developing new Twitter apps, others may have a more malicious intent, such as violating copyright and/or using content not their own for profit (and without permission).
In addition, with all these platforms asking users to log in using their Twitter IDs and passwords is especially troubling. How do we know that our info isn't being pharmed and used for illegal and harmful purposes?
This IS a serious cause for concern.
Thanks Marshall. Interesting post and some important questions raised. Thanks also to the link to the twitter id's of all your writers. I had failed to find Frederic Lardinois's when trying to give him cred for a recent post.
Thanks Marshall. Good post, and it's interesting to have watched this sentiment develop for the past few months. I appreciated @EV's email, well thought through and well spoken.
I think the danger is real: Twitter HQ could make some decisions that ruin the beauty of Twitter and that's been made clear by the whole reply fiasco.
The beauty is the openness which it allows for, the transparency and boundlessness of connection. If Twitter HQ did something to ruin that it would absolutely be a game changer... "That's a deal breaker, ladies!"
Yet, the reply fiasco is a great learning point for me. I was really upset about it. I found out about so many great people through open replies, and I thought it terrible that I'd be losing new potential contacts and info. However, for the past 2 weeks I've noticed it's kind of nice to be able to reply to someone knowing that it's not going to cloud up my followers' Twitter clients. Of course, it's easy to get around as well. I can put "hey" or "*" before the reply if I do want all to see the reply. So I have the choice of a semi-hidden reply or an open one, at the cost of a character. Not so bad.
This has been a learning experience for me and maybe others have experienced the same thing.
I think the worry about Twitter HQ making a horrible decision that defaces what we love so much about it is legitimate. There's a real question as to whether or not these people actually understand how people are using it. "Power users" aside.
Are you SURE they're the ones who are doin' it wrong?
Come on! You're making assumptions based on POWER users! But is it really important to be just like the power users to enjoy twitter? I don't think so.
Ideally, as @ev points out, it's great to have a small list. That way you usually REMEMBER your followers and can interact much more with them :)
Speaking of getting developer information, it would have been so much easier to get it from our twitter apps site twi5.com We profile the best twitter apps and provide developer information as well!
It's all about eating your own dog-food. Twitter employees run the risk of losing touch with their users if the trend continues.
Marshall, I think you betray your own attitude when you say "On average though, Twitter use at Twitter HQ doesn't look like our experience with Twitter." Not all Twitter users are you.
And as for only 2 out of 49 Twitter team members following more than 500 people and no one was over 1k, I'm glad that they remainder actually understand that you can't meaningfully follow than many people. Part of what differentiates Twitter from other social networks is the asymmetry of its follower model, and I happen to think those 47 Twitter members are setting the right example here, unlike, say, Guy Kawasaki.
Twitter's rapid adoption comes in large part from its laissez-fair way letting users figure out what they want from it. You might think of showing a similar tolerance towards its employees, rather than presuming that they should use Twitter the way you do.
I would argue that it's common in start ups to have the entire company working to improve the product, without actually using the product. This can be because the product does not directly contribute to their productivity or line up with their workflow. Twitter, as a social networking service, is a huge time suck and it doesn't surprise me that people who are working on the product are only casual users.
People with the largest followings work at encouraging those people -- they listen, follow and tweet back. That's the role of a community or marketing person -- not a developer.
Hey folks, I totally don't want to say there's one right way to use Twitter - I just mean to say that when the folks running the system don't use it in the way that I and some other people do, that worries me about my use case being supported. And like I demonstrated with the California and Knitter examples above - for people with a lot of followers, Twitter staff are *unusually short on people they follow back* It's not just my use case, almost everyone with as many friends as these people have is following more people than they are.
Regarding developers not following a lot of people, check out these developers who work at other companies and follow loads of people
http://twitter.com/andysowards
http://twitter.com/crazeegeekchick
http://twitter.com/munklefish
http://twitter.com/mvgalle
http://twitter.com/tanepiper
Those folks are coding all day and follow lots of people on Twitter.
Huh? Perhaps the Twitter folks aren't interested in following too many people or have the free time to do so because they're focused and preoccupied with working on Twitter's platform. IMHO, that's really what they should be spending 120% of their time on!
What's great about Twitter is that it can be used in so many different ways by different people. So what the Twitter folks don't use the service like you or I or anyone else does?!
Please stop trying to find every twisted angle to write yet another story about Twitter. :-)
http://twitter.com/lliu
You bring up some interesting & valid points.
In particular, it at least is a good start to a conversation about the extent to which and how is the "best" /"correct"/"expected" way for a company to "eat the dogfood". When users start to drive the way a product is used, should the company be expected to adjust their usage as well?
With respect to the number of people Twitter employees are following, I have to agree with @Ev. As someone who accesses Twitter either via iPhone or the web, I don't have access to group features. I've found my Twitter experience to be richest when following
At the end of the day, it's a free service that's new. There was a time where people actually cared about what MySpace did too.
Marshall,
I've been pretty critical of Twitter in the past, but I have to say that I found Ev's response to be very thoughtful, appropriate and, well, simply right.
You are an aberration. Scoble is an aberration. And I mean that in the most loving way possible :). You are not a typical Twitter user (from at least what I can tell and what common sense would suggest), and the loud but active handful of SEOs and marketers and life coaches and whatnot who follow umpteenbillion people are not typical Twitter users.
And seriously, let's take a step back for a moment and play with the numbers. You've got, say, 1500 followers. Each posts a (very conservative) average of 1 post a day, and you feel inspired/obligated to post replies to 1 out of every 20 posts you read. (and this doesn't even include @replies, which, even with this modest volume, are likely to be many).
You're reading 1500 posts. A day. Writing 75 posts. A day. If we are *very* conservative and say you can read and mentally process 1 post a second and can write your own post in 20 seconds, that's 3000 seconds, or nearly an hour a day, just doing a very cursory slog through your Twitter account.
Seriously, man, an hour a day. I don't think most people, or at least most non-geeks, would jump at that opportunity.
You know how many people my average non-geek friends on Twitter seem to follow? Around 50-100. And me, personally, I only follow... er, wait a minute, Twitter is down (again), so I can't check. However -- and I feel somewhat bad about this -- I don't even read 10% of my own Twitter stream regularly.
I'm sure some will tell me, hey, use this handy-dandy super-duper program and group your friends, once for each computer you use! You don't have to actually *read* all the stuff from your friends!
How many -- look, I'll say it -- how many *normal* people are going to take the trouble to find and download a Twitter app, assign friends (current and new ones) to groups, and so on? I don't think that many in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe I'm just an old curmudgeon. Maybe I just don't get it. But I truly believe that the passionate, well-meaning folks who yell the loudest (whether about @replies or about employees of their favorite service not using the service as they think they *should)... these folks are a tiny, tiny fraction of the overall service membership.
You know what would doom Twitter? If they listened to these folks instead of following through on more well-thought-out plans to both attract and keep *mainstream people* active on the service. I hope and trust they'll choose the latter.
(part of my comment may have been html-tagged out)
To clarify - with reference to my Twitter usage, I've found my experience works best when following fewer than 400 people (although I've eeked above that lately!). I respond to any @'s and use search to find relevant tweets and continue to participate "in the conversation"
Twitter is doing nothing wrong.
It's the so-called twitter power users that spread the concept of follow-back-everyone-and-make-your-numbers-big.
It's plain lame. Twitter is ultimate flexibility. If you're there to promote a product or website, that might work. But, if it's used for enjoying your life in a broader way, you must exercise care while following and unfollowing.
I'm afraid this article is slightly biased towards the power users. No one is a power user. it all depends on how the term is defined.
I like Ev's response. It is exactly how I feel as a user.
Trying to see the point of this post. It's worth posting and observing and ingniting some discussion.... I dont think that it is entirely fair to place this kind of weight on twitter based on the employee follow/friend lists.
But you are making a point to separate normal users and power users (some being early adopters). To further this discussion, I think you should do an article that delves into the autopsy of a "twitter power user" and why they might matter to the evolution of twitter the company.
@sull
Why you be hatin'?!
If anything they can just study users that follow a high number of people. It's not like it's not all public.
Also, what could they possibly learn from forcing Twitter employees to become "power users". The best course for everyone is to let followers come organically because this is the only way to produce meaningful data. The best solution would be for Twitter to hire an existing "power user" to become a consultant.
I follow around 350 and I really don't enjoy the fact that I miss A LOT of the conversation. I want to read everything that everyone has to say. Not everyone uses Twitter the way I do. I understand that. I guess the point of your article is only that Twitter needs to understand this too.
Absolutely stunned by the arrogance of this article.
I've lost a lot of respect.
This recent parade of things twitter does wrong is telling.
How long have you followed a lot of people?
The people at twitter who have been ripped for
what's wrong with the company, and not fixing it fast
enough, should all follow many more other people and dilute their daily hours down even further?
Of follow thousands and pretend?
These are human beings.
If they listened to every critic, they'd have
a manual "What you must do" 1,000 pages long.
Unfortunately insults, critiques, bad advice,
personal attacks *have made it harder for helpful contributions to get through.*
Anyone who has been a twitter-watcher since the beginning can see a subtle recoil and increased desensitization
to incoming signals, following each wave.
Does twitter have a lot of improvements to make?
Yes.
You, "don't tell me how to live" social liberals are
telling them how to manage the minutae of their days.
This post, and the reaction is "Heads must roll! Bring in someone who knows what they're doing to run the company"
*About the very people who built the company* you all love, use and are obsessing over. o.O Hello?
This is outstanding, sir! Thanks for posting. I'll admit that for a moment I got a bit paranoid about the Twitter team not using its own product as much as I do. But then again, I have several accounts for different projects and communities (one for crowd-sourcing, another for my closest friends, etc). It could be that @Ev & Co. tweet work stuff all day with one another in accounts we don't know about.
Anyway, in my opinion, what Ev wrote you makes a lot of sense to me. I totally agree with you that because Twitter's workforce use differs from so many 'ordinary' (props on the knitters example) and (especially) power users, they may not understand the Twitter experience as they probably should, but Ev got me thinking about the nature of that experience, too. "...having more followers does not give you more time in the day."
Word.
This is bullshit. The logic doesn't play over. Regardless of the adoption of the employees, it has no bearing on the quality of the service. Look at Ma.tt.
He blogs very rarely, but look at how wordpress has grown into something so powerful.
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