Your Twitter Experience is What You Make It

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An analysis of two kinds of Twitter accounts.

Twitter logoI’ll admit it: I have two Twitter accounts.

One account, mlanger, is the account I opened in March or April of 2007 and have maintained meticulously in the 2+ years since then. I’ve carefully chosen the 100-110 people I follow, adding new ones and trimming away old ones to maintain a total count that never exceeds 120 people. In the meantime, I’ve been followed by over 1,000 people throughout the years — but more about that number in a moment.

The other account, flyingmair, is the one I created when I recorded my Twitter course for Lynda.com. It was a test account, never intended for anything more. A bunch of people who agreed to be in the course followed me and I followed them back. When my work on the course was finished, I allowed it to languish. Later, I set up an TwitterFeed to automatically post news and special offers for helicopter flights from Flying M Air’s Web site to that account. It’s not much — maybe 2 tweets a month. I turned off follower notifications so I wouldn’t be bothered by bots. But more recently, I decided to use that account to experiment with TweetLater, another third party Twitter service. One of the features it offers is auto-follow, where your account will automatically follow anyone who follows you.

On Auto-follows

Now I need to be clear on something here: I don’t believe in automatically following anyone. This has to do with my personal philosophy of what Twitter is: a social networking tool. What’s social about automation?

I also don’t believe in following everyone who follows me. Twitter is being destroyed by “follower collectors” — people who participate in Twitter solely to build follower count. They’re sucking bandwidth and resources that could be better used to maintain the system for people interested in content. I’m interested in content.

So I would never use an auto-follow tool to follow new followers on my main Twitter account. I keep my follower count to just over 100 because I’ve realized that that’s about all I can follow. I read all the tweets of the people I follow and I interact with them. I build relationships. I learn things. I get links to great content on the Web. Sure, some of the people I follow link to crap and have stupid tweets. But not all the time. And don’t we all?

But the follower collectors don’t care about content. All they care about is building follower count. They do this primarily through automated tools — automatically following people based on keywords or just hits, hoping those people will follow them back — automatically or manually. To avoid their accounts being flagged by Twitter’s monitoring tools, they also automatically unfollow people who don’t reciprocate the follows.

I moment ago, I reported that I’d been followed by over 1,000 people in 2+ years on Twitter. Yet my follower count is under 800. The reason is the automation tools used by the follower collectors. They automatically follow me but I don’t follow back, so they automatically unfollow me. Some of these people have followed me more than once — I reward them for their efforts by blocking them.

Content Is King

So now I’ve got these two accounts:

  • The one I monitor, maintain, and interact with daily. The one I enjoy. The one I joined Twitter for.
  • The one I allow to languish with occasional automated tweets for my business. The one I reciprocate follows for.

And here’s the difference between them.

The one I maintain has good content. Not perfect, not always crap-free, but good. It has interactions between intelligent, interesting people who link to interesting things on the Web, share good photos, and provide answers to “lazyweb” questions. This Twitter account is the “water cooler” I’ve blogged about so many times. The break from my work, the “friends” who aren’t really close but who know me at least as well as I know them.

The one I’ve fully automated is mostly full of crap. All of the people that account follows are people who followed that account. More than half of the people who follow that account, automatically followed that account. In other words, those accounts may or may not care about interaction. At least 10 of the accounts there release an endless stream of links to content on the Web via RSS feed. They’re just regurgitating links to dozens of new blog posts on other sites — some of which may not even be topic-specific. There are a few accounts there that are connected to real people who are genuinely interesting; I follow some of them on my main account. But, for the most part, the unmaintained, automated account is a gateway into a total waste of bandwidth.

Which would you rather have on your Twitter Home page?

What Would Happen If All the Crap Went Away?

Imagine a Twitter where most of the tweets were interesting or useful or made you think. Imagine it being populated by people who actually cared about the people they followed and interacted with them regularly.

Imagine a Twitter where people didn’t game the trending topics, using all those popular terms in tweets to get their accounts noticed. Imagine automated tools for following, unfollowing, and tweeting vanishing into thin air, requiring people to actually type in the content they want to appear.

You’ve just imagined the Twitter I joined 2+ years ago.

It’s Not Supposed to Be Like This

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It’s supposed to be cooler with at least a slight chance of rain here.

Just compared the forecast here, in Quincy, WA:
Quincy Forecast

to the weather back home, in Phoenix, AZ:
Phoenix Forecast

Clearly, I won’t be drying cherries anytime soon. In fact, if I could be used to cool cherries (which I can’t), I’d be in high demand.

The one thing I do miss being up here and not back in Arizona is the monsoon storms. Not only do they bring cooling rain, but the violent storms are amazing to watch. The steamy humidity that comes before and after, however, is something I don’t miss at all.

The Blog Posts I Wanted to Write this Week…

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…but couldn’t because I’m writing something I’m getting paid to write.

If I had to choose between writing blog posts and writing 400+ page books about using computers, I’d take the blog posts any day. They’re shorter — I can knock one off in an hour or less — so I get immediate gratification. They’re also about a wide range of topics I choose to write about, so they can be a lot of fun to write. I can include color photos and other illustrations that don’t require me to set up a computer screen just so and snap a picture. Best of all, I can archive them here in my blog with almost 2,000 others, building a living journal of what’s going on on my life. You don’t know how much I love reading blog posts from the past five years of blogging just to remember what was on my mind back then.

200907212014.jpgBut I’m not blogging much this week. I’m writing something else: a 648-page revision to my Mac OS X Visual QuickStart Guide to cover the features of Snow Leopard.

I’m working my proverbial butt off on this book. 648 pages is a lot of pages. And, as usual, I’m not just writing it but also laying it out, page by page, using InDesign CS4. So I’m sitting in front of my 24″ iMac and my new 13″ MacBook Pro, both of which are set up on the dining table in my camper, typing, mousing, screen-snapping, and Photoshopping my way through the project. I have 4 of the book’s 25 chapters left to churn out — roughly 120 pages. My editors (production and copy) are keeping up with me nicely, so we’re turning around finished chapters at an amazing rate. Even my indexer is hard at work with the first 18 chapters properly numbered and ready to index.

A lot of people think I fly for a living. I don’t. This is what I do for a living. I write books about how to use computers.

Of course, when you do something for a living, that means you get paid to do it. I get advances on the books I write and when they sell a bunch of copies, I get quarterly royalty checks. That’s how I pay my bills and, when my helicopter business isn’t busy enough to pay its bills, my writing work pays its bills, too.

I don’t get paid to blog. And I don’t have blogging deadlines. And my blog will never become a bestseller, featured in the Apple store and on Amazon.com. (Yes, it’s true that the first edition of my Mac OS Visual QuickStart Guide, which covered Mac OS 8, got all the way up to #41 in rank on Amazon.com.) So I set my priorities accordingly and my priorities tell me to get this book off my plate so they’ll send me more money and I can get to work on the two books lined up right behind it.

Yes, you read that right: this is the first of three books I have to revise this summer. The other two, which I’m not at liberty to discuss right now, are also more than 400 pages. Each.

But I thought I’d take a moment to list the blog posts I didn’t write this week:

  • Where I was when Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon. I was almost eight years old and my mother kept me and my six-year-old sister up to watch the activities on television. It was late and I was tired. It was boring. But my mother said that we were watching history. All I can remember is wondering what was taking so long for them to come out and why there was so much beeping in the sound.
  • Miscellaneous Political Things. I’m thinking about Sarah Palin, who isn’t a quitter or a dead fish, but gave up mid-term, likely to pursue book and television deals while she’s still hot. I pray she doesn’t try running for president. I’d hate to get a real count of the number of Americans stupid enough to vote for someone who doesn’t know Africa is a continent and thinks living in a state between Canada and Russia gives her foreign policy experience. I’m thinking of Mark Sanford, the South Carolina governor who disappeared off the face of the earth for 5 days without telling anyone where he was going, leaving his state unmanaged so he could pursue an extra-marital affair. I’m thinking of that same guy giving Clinton grief for being serviced by an intern in his office, insisting Clinton resign and now not resigning himself. I’m wondering whether his name will appear beside the word hypocrite in dictionaries or Wikipedia. I’m thinking of the guy who owes him a good dinner (or maybe an all-expense paid trip to Argentina), John Ensign, the Nevada senator who, under threat of blackmail, revealed that he’d had an affair with a member of his staff (no pun intended). A member of a Christian Ministry that calls itself the Promise Keepers, he evidently didn’t think his marriage vows were a promise worth keeping. And I’m thinking of a wise Latina, Sonia Sottomayor, allowing herself to be submitted to the indignity of cross-examination by members of the Republican party trying to make her look hot-headed and unprofessional. They failed because, after all, she is a wise Latina indeed.
  • Blessed by Arizona Highways (Again). My phone started ringing this week with more calls for Flying M Air’s Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure. Someone had written in a blog comment that I was listed on page 29 of “AZ Magazine.” Turns out, the listing is in Arizona HIghways magazine, the same publication that did a 10-page story on my company’s excursions in the May 2009 issue. This time, I’m listed as the “Best Way to See Arizona in a Week” in the August 2009 issue. While I’m thrilled to be getting the additional press, I’m also a bit worried — I didn’t bring enough marketing material with me to send out the info packets that are being requested daily.
  • My New Old Mechanic. That would be a brief post about how glad I am that my original R44 helicopter mechanic has left the company he worked for to go solo. His boss wouldn’t let him fix my helicopter because of insurance issues and I wound up with a long line of inferior mechanics. Until recently, of course, when I started getting my annual done up here in Washington state. But now I can use my old mechanic for my 100-hour inspections each winter and feel good about the quality of maintenance.
  • Helicopter ArtworkAn Orchard Party with Three Helicopters. That would be an account of the party my friend Jim and I attended near Othello, WA the other day. I was invited by another cherry pilot I’d met on my blog and was meeting her for the first time. Jim came along. We both flew — in two helicopters. We had great Mexican food, met really nice people, and gave 12 lucky raffle winners helicopter rides around the orchards. We were promised artwork from the kids (hopefully like this piece I received last week after giving a grower’s kids a ride) so maybe I’ll blog about it then.
  • The Evolution of Twitter. This would cover my observations of two Twitter accounts I maintain, how I maintain them, and what the results are. I’m pretty sure I’ll write this one sometime this month.
  • On Skeptics. Why I’m a skeptic and how it makes me look at the world. I haven’t thought this one out much yet, so I might still write it. I know it needs to be written.

These are only a few topics I didn’t get a chance to write about. And if you know me, you know I’d write a lot more than I’ve written here. But when I get this book done, I have about a week before I need to start the next one. Maybe I’ll churn out some fresh and interesting content then.

Or maybe I’ll get out of this camper and away from my computer and enjoy the area while I’m here.

Know Thy Menu

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Is it too much to ask for accurate answers to menu questions?

Blustery's

The sign out in front of Blustery’s, with the Columbia beyond it. (Pardon the quality; this is a cell phone photo.

Last night, I had dinner at Blustery’s Drive In in Vantage, WA. It’s a burger joint right off the interstate (I-90), just west of the bridge over the Columbia River (Wanapum Lake). I like the place. It has personality. And it has great burgers. I go there for the “Logger” burger, which is a burger topped with bacon, ham, cheese, and a fried egg.

As I ordered at the counter, I considered a side order with my burger. I asked about the onion rings. I like them batter dipped, not breaded. When I asked which they were, I was told they were breaded. I had sweet potato fries instead (which were excellent).

After dinner, I wanted ice cream. (Can you understand why I will never lose weight?) The girl at the counter offered hot fudge. Last time, I’d asked for it but was told they didn’t have any. I love hot fudge, so I went with it.

“Whipped cream and nuts?” she asked.

“Is the whipped cream real cream?”

“Yes,” she assured me.

“Okay, I’ll take some. But no nuts.”

I paid and waited for her to prepare the sundae I didn’t need. As I waited, an order of onion rings came out of the kitchen. Batter-dipped onion rings.

Now it’s pretty easy to tell the difference between breaded and batter dipped onion rings. These were definitely not breaded. They were batter-dipped. And they looked pretty good — not even very greasy.

Okay, so she’d made a mistake. No biggie.

I glanced at the girl making my sundae. She’d taken something out of a microwave and was pouring it into the bottom of a sundae dish. It was very runny. Hot fudge doesn’t usually get that consistency.

She added soft-serve ice cream and topped it off with more runny brown stuff. Then she disappeared into the back. When she returned, there was creamy white stuff and a maraschino cherry on top. She handed it over.

I dug into the cream. Or perhaps I should say “creme.” It wasn’t a dairy product. It tasted suspiciously like Cool Whip. Ick. I scooped it all off into a napkin.

I worked the spoon again. This time, I came up with some ice cream and chocolate syrup. The ice cream was melted; the syrup was cold. It was definitely not hot fudge. It was microwave-warmed chocolate syrup which had cooled back down after melting a good bit of the ice cream.

Don’t get me wrong — I ate it. Chocolate syrup is the next best thing to hot fudge in my book.

But is it too much to expect the people who work there to know what they’re serving me? Could the waitress possibly mistake Cool Whip and chocolate syrup for whipped cream and hot fudge?

Reminds me of the breakfast we had in a small town on the road one day. Mike asked the waitress if the blueberry pancakes are good.

“They’re great,” she assured us. “The blueberries are fresh. They just opened the can this morning.”

Please Don’t Drag Me Into Your Life

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I am a stranger.

This morning, as part of my e-mail routine, I checked the list of new Twitter followers. As I’ve said here and elsewhere, I don’t follow many people on Twitter, but I do check out all the new followers I get. Although most are spam these days, occasionally I find one interesting enough to reciprocate the follow.

Today’s batch included one that made me stop and think. About 75% of this person’s recent tweets were about the deteriorating health of her mom. Heart failure, lung problems, pneumonia. She was tweeting from the hospital, she was tweeting after discussions with doctors. She was keeping her followers apprised of what certainly seemed like the impending death of her mother, right down to details about how her father was taking it.

There are a few things that struck me about this.

Should strangers be expected to care?

First, I find it hard to believe that a good percentage of her 1,000+ followers really care enough about her and her life to want to read the grim details of the family health problem unfolding for her and being broadcast on Twitter.

Sure, if my mom went into the hospital, I’d likely mention it once or twice on Twitter. But if she got really sick and I was spending a bunch of time at the hospital as she lived her last days, I don’t think you’d find many blow-by-blow tweets about it. In fact, I don’t think you’d find many tweets from me at all. I’m not very close to my family, but I’m close enough to spend important time with them and to keep it mostly private. I have 700+ followers on Twitter and I’m positive that very few of them need (or want) to know about the things in my life that are real downers.

On the other side of the coin, I’ve followed folks on Twitter who have tweeted about their health problems or the health problems of family members. That’s normal; health problems are a part of life. But if any of them became absolutely consumed with the problem and tweeted mostly about that, I had to take a hard look at the situation. How well do I know this person? What can I do to make it better? How do I feel reading about this day after day, alongside tweets with links to yodeling cats, health care reform analysis, and cartoons? If the person was a stranger and I’d already said the comforting things I could and the tweets were making me feel like shit every day, I’d stop following. I’d have to. I cannot allow my emotional well being to be dragged down by the misfortunes of strangers who, for some reason, need to make their physical or emotional pain a part of other people’s lives.

So no, I’m not saying I stop following people who complain about a bad back or tweet briefly to mention a loved one with a health problem. But if I don’t know you and that’s just about all you tweet about, please don’t blame me for turning off the volume and getting on with my life.

I guess my point is, there’s just some things you shouldn’t expect strangers to deal with.

Can a person’s priorities be this fucked up?

The other thing that struck me is that this person was going through an ordeal with doctors and hospitals and family members, yet she still found time to follow me on Twitter. Are her priorities fucked up or what?

Now you might suggest that she followed me using some kind of automated tool. Lots of people do that for reasons that are not always in the best of interest of the Twitter community. (I don’t think she is a spammer, though.)

When I checked the time-stamp on the follow notification, I saw that she began following me at 5:47 AM today. My last tweet last night was before 10 PM and my first tweet this morning was after 6 AM. So I hadn’t tweeted anything that could trigger an automatic follow at that time of day.

So that leads me to believe that she’s surfing the Web, reading tweets, and interacting on the Internet. She’s somehow found my Twitter address and has decided to follow me.

Now.

While her mother is potentially on her deathbed.

Or is the whole family thing exaggerated? Just a story to make her sound more interesting to people who like to read that sort of thing?

I really don’t know what to think.

I’m not knocking anyone…Just trying to understand.

Please understand that I’m not writing this to knock a specific person dealing with a family problem. I’m just floored by the whole situation, trying to understand how someone’s take on “social networking” can be so incredibly different from mine.

And I’m wondering how off-base my thoughts on this matter are. How do you feel about strangers you meet on social networking sites detailing the sad parts of their lives? What is it that you want from your social networking activities?