Tweetworks

Mike Langford goes off on a cold medicine induced rant about the incessant whining about auto DM’s on Twitter. “Being mad about auto DMs is like eating a bunch of Doritos and drinking beer only to be upset that your burps stink.” Mike says. What do you think? Join the thread Mike started this morning and share your thoughts about auto DMs.

After the rant winds down we get into the featured groups, complete with special effects. Ooh!

Featured Groups:

• TrueParanormal (created by  @DebAllen) – Share stories and insights related to the paranormal/supernatural.
• Jamaica (created by @JamaicaTweets) – Sun, sand and surf with a rum drink sounds pretty good right about now doesn’t it?
• LOHAStraveler (created by @rainfrog) – We have no idea what they are talking about in this group but the Chinese characters look pretty cool.
• TCBRacing (created by @jrmoore987)  – Just think, in about a month from now all the hardcore cyclists will be hitting the roads and trails again. Ride on!

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I Want Your Help

Okay, the time has arrived! I’m looking for your help to take Tweetworks to the next level. I’m on the hunt for talent and am starting the process of raising some capital. Please watch this video and send your thoughts my way.

Witness the first Rick Roll on Tweetworks. I’m also offering a signed Tweetworks beak to anyone who can tell me the origin of the Rick Roll? Who started it and why?

Featured Groups:

• Fabulous50s (created by @OnPurpose50) – Discover a wonderful time of life. Life begins again at 50. What are your thoughts?
• Awesome80s (created by @alangford) – All things awesome about the 80′s, big hair, corny music videos, bad movies you cannot turn off.

Lastly, a very special shout out to @HeshieSegal, for her refreshingly social use of social media. Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to meet you Heshie.

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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.