Tweetworks

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Here’s an interesting question, what happens when the other 90% of the population starts using the conversational web?  I spoke at Social Media Jungle: Boston yesterday and floated the idea to a room full of marketers. Despite being the last speaker of the day, the discussion that followed was quite vibrant.

My observation, most of the people using conversational web tools are under 45, white and college educated. While this group makes up only 8.4% of the adult population in the United States, they seem to dominate on Twitter.

So, what do you think? How will the conversational web change when the mainstream population joins us?

Feel free to share your thoughts here in the comments section or jump over to the SMJBOS group on Tweetworks and tweet it up with people who were there.

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Some Evils Are Necessary

Before Tweetworks, hashtags were the only way to categorize a tweet. And if I have anything to say about it (and I do), hashtags will be a thing of the past in the near future.

Hashtags are evil little things that suck up precious space in the already tight confines of a 140 character post window. But, since they’ve been the only mechanism a Twitter user had to add some measure of order to their tweeting chaos, people adopted them without a fight. The problem is, they don’t really work that good and they come with a heavy cost.

The Limited Utility of Hashtags

• Typos or Incorrect Tag - In October 13, 2008 there was a fun meme going around with the hashtag #Scariest3Words. A funny thing happened though as the day wore on, some people started using #3ScariestWords instead of the original hashtag. Of course this is a harmless example but imagine if this happened with topic you really cared about. Beyond the dislexia shown here, hashtags are wide open to typos since there is no validation process when they are entered. Enter #Scarcest3Words and there will be no warning message telling you that you’ve entered an invalid name.
• Duplicate Tags Pollution - There is nothing stopping someone for using a hashtag that you set up to track your conversation for something completely irrelevant. Worse yet, someone could seek to hijack your hashtag for their own shady purposes. Don’t laugh, the spammers and bots that are hitting Twitter are crafty. You don’t think someone might notice a big dog like Aaron Strout or Gary Vaynerchuk starting a hashtagged tweet stream and try to lace it with their “visit my site for cheap Viagra” messages? C’mon! But, if we assume that the most likely scenario is that some other group of people decide to use the same hashtag you are using, we can easily see that things can get confusing come query time.
• Lack of Depth - South By South West is a pretty big deal. Using the #SXSW09 (or is it #SXSW9? or just #SXSW?) tag only gets you so far in describing what you are talking about. In order to bring it down to something more specific you need to add another tag like #Music but then you might want to toss another one like #Rock and then #Band. Pretty soon you have chewed up half your 140 characters with hashtags.
• Who Started It? – I’m pretty sure that my friend Lyell Petersen started the #Scariest3Words thread but I can’t back that up with paperwork. And I am certainly not going to wade through the dozens of pages of Twitter search results to figure it out. You might not always care who started a conversation but you might care how or why the conversation got started. Every once in a while it is good to check back to the source to make sure the conversation is still on track. Once a hashtag is in the tweetstream however, God knows what will happen to it over time.

The Cost of Hashtags

• Time - It takes time to type a hashtag. It takes time to write a search query and sift through all of the responses and evaluate what you are seeing. While the hashtag may help to categorize a specific tweet as being about some topic in general it does little to put it in the context of a conversation as mentioned above. Therefore, a user has to invest quite a bit of time piecing together the individual components of a conversation.
• Missing Participants - Newbies and novice users have no idea what hashtags are in most instances. I didn’t know what they were when I first started using Twitter and I like to think of myself as reasonably plugged in. If you are a seasoned social media pro, be honest you’ve been asked “what’s a hashtag?” dozens of times. Think of how many amazing comments, answers and insights we are missing because not everyone is familiar with this rather “inside baseball” convention. Or perhaps, some people just can’t be bothered to use a hashtag since they themselves will never do a Twitter search.
• Processing Power and Bandwidth - Initiating a query from a third party application to run against the Twitter database uses some serious horsepower. There’s a reason why Twitter imposes API limits. Constantly hitting the API looking for tweets with a certain hashtag so you you can pull it onto your system and display it a certain way creates a lot of two way traffic and requires a lot of processing power on both sides. This isn’t counting the volume of storage space needed for all the extra characters unnessarily tweeted on a daily basis just for hashtags.

Tweetworks Groups and Threads Are Holy Water

The entire Tweetworks application is based on one simple concept, capture and associate a post to a specific conversation on the way in and present it as a comprehensible conversation to anyone who sees it in the future.

Groups - If we continue the South By South West example from above, the SXSW09 group on Tweetworks would replace the #SXSW09 hashtag. A user interested in tweeting about the March 2009 festival/conference would only need to locate the group, click in and start tweeting. No need to type a hashtag each time he wants to make a comment about SXSW09.

Threads - Adding a conversation about a live music event at SXSW09 is as simple as tweeting “I’m at Flamingo Cantina where Beach House is about to hit the stage.” within the SXSW09 group. Anyone who’s interested in tweeting it up about the show can jump right in by replying to the thread. Or if you don’t like the way the conversation is going, start a new thread.

With this system we avoid all of the pitfalls and costs of using hashtags:

• Typos and misnomers don’t happen when selecting a topic is point and click.
• The pollution effect is highly unlikely since each group not only has a unique name but in most cases the person who set it up also gave it a fitting description.
• It’s easy to see who established the group and who initiated a thread.
• There’s little time wasted in finding, participating and reviewing conversations that meet your interests.
• Any user, from the social media super star to the new guy, can log in and be active on day one.
• Tweetworks performs like a relational database driven application should. Each piece of information is stored and indexed appropriately. If the data went in organized it will come out organized. Hint hint.

Hashtags your days are numbered… You’ve been warned.

Note: This is not an anti-follower rant. I promise. The follower relationship has it’s value, it is simply my contention that we’ve reached a point of diminishing returns. As you’ll see, I believe that it is time that we move off the follower standard and adopt the conversation as the means of connection.

Deep inside you know it’s true but somehow you want to believe that hundreds of people are actually following what you have to say on Twitter.

Any day of the week you can see one of these followers trumpeting a new follower threshold reached. “Two more people and I hit 700 followers!” he’ll tweet with pride as if he’s actually accomplished something. “So cool! Every time I tweet 700 people will see it. How influential am I?” he wonders.

Not very. Beyond the fact that everyone and anyone can accumulate 500, 1,000 or even 2,000 followers with relative ease thus rendering the follower metric virtually useless as a measure of influence, the simple truth is your Tweeps aren’t listening.

Sorry, your followers are NOT following you. They’re just not.

Your followers are not following you for several reasons:

1. Most never had any real interest in you and could care less what you have to say and aren’t even bothering to look when you tweet. I know it’s harsh but I thought I’d shoot straight. Most of your followers followed you to boost their own stats. It might not be that blatant, it could just be they reciprocated or followed you out of politeness after exchanging business cards at Tweet-up or big social media conference. But, Twitter is a numbers game and people get that so it’s off to the races. I mean have you noticed how many relatively new Twitter users are following over 1,000 people with a similar number of followers? It’s not that hard to amass a truck load of followers in a few days if you put your mind to it.
2. It is impractical, if not nearly impossible, to follow the tweets of hundreds or thousands of people. I’m not sure when it happens but it happens, Twitter users start to primarily look at their replies and direct messages when they hit a certain number of people in their tweet stream. If they happen to see and respond to a random tweet from you it’s because they were tweeting and saw it or you are one of their inner circle of friends (i.e. a real follower).
3. The mechanics of Twitter clients don’t allow for following the posts of  the obscene numbers of people who are in your follower list. Twitter renders 20 posts per page and while Twhirl and Tweetdeck render more, if you scroll, they only display 8 or so at a time. It becomes a simple math problem that is difficult to overcome. If your average follower is following 400 people, which is becoming more and more common, and the average person tweets a mere 5 times per day then your post will stay on your followers Twitter time line for a maximum of 14.4 minutes. That number drops to 5.8 minutes max if your followers are using Twhirl. And of course you know that a daily tweet rate of 5 posts per person is extremely low so the numbers are likely much worse. The point is, the chance that your tweet will actually be seen by your followers is extremely low.
4. People, and businesses, are listening for what they want to hear not what you have to say. I’d like to think @Starbucks or @GuyKawasaki are watching their time lines and seeing my tweets and thinking how smart, funny or just plain cool I am but I know better. They are using Twitter’s search tool for keywords that are relevant to their brands or their interests. Now if I mentioned that the service at my local Starbucks was less than stellar, I might expect a reply @Starbucks but it’s because I mentioned what they wanted to hear.
5. You aren’t as interesting as the people they really follow. Some followed you because Robert Scoble or some other social media celebrity replied to you. Most of these people probably were covered in reason number one. The rest of these people followed you in this scenario because they felt a sense of kinship in the shared interest in what this very influential person has to say. But unless you showed yourself, and relatively quickly, to be every bit as plugged-in or as insightful as these professional Twitterers, your new follower probably lost interest.
6. They thought you were interesting just long enough to follow you and now…not so much. Some people followed you because you posted something once that sounded interesting or they found you listed on a Twitter user list somewhere. They thought “Hey, he posted about the Red Sox! I love the Red Sox, I’ll follow him.” Ah, but the romance was short lived because as soon as you started tweeting it up about WordPress development they were lost.

Why do you have followers? More aptly, why do you need a lot of followers?

You need followers to have a conversation. Derr right? I know. Your ability to have a conversation on Twitter is directly proportional to the number of followers/following to whom you are connected. If you have 50 followers, the likelihood of engagement without a directed message (either @ or DM) is small. With 500 your opportunity is exponentially higher. This is logical and it partially explains the race to accumulate followers that happens soon after the “I think I like Twitter” moment that you experienced early on. The challenge is that Twitter was never designed for conversation. It was designed as a status update tool. You’ve seen the question “What are you doing?” right? The follower mechanism then was intended for people who actually cared about what you are doing.

It turned out however that the follower deal was simply brilliant, either by design or luck. It was also idiotic for reasons described above. In fact, I don’t think I have met one person yet who didn’t think Twitter was useless, insane or just plain ridiculous when they first saw it. I know that’s what I thought. But, let’s explore the genius of the follower phenomenon for a minute.

First, it fit with the known and accepted norm of communication which is to add connections. We were already comfortable with that, we had our contact lists for email, we had our IM buddies, and many of us were on the front edge in using LinkedIn and other social media sites. Second, allowing people to follow others with ease and no need for real introduction created the feeding frenzy-like follower orgy we see happening today.

So, what’s the problem? Well, if the application was designed for status updates but now it is being used for conversations and the only way that users can hope to have the promise of viable conversations is to follow outrageous numbers of other users then it seems a rethink might be in order.

What would you like to talk about?

“What are you doing?” has morphed into “What do you want to talk about?” and this means we need to move the focus away from this artificial follower construct to a new model which focuses on the conversation. Consider for a moment the fact that on Twitter you regularly engage in conversations with strangers who just happen to be posting on a topic that interests you. Why are you talking with this person? Is it because they are one of your hundreds of followers or is it because of the topic of conversation?

Might it be more enjoyable and efficient to organize things by conversation topics? If you want to talk about the Red Sox why not have the ability to quickly and easily find a conversation about the Red Sox that you can join unencumbered by follower limits? And instead of having a series of disparate one-to-one posts flying around it might make for a more robust experience to thread the conversation with many participants.

Of course there are times when you do want to control who participates in a conversation, kind of like a true follower experience for a certain topic. So, why not allow for many to many conversations to take place privately.

Welcome to Tweetworks

I fell in love with Twitter in the Spring of 2008 and in the Summer I made a decision to make the Twitterverse a better place. I started Tweetworks with the simple goal of enabling richer conversations. You like to talk about the things that interest you at the moment and we are making it easier for you to do just that. On Tweetworks a person with zero followers can engage in the same conversation and have the same reach as a @ChrisBrogan or a @Pistachio. This is not to say Chris’s or Laura’s influence (which is based on their thought leadership not their follower count) is lessened on Tweetworks but rather in the true spirit of social media democracy each users weight is measured by virtue of his contribution to the conversation.

So, what do you want to talk about? Do you like food? Are you having a bad day and need to vent? Do you want to talk with other people from Boston or Austin? Need a beer, a glass of wine or scotch? Are you an entrepreneur, a writer or a blogger? Maybe you’re into horses…

Whatever it is that inspires you to tweet, Tweetworks makes it easier to find others who are into the same thing. No followers required.