Comments on: Are You Being Heard On Twitter? Probably Not.

By: hsushoe

hsushoe — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 03:54:22 +0000

Here is an update to my comment. The end result is that people ARE being heard on twitter, they honestly are. Yes that means you Jeff.

I posted a blog on my site and I told buddies of mine to re-tweet the post but it had to have @ustream so that they would get the blog link.

The next day I was contacted by UStream by e-mail and they told me that they fixed it, that I was not the only one affected by that little mishap.

I don't really care anymore but thats to show the power of the internet.

- hsushoe

By: David Ford

David Ford — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 03:56:47 +0000

Towards the end of the post, filters, live search, and things of the sort are mentioned. I feel that this is where FriendFeed exceeds twitter. FriendFeed is much more organized as well. Comments are in-line, and one mustn't constantly check between two accounts to follow a conversation.

As far as filters go, FriendFeed exceeds twitter here as well. For instance, I've made it a point to filter out all Twitter posts. You can filter users out, groups out, certain keywords out, etc.

I honestly feel that FriendFeed's features are far more superior to Twitter's. The issue with FriendFeed at the moment is that they do not have the "marketshare" so to speak to be able to promote themselves well enough.

Dave

By: hsushoe

hsushoe — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:30:30 +0000

Well the goal of Twitter (to me) was to do what Twitter's slogan suggests "What are you doing?" and I tend to put things the I feel other people may find interesting as it did me. Sometimes I tend to tweet something that I am doing like "I am Writing a blog post i'll get to ya as soon as I can". Other times I use services like FriendFeed so that my twitter picks up when I dig something, share a youtube video, share a station on pandora etc. etc.

When people see what I have posted they just ignore it. Look at it and tell me on IRC, or look at it and reply to me on Twitter. So You cannot really know which of your followers are looking at your tweets constantly until they are the ones that constantly reply or contact you in some form.

So tweeters are being heard, if one chooses to listen to what they have to say.
Very well written post.
-hsushoe

By: Cleta Amburgey

Cleta Amburgey — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 00:06:23 +0000

I agree

By: OmniDragon

OmniDragon — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:20:56 +0000

I've used their live search quite a few times and sometimes prefer it to a standard search engine such as Yahoo or Google. I don't think the people who made Twitter initially expected much from this online service. I mean, how about the numbers that show how long it took for this service to really take off and how many issues/problems they've had on the server side of things. They clearly weren't ready for this magnitude of an audience, therefore the plans/resources weren't there, and still aren't.

I wonder all the time whether people read my tweets or not. I don't have very many followers and I have tweeted about some very interesting things. Interesting to me, anyway. Maybe people choose a different outlet because they'll be able to respond to something that interests them with more than 140 characters. Twitter seems to think that if you have something to say that is more than 140 characters, then that makes it blog worthy. I just don't think like that.

I think their trends are taking off like a rocket, though. I think tweeters are definitely being heard, as per your examples: Iran and Michael Jackson.

I guess you're right, though. Possibly only the people with the biggest following are heard the most. People will pay attention to someone more just because they have thousands of followers. The Pope may have people crowd around to hear him speak, but he's not going to get you into Heaven.

Am I being heard? I don't know. Sometimes, I hope so. Other times I feel like I'm talking to a wall. That's only fun for so long.