On Twitter

Today, there’s hardly any soul active enough on the internet who hasn’t come across the word ‘twitter‘. If not having an account, they have surely heard about twitter from their friends, colleagues or random people on Omegle.

Image via scobleizer on flickr

The best part about twitter is that the core idea of the system has been kept as simple as possible by the founders. Thus, the users are free to understand the system in their own unique way and adapt & use it the way they wish to. Today, there are millions of people registered on twitter, but if you notice carefully, every user has his own style of using the service. There are tons of ‘Marketing and SEO Gurus‘ on twitter, many who will start following you when you mention their favorite keyword. Of course, there are the other users like graphic designers, college-going folks, web and software developers and pretty much every kind of office worker.

Over the years that twitter has gain a larger momentum, we have seen many trends being developed on twitter and how it has evolved to either adapt to, or overcome them. twitter and the service is so large, that many of these things are ignored or overlooked most of the times. I’ve been contemplating to write about a number of things I’ve noticed on twitter for a long while now. WIth this post, I’ll try to put forth a few.

Hashtags

The volume of tweets being posted every minute on twitter, and the variety of the subjects of those tweets is so large and wide respectively, that it became hard to keep track of everything. This led to the frequent use of ‘hashtags‘ .

Hashtags are nothing but keywords suffixed with the # character, so it becomes easier to track tweets. For example, tracking all the activity about the ongoing IPL series in South Africa is easy if you look for ‘#ipl‘. Simply prefixing a keyword of your choice with the # character turns it into a hashtags.

But these hashtags are so irregularly used today that it has become terribly annoying. One tries to cramp in as many hashtags as possible. Take a look at the following tweet.

#awesome #video No.2 #g20 http://illuzia.net/en/videos/clips/g20

Now, keep in mind that this is just an example and there are many such out there. Almost every word in the tweet has been hashtag‘ed by the user. Aalaap, president of the Non-Profit Organization ‘Hashtags are Douchebags’ replied with the following tweet.

@fossiloflife #dude #not #so #many #hashtags #please !!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unlike Aalaap, my grudge isn’t against the number of hashtags used in a tweet, but against their unnecessary usage. Twitter Search (formerly, Summize) is an amazingly powerful tool to dig out tweets. What hashtags do is simply add clutter.

The chances of you finding the above tweet by @fossiloflife if you had searched for #awesome or #video are the same as a search for ‘awesome’ or ‘video’. It’s high time people realized the importance of including the right hashtag.

It is very important we understand the very concept of a tag. Tags are meant to be addons to the original entity, not a part of it. When you travel by air, your luggage is tagged. They don’t engrave the information with a drill machine. When you upgrade a photo to flickr, tags are added as information in the sidebar. See where this is going?

When you add unnecessary hashtags in your tweet, you are just reducing the chances of people noticing its value. Take, for instance, the following two examples:

Steve Jobs appears on stage, announces a netbook based on iPhone OS. Awesome! #wwdc

and

#Steve Jobs appears on stage, announces a #netbook based on #iPhone OS. #mac #awesome

It’s way too easy to stick to one single hashtag that best describes what you are talking about than adding one to every single word in your tweet.

I understand you may not necessarily agree with the above, but this is just what I feel about hashtags

Conversations

Conversations, today, are as much an integral part of twitter as a the battery is in a digital wrist-watch. With twitter accepting @replies as a standard, the activity has surely increased around conversations. Opinions are being taken / Help is being asked for on twitter and people are @replying to specific tweets.

See how that last part is bolded? It is now possible to reply to specific tweets on twitter, but sadly there are many whom I follow who are now aware of this. This was made possible by twitter after is enabled the in_reply_to_status_id, which is basically a reference to the tweet you are replying to. Even then, there are a number of 3rd party apps/clients/web-apps that still don’t make use of this parameter via the API. Sadly, even twitter’s own mobile web does not support this feature.

Back to conversations, what this feature has enabled, is a number of twitter clients can now show you the reply-chain between two people. The best implementation of this is in Tweetie Mac. But when the parameter is not populated, the whole chain is broken. A few clients that I can recall who don’t support this are PocketTweets and m.tweete.net. This makes is annoyingly stupid to make sense of someone’s tweet in your timeline. Every once in a while, I come across a tweet like, “Haha, awesome dood!” and there’s no way to know what that was in response to.

Loren Brichter, in a recent interview to Macworld, said:

One of the fantastic things about Twitter clients is how easy it is for users to jump from one to another. Just type in a username and password and off you go.

While not a compulsion, you can easily move to a better client / web-app.

Retweets / Reposts

Retweet: The act of re-posting someone else’s tweet which you find interesting. Retweeting has really picked up momentum in recent months. But, it’s being overdone. Retweeting that occasional interesting tweet is okay, but if more than 50% of you recent tweets are RTs, you need some thinking time.

Also, there’s the argument about what standard to follow. There’s the RT @username format and the (Via @username) format. There was a huge debate on this recently and obviously, everyone continues to have his own opinion. Here’s mine:

If Original tweet is:

OMG! This phone totally blows. What a waste of $499 – http://link-to-twitpic

RT works as:

RT @username OMG! This phone totally blows. What a waste of $499 – http://link-to-twitpic

while the via syntax works as

Heh! What a way to waste $499. A phone that totally blows http://link-to-twitpic (Via @username)

Just as the common opinion in the above links is, to me, context is very important. And using the Via syntax allows you to add your own context, while RT is just ‘saying because he said‘.

If you’ve been following me on twitter, the ratio of RT:Via for me is about 1:7.

Re-Tweeting again

There’s another annoying trend that I’ve noticed a lot more frequently in the recent days. This is always with the RT syntax. In my timeline, I come across such a tweet.

RT @username RT @longusername RT @longerusername OMGWTFBBW http://some-random-link LOL

In my opinion, it’s only ethical to credit the original user for the tweet. Sure, you found about it through your friend, but this isn’t a competition and you are not getting points for this. I was unfollowed recently because I re-posted a link crediting the origin, but not whom I read it from.

More?

Twitter is so large a system, that there are so many other things to talk about. I’ll probably cover that in the coming days in another post.

I don’t mind negative feedback, as long as you’re on topic. So go ahead, leave your comment.

Tagged as: etiquette, opinion, twitter