• Does anyone care if I was in a swarm, visited Mount Rushmore or can administer CPR?
• Do we have to get jackets or sashes that we attach these digital badges to?
• Do you visit the pages of your friends to see what badges they have, or do you use some client just to see where they check in and have no clue what they earned?
• Can I get free services, coupons or discounts for having specific badges?  This isn’t mayorship, just an icon.

I begin to feel we reached a peak in the desire to achieve such things and are looking for true value in the services we are using.  Badges inherently were built for kids as a sign of learning and have now turned into a game with no winner.  Each time you get close to having all of the possible badges, new ones are announced.  The game never ends.

It becomes like a RPG that adds levels every time someone conquers all there is.  I have a badge for all of the sites giving out badges.  But it wouldn’t be appropriate.

The problem is, this is only seen when you log in via the web interface.  For new users, this is a common occurrence.  For power users and more, there are a slew of mobile and desktop clients in use that will never show this change.

How many of you use the phone number that might be known or an email address commonly known?  Most of you do and would say that it shouldn’t make a difference in any case.  But that shouldn’t be true.

I should have to opt in to have this information shared and the boxes themselves should not be checked automatically when I log in.  The default setting should be to disallow this type of search with explanation of what enabling these could expose.

The second portion was the ability to leave the selection to later.  Are these email addresses and phone numbers being exposed anywhere outside of the ability to find and add friends?    I didn’t see anything in the online help system for Twitter and only a few scattered articles.

Either way, get in there and establish your settings by logging in via the web interface.

With any current reader, you are able to control subscriptions, read and unread marks, better sharing integration across networks and exploring and finding of other feeds through services like Toluu.  Twitter is a force feed of data from anyone that passes a link along to you.

While you build your own community of people you wish to follow, actually parsing the content is another thing, mainly when you follow ~16k people like he does.  This would be incomprehensible even in a feed reader to keep up with the sheer volume.

Twitter is about getting in and out of the stream.  Taking a dip in the information flow.  You only drown if you choose.  RSS readers store the data for retrieval when you are ready and are sorted nicely into tags and groups.  Twitter is not close to this with lists yet and has quite a way to go, as I have noted.

With such add-on tools as the Feedly extenson for Firefox, your RSS feeds turn into a newspaper, list or magazine covers with incredible amounts of sharing integration.

Twitter works in the reverse since people need to be present and watching the stream to catch what you send out.  Not many are able to watch ~16k feeds and have the time to see each and every one.  Now imagine them in real-time scrolling by.  You would not be able to click to read links by the time a slew of others roled across.

I think he is right in that is is a great news source, that I use as well, and has immediate impact on trends and breaking stories.  But for real commentary, RSS is here to stay.

P.S. yes I follow Robert and I think he follows me as well (if I go use the tools on EverythingTwitter to verify).  But I still don’t expect him to see my content scroll by.  So I tossed an @ symbol in the title instead.  Get it?  My content will scroll by quick, but a conversation marker can be seen across his Twitter client.

His entry chapter What is Twitter (and What It Is Not) lays the groundwork for the reasons most people don’t understand the whats and whys of Twitter and explains them in humor and direct example.  For those that still don’t get it, or those using it and don’t get it, this is for you.

After a couple chapters on establishing an account, setting up your profile and the please do’s and please do not’s, he talks of working beyond the website.  He does have chapters on outside tools, and I shook my head in amazement he left out EverythingTwitter as a great source to find whatever you need.  Yes, I mentioned this to him jokingly in email and he took it in great fun as he must have heard from many people.

Pay special attention to the chapter on The Trouble with Twitter as it does an excellent job of covering the fail whale, issues with some very personal information sharing, signal to noise ratios and dealing with the explosive growth of Twitter and how it affects the technical performance side.

Chapters 10 and 11 cover how to use Twitter for personal and business use respectively and make the most benefit of it no matter how you wish to use it. From communicating with friends and family to promoting products/services, events, conferences, podcasts and more.  In all he covers how Twitter is a tool to be used in so many ways and gives concrete examples of each.

Chapter 12 is an eye opener for most that only hear hype around using Twitter.  Tee talks about the darker side of what goes on and the dymanics of how we are all interconnected.  Who do you follow?  Who do you ignore?  Should you block?  What about spammers? Bots? Incomplete profiles and more.  It is succinct and honest about some of the behind the scenes issues that power users see daily.

Mr Morris leaves with why he is on Twitter and how he uses it in daily work and promotion before an appendix of some terms and more tools.

At ~260 pages, this is a must have for those entering social media with Twitter and makes for a clear and concise read with just enough technical information for any level of user.  Amazon has it for only $14.99 right now and I think that is quite the bargain.  Published by Que.

Disclaimers: This book was sent to read free of charge through some promo people and I was not obligated to say anything good or bad about it.  I actually read the darn thing and enjoyed it, even with how I use Twitter on a daily basis.  After meeting Tee Morris I saw some of the drive and determination he had and it made the remainder of the read even more enjoyable as you can place the author with the book.

I also run EverythingTwitter.com and shook him fiercely at BlogWorld when he failed to mention us, the largest review catalog of Twitter tools and add-ons.  Kidding, I never shook him.  He might have tripped, but I am unaware of who did it.

In reviewing GraphEdge for EverythingTwitter, I read a recent blog entry from their founder about a limit they hit on Twitter and the response received from Twitter when the subject was broached.

The crux of the issue was on the number of messages an account can send daily.  I went searching for this magic number and found it via Webtrepeneur in this article.  Only 1,000 total updates and 250 direct messages per day on any and all devices are allowed per account.

So the service that is being provided by GraphEdge wanted to send @ messages to customers instead of using their email addresses.  Since the service itself is based on Twitter, why not use Twitter.  They broke the limit and added another account to continue sending when the first reached it’s limit.  Twitter suspended that account.

The Issue

Now here comes the confusion.  Responses from Twitter said that @ messages were meant to be public only, not a conversation.  I think I am torn in this thought process.  A direct message is meant to be a private conversation.  The @ message is meant to be a public conversation.  Picture it much like you are in a room sitting in a circle.  I look across and talk to someone direct, but everyone can hear, follow and interact if they wish.  Then I go whisper in someones ear in the circle, closing the public facet, while still in the same community.

Both are modes of conversation in their own right and should be treated as such.  I understand the theoretical limit Twitter imposes to protect someone from just blasting tweets all day long.  You wouldn’t expect someone to do this in a room, you would ask them to stop and then quietly remove them.  Twitter could do this by slowing an account down and then silencing it for some period of time after the infraction grows.  Break the rule too many times, then you get suspended.  There is justified services that users may opt in to receive @ messages to get updates.

Some of you are thinking, what about the whitelist or firehose Twitter offers?  Those are consumption and application calls, not communication calls like @ and direct message types.  So the limits still stand for sending specific types of messages into the system.  I think there needs to be some balance between authorized and verified applications that require the user to sign in via oAuth and receive a source parameter (sent from “[MyApp]“ in your tweet).

The Opinion

Any type of action in sending a message on Twitter that occurs is considered communication.  Whether it is a public statement, an @ symbol or a direct message.  Limiting how much I talk (when it is not subject to spam) should not be controlled by automated systems.  A mute, ignore or other ability could be included to let my followers decide when I talk too much.

The idea is to have a giant room of your followers and let them come by an engage when they feel necessary no matter how often I stand on a box, talk to a person so it can be overheard or drag someone to a corner and whisper in their ear.

Caption courtesy Mashable posting

My opinion is that Twitter is too late to the game in the corporate space allowing third-party developers to overtake this area quite some time ago.  The web interface that Twitter offers by default, with a new contributor toolbar or not, is not condusive to performing long term work and management in the Twitter stream.  Missing is a wide array of tools needed to watch, forward, queue and otherwise control a corporate contributor toolset.

Twitter would have better luck purchasing one of the third-party developers like TweetFunnel, TweetRiver or Cotweet that have built a service, with subscribers, around this idea with more advanced tools and controls.

Twitter has slacked in making moves to purchase some of the add-on tools that have been created and with some remarkable success.   This is purely a business decision and move that should have occurred some time ago to strengthen Twitter as a corporate tool and provide immediate means to monetize.  I cannot see any company paying for this type of basic interface when other and better alternatives exist.

Disclosure: While I certainly don’t make any of these tools, the above links to the review site EverythingTwitter is also a site owned by me.  They are not paid postings or reviews and we often slam them.

Say I am looking for a list on the top social media people/companies to follow.  Where would you turn?  How would you begin your search?  I would start with a trusted social media person themselves to see what lists they created.  Then I would start following that list.  Done.  However, the person that created the list is not on the list since they cannot add themselves.  A break in the whole idea.  Here is one more example.  I follow the PR person that has been tweeting at company A for a long time with great content.  To allow themselves to show in a list for their company, they create a new account that will make a list to include everyone that tweets from the company, including themselves.  But how does everyone find that list from some unknown, or not yet followed, Twitter id?  Listorious?  No, a great sit but not the source the average user would find.

Need another example?  Wayne Sutton said it best.  He created a list for all the speakers at the SocialMediaBusinessForum using the SMBF Twitter account, that he also tweets under.  So we can follow the speakers but not the SMBF id itself on the list now.  Got it?

So the only true way to create a complete list, and have it found, it for the trusted authorities in the Twitterverse all create the lists that would never include themselves.  I created a list for the Atlanta Social Media Club. This means I got their main SMC account and all the officers in a single list and as an officer of the St Louis Club, I might be considered an authority.

UPDATE: I think I found a way!!  After creation of the list itself, you go back to your own profile page in Twitter.  From there the icon to say what lists that account will show in is active.  You can then click down and add yourself to any list!

How can you effectively build a list that everyone follows when the topic may contain yourself?

Scenario: If you build the top list ever, in any category, you can’t be on it!  You do not reap the benefit of making lists for a category unless you have yet another Twitter account.  Which in turn eliminates people finding you for creating the list.  A nasty circle they overlooked.

While this new lists feature greatly simplifies sharing groups of people you want others to follow, and cleans up the confusing #followfriday, the public listing side is greatly messed up.

The issue comes around the naming and sharing of public groups. Since the groups are stored under the person that created them, you can have numerous lists that technically have the same name across Twitter. (the site Listorious shows this off accidentally.) The better option would have been unique naming with the ability to allow others to edit your list, if you so desire. You could open the editing to specific named Twitter users, those on the list or everyone.

While this would create a race to get the best list names and control of them, it would also streamline searching, finding and using the very best lists Twitter offers. There are countless lists already for social media, authors and even companies already forming. How the heck do I know which is the best or worst?

Naming and tagging of the lists is incredibly important as everyone scrambles to create their own. Being able to see the lists that just my friends created would have made sense also as those are people I trust already to provide information I want to see. I think Twitter jumped the shark a bit on introducing this and allowing the mass creation without walking through all the scenarios. When you need a site to list the best list of the multiple lists, something went wrong.

(image credit to John Hayden)

Private lists would not be affected by this idea I am suggesting. That topic is actually in the next posting tomorrow.

The first alarm was the simple fact that uSocial themselves only have ~15, 500 followers at the time of writing this posting.  (They also claim 18,000 in their online propaganda which leads me to think they lost massive followers when Twitter removed bots.)  Then, they are following back all 15k which I bet most are the same bots that are driving their numbers. How can they guarantee you will have that many followers when the company themselves is not able to meet that claim?

It leads me to believe that most of what you are purchasing are bots or other accounts that are not true humans as we would hope when engaging such a service.  What kind of business ROI would we get from a bunch of bots?  Who guarantees the actual results?  How long will these followers stay? Where is the interaction? How do you get feedback or is anyone there to even click on your blog posting links or product information.

The second part is that they offer the service to push your product, 3 times per day for a month, to their followers.  I am not sure how many of us follow accounts just to get advertisements.  Having one here and there from the person that owns the account pitching their own goods is expected and I take no offense.  Having a feed of all ads?  How productive is that?  Plus, if most of their followers are bots, who are you really reaching?

Summary – buying followers is not economical nor helpful.  Building great products or having something important to say will grow your base.  That or buy your way onto the Suggested User List (SUL).  A sure guarantee to add followers. A tight community of thousands is far better than a loose collection of tens of thousands.