Social media etiquette

A month or so ago I recorded an interview with the local Fox station on social media etiquette. The interview was a lot of fun, in that I got to talk about Twitter and Facebook with reporter Foti Kallergis and producer/cameraman Jacob.

Here’s a link to the story on the Fox 7 website, and I’ve embedded the full video below.

Interactive Austin 2009

Yesterday I got to attend the morning sessions at the Interactive Austin conference. I was invited along with some other students at UT to blog and tweet about the conference, the theme of which was using social media tools and organization to improve enterprise profitability.

Because I had to leave early, I only had a chance to see the first two keynotes and one breakout session, but what I saw was interesting (here’s my tweetstream from the conference, via Twitter Search).

The highlight of my visit was Sam Lawrence’s keynote “No More Whip Cream on BS.” Although I don’t have much connection to enterprise business, I really enjoyed Lawrence’s presentation style. He presented a lot of what could have been really dry material quickly and entertainingly. I had my Flip cam with me and took some (shaky) video of the talk. Below is a clip from the first few minutes of his talk. The rest of my videos can be found here.

"Is Aristotle on Twitter?" panel wrap-up

A visualization of messages referencing the #Aristotle hashtag on Twitter, created by Social Collider. The red lines in the center are the #Aristotle references. Click on the image for a high res version.

Thanks again to everyone who came to our SXSW panel, “Is Aristotle on Twitter?,” last Tuesday. The feedback from the crowd and online was very supportive, and the discussion was driven by some perceptive and interesting questions from the audience.

If you weren’t able to make it to the panel, there are a lot of ways you can catch up with it online. ZDNet posted a video of my discussion of arrangement,

while fellow panelist Will Burdette has posted audio of the entire session on his blog.

You can also find photos of the session here.

Update (Mar. 23, 2009): Panelist Jim Brown has posted a description of his talk on delivery on his blog, along with the accompanying video “Delivery: From Cicero to Beyonce.” Here’s part of the description from his post, along with the video:

I talked about how delivery in the history of rhetorical education dealt with using the body to make meaning. While Cicero thought that teaching delivery in the form of breathing exercises was kind of silly, this didn't stop teachers from showing students the mechanics of delivery. In 19th Century elocution models, such instruction meant that students were shown very specific ways to move their bodies. To bring this discussion to the present, I discussed Obama's delivery. But I also discussed Beyonce's "Single Ladies" video has an example of rhetorical education. All of Beyonce's students (those imitating her on YouTube) are learning to use their bodies to make meaning.

Update (June 1, 2009): I’ve posted a slightly longer version of my talk here.

“Is Aristotle on Twitter?”: The interview

Last week, Adam Lee of SXTXState interviewed me and my fellow SXSW panelists about “Is Aristotle on Twitter?” Here’s the video:

The panel will be Tuesday, March 17 at 10:00 a.m. in room B. You can find more info here.

“Is Aristotle on Twitter?”: Details of SXSW panel now online

This March I’m going to be in a panel discussion at SXSW with Will Burdette (Twitter), Jim Brown (Twitter), Trish Roberts-Miller (Twitter), and Jillian Sayre (Twitter). The panel is titled “Is Aristotle on Twitter.” Here’s the panel description from the SXSW site:

We introduce a framework for understanding information overload by reflecting on and updating ancient communicative traditions. Aristotle was an information maven and Cicero a communication connoisseur. These classical communicators designed their speeches around five principles: invention, style, arrangement, memory, and delivery. Contemporary communicators build on this tradition with Web-based technologies.

Mark your calendars now to make sure you don’t miss it. :)

Say goodbye to the fail whale?

Twitter downtime has been less of an issue lately, and Wired is claiming that the record site-usage during the election season might mean the site has corrected some of it’s technical problems.

Proving itself capable of handling traffic on one of the biggest days of its existence is an important step for the site, which has yet to nail down a revenue model but is growing rapidly and becoming more mainstream.

The service faced episodic downtime earlier this year, but Stone says they’ve developed a strategy that has been successful in preventing visits from the notorious "fail whale."

“Our approach over the last several months has been to find the weakest point of the system, fix it so it's no longer the weakest, move to the next weakest point and so on. This simple technique has vastly improved performance, reliability and capacity,” said Stone.

Another Election Result: Twitter Comes Through

Twitter users in U.K. lose some SMS features

I think this issue has far more potential to be a Twitter-killer than downtime problems. One of Twitter’s distinctive features is its SMS capabilities. If those start going away, then what is the draw of the service?

European users of Twitter can no longer receive text message updates on their cell phones, in a temporary move designed to keep the start-up's telecom bills down.

Twitterers can still use its U.K. number, +44 762 480 1423, to send updates to the site. But that number will no longer deliver text-message updates back to users, and recommends that they use the Twitter mobile site or a third-party client like TwitterBerry, Twitterrific, TwitterMail, or Cellity.

Finding classes via social media

Here’s an interesting post on how a prospective student found one of my classes.

Social Tech on Campus in Practice

Restricting Congressional Tweets?

Texas Congressman John Culberson has posted a link to a letter by Michael E. Capuano, the Chair of the Congressional Franking Comission and Congressman from Massachusetts, which Culberson claims will require prior approval for posts to non-governmental websites resulting in

No more live [Qik] videos - no more live Tweets from the House floor or anywhere in the Capitol - no more www communication w/o prior approval

Here is a link to the document. I’ve posted the relevant recommendations below:


I like Culberson, and I wish more of our governmental officials would embrace web communication technologies in the way that he has. However, I wonder if he is overreacting to this document. Unless he is referring to some other as yet unpublished communication, it’s difficult to find the rules he is complaining about in the actual document. The document itself refers explicitly to online video, advocating the establishment of a dedicated congressional channel on a web video site (YouTube, I presume, although the letter isn’t specific) for House members to publish video content. The first and third recommendations would require the videos to be compatible with existing House communication rules, while the second encourages (it doesn’t require) the channel to not show ads, and the fourth suggests the establishment of some kind of rules for posting on non-governmental sites. Those rules all seem sane to me, but here’s Culberson’s take:

Dem "Supreme Soviet" leadership of House would have to approve every Twitter before I could post it!!

I just don’t see that in this document (although more documents might be forthcoming). And, frankly, I find the name-calling and the implication that there is some sort of conspiracy of silence being put in place by the “Dems” a little hard to take from a member of Dick Cheney’s party.

Update: Culberson says:

Look at page two - note each Twitter etc must meet "existing content rules and regulations" that means prior approval/rewrite

However, Culberson notes that this rule applies to almost anything he says, acknowledging that his phone conversations should be censored. Of course, they aren’t censored, making it difficult for me to see how this new ruling about video posts will lead to censored Twitter streams.

The Tweetularity is near

Little more than a week-and-a-half after this post on the future of Twitter, the future seems to have arrived. At least that’s what Robert Scoble says.

Twitter has evolved from status updates into public conversation with colleagues, companies, and your target audience.

Scobleizer: Stream of Consciousness

via Steve Rubel

The future of Twitter

O’Reilly’s Ben Lorica says that it will be similar to the explosion of popularity in blogging.

When Microblogging Grows Up

Twitter items of interest

I’ve been swamped for the last week getting my students’ grades in and working on a few writing projects, so I haven’t had a chance to blog here in a few days. However, I did want to post these interesting Twitter-related items.

First, Twitterverse is a free screensaver that ships with the new version of the Mac OS which will show your friends’ Tweets while your computer is idle. I just installed it, so I’m not too sure how fast it updates, but it looks pretty cool. For those of you (like me) who aren’t as Mac-savvy as the link above assumes, you have to install the DevExamples package on the Mac OS disc 2 to find the file. After that, you can follow the rest instructions.

Second, one of the most common questions that non-Twitter users ask about Twitter is “Why would you want to do that?” This question can be surprisingly difficult to answer, but this video provides one nice, simple answer you can point them to: communication. I think Twitter has more (and more interesting) uses than this, but the video is engaging and worth the watch.

Twitter business model: Selling interactions

Twitter, the ubiquitous microblogging platform, has investors worried because, despite its popularity as a life-streaming application, it isn’t clear how the service can make money. Although the company is experimenting with ads in Japan, there is some concern that U.S. users would reject ads on the site.

Another possibility, though, is the use of Twitter as a marketing platform. SMS Text News recently reported on an interesting use of Twitter by a marketer at Boingo:

Pat Phelan is bored out of his skull waiting for his flight at the fancy new Heathrow Terminal 5. How do I know? He Twittered this. Well, an enterprising person at Boingo Wireless (also using Twitter) decided to use his/her initiative and make Pat an offer of a free wifi pass:

Best ever use of Twitter for business @boingo saw that I was delayed in Heathrow and offered me a free wifi logon, really cool

Why isn’t facilitating these kinds of interactions Twitter’s business model? Since users like this sort of thing, Twitter wouldn’t take any kind of hit from them, and I’m sure marketers and customer service workers would be thrilled to have an easy way of connecting with customers who are in a jam. Twitter could could then take a small percentage of resulting transactions, or just a few pennies as a “finder’s fee,” similar to the eBay model.

Twitter everything, nothing at all

The back story:

UC Berkeley graduate journalism student James Karl Buck was arrested on April 10 without any charges in Egypt for photographing a demonstration.

He used his mobile phone to twitter the message “Arrested” to his 48 followers, who contacted UC Berkeley, the US Embassy and a number of press organizations on his behalf.

The TechCrunch story by Michael Arrington is titled “Twitter Saves Man From Egyptian Justice.” Peter Kafka at Silicon Alley Insider disagrees:

We’re glad James is out of jail, but it seems that Twitter probably didn't spring him—being an American, with access to a cell phone, was probably more important.

So, did Twitter free Buck, or is the hype around the story merely hype? I think the reality is somewhere in between. While I agree with Kafka that the key here is that Buck is an American, it certainly helped him out a lot that he had a cellphone and was able to quickly notify his friends about his situation. He could have done this a number of ways, but he chose to use Twitter. It isn’t clear why he made this choice—maybe a call wasn’t possible?—but he did.

So what role did Twitter actually play in this situation? First, it broadcast the message of his predicament to a number of people at once, making it possible for all of them to agitate for his release and contact others—UC Berkley—who could also agitate for him.

Second, and I think perhaps crucially, Twitter made a permalink of Buck’s cry for help. As they passed on his story to larger organizations, Buck’s friends could point them to the archived version of his post, a fact which I imagine would have made their pleas for help on his behalf more convincing (of course, I have no proof this happened).

Although Buck clearly benefitted from his American citizenship, if Twitter helped him at all, I imagine it was in these two ways.

Chronicle.com on Twitter

Jason Jones at The Salt Box has posted a link to the Chronicle of Higher Education’s recent story on academic uses of Twitter (sequestered behind paywall, or free for a limited time).

Most of the article repeats basic claims about new communication technologies—a lot of Tweets are mundane, some are profound, be careful what you post. There is some good stuff on one of the most interesting uses of Twitter: a broadcast-messaging system for emergency announcements. Overall, it’s a good summary of how the technology is being used by some academics, along with the benefits and possible drawbacks of integrating microblogging into academic or pedagogical pursuits.

Video-microblogging with Seesmic

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web claims that video-microblogging service Seesmic is more than just Twitter with video.

There appear to be two primary factors behind the early enthusiasm for Seesmic. The first is that it’s very well executed. Le Meur is the former head of SixApart Europe, the company hired Ben Metcalfe as an early consultant and there must be a number of other very social-media savvy people there whom I haven't met yet. The company takes feature requests via a public video thread. They hired at least one very skilled Flash designer. Usability is fairly high, it’s very easy to record a video on Seesmic and there’s literally zero turn-around time before your video is available in the public timeline and as a reply if appropriate. Can the company continue to scale? That will be a big question.

Aside from that, there’s something about a video-only environment that yields a level of personal accountability and quality discourse that you don’t find on other services. It’s a small, yet global, and very welcoming community. Many entrepreneurs claim that their community of users are the key to their momentum—but at Seesmic you can see the faces and hear the voices that prove it.

I’m not sure that these factors are so different as to make the description “Twitter with video” inaccurate, but Seesmic sounds like an interesting service. As more people’s cellphones are able to record and transmit video, this service (or services like it) are going to be increasingly popular. However, if the site wants to truly lock up the market, I don’t see why it wouldn’t include text messaging as well. (And I may be wrong about this: it seems that Seesmic is video only, but maybe it isn’t.)

Tweetmeme tracks the tweetosphere

Tweetmeme is a new service for tracking the movement of memes through the tweetosphere.

Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others. But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio).

I’m excited about this service; I’ve become interested in the kind of writing that occurs on microblogging platforms like Twitter, but I haven’t been able to do much research on the subject because I haven’t been able to find a way to archive tweets for research. It seems like Tweetmeme will make that possible.

via TechCrunch

Personal publishing and micro-fiction

Cameron Reilly of The Podcast Network has created a new site, Twittories, for crowdsourced stories composed in Twitter (via TechCrunch).

My wife and I were putting our kids to bed and we were doing something we have done with them since they were about two years of age. One of us starts a new story by telling a few lines and then the next person picks up where they left off and so on. I thought “gee, this is like a Twitter conversation” and started to wonder what it would be like to have a bunch of folks on twitter collaborate on a short story—140 characters at a time.

Apparently, a similar phenomenon has already demonstrated that it has legs: in Japan, novels are currently written and consumed on cellphones.



In a related post on Read/Write Web, Alex Iskold responds to a post by Fred Wilson on microblogging (Wilson drew the graph above), expanding on Wilson’s claim that microblogging fits a niche in personal publishing not met by chat, social networking, or blogging. Iskold concludes his piece this way:

The personal publishing market evolved from cumbersome web sites to online diaries called blogs to social networks and more recently to microblogs. Each form of personal publishing is different and each has its niche and audience. While social networks have been the most wide spread, the content creation there feels different from publishing. Because traditional blogging platforms are powerful and still require technical know-how, microblogging has evolved as an intermediate form of self-publishing. Microblogging has a shot of spreading blogging further into the mainstream as well as swaying some professional bloggers to start personal blogs.

Although Iskold doesn’t mention micro-fiction like Twittories in his post, it will be interesting to see how this kind of writing fits into the microblogging niche.

Email is dead. Long live email!

So, it turns out that the youth of today no longer use email, preferring the IM and chat. Oh, wait; maybe that was the youth of five years ago. At any rate:

e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than e-mail. Last year, comScore reported that teen e-mail use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant.

However, there is some hope for email yet. Apparently Yahoo and Google are attempting to reanimate email’s rotting corpse as the backbone of their respective social networking strategies. Clearly, people still get worked up about email, but it is possible that, over time, email will morph into a primarily business communication tool, as the most formal—or, perhaps, the oldest and therefore least scary—of online communication methods.