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I’ve been on Twitter for a bit over a year now and during the recent year-end holidays I paid a bit more attention to my Twitter stream than I had recently.  I even used Mr. Tweet to help guide  some over-due tuning of my Following list. I also found myself reflecting on the new or evolved Twitter usage patterns since I last blogged about Twitter in March 2008 with Twitter first impressions, use cases, and tips and Does Twitter fill a communication void?

Three of the most noticeable evolutions in Twitter since I last thought about it as a system are the retweet (RT) usage pattern, increased use of hashtags, and the more noticeable spam. All part of growing up I suppose.

Retweets

From Jeremiah Owyang in Retweet: The Infectious Power Of Word Of Mouth:

A retweet is when one individual copies a tweet from someone in their network and shares it with their network. It’s perhaps the highest degree of content approval, it means that the content was so valuable and important that they were willing to share it with their network –causing it to spread from one community to the next –retweets are the core essence of the viral aspect of content spreading

Shel Israel also sees retweeting favorably in The Power of Retweeting:

Retweeting allows the power of the network to take place, in pretty much the same way a blog link can extend the conversation from one blogger to a great many, sometimes at a very rapid rate.

As does Valdis Krebs in So many people, So little time:

If someone re-tweets what you posted/tweeted then that is a vote of attention/quality — if many people re-tweet you, or the re-tweet the person that already re-tweeted you, then better yet! In this sense Retweet Rank follows the example of Google’s very successful PageRank algorithm — people point to web content they find interesting/useful/valuable.

On the other hand, Steve Rubel in Re-Tweets Comprise Two Percent of All Twitter Volume opens with:

Back in January I wrote about the Lazysphere and it’s impact on blogging. My point then was that many tech bloggers have become lazy in simply re-blogging links rather than breaking news or writing essays that outline powerful new ideas or big questions. Now there are signs that the same is spreading to Twitter.

My own still forming views on retweets:

• Bottom-line up-front: Retweeting in moderation is a fine thing. In excess and you’ll get a ‘Remove’ from me as I’d rather follow someone closer to the source content than reading the log of a ‘relay station’.
• All the retweets of the recent phishing scheme (when there was already a warning put out by Twitter itself) reminded me of people emailing virus warnings in early PC virus days…or worse, sending around urban legends.
• I find my scanning visually impacted by the RT convention and would like it at the close of a Tweet versus the beginning — less obtrusive.
• On the more positive, I’ve discovered some new users I’ve decided to Follow via clicking on the user name for the original Tweeter. In this regard I appreciate RT’s versus just reposting a link that someone else tweeted.

Hashtags

A year ago I mainly noticed hashtags being used for conferences, e.g. #CES (Consumer Electronics Show) that begins later this week. More recently I’ve noticed users increasingly using hashtags as ongoing topical tagging, as in #KM for Tweets related to Knowledge Management, and also seeing more conversations to coordinate on the best hashtag, e.g. for learning content.

I don’t have much personal opinion on this one other than, like RT, I find hashtags can get visually in the way of my scanning…although at least this time the convention is to place them at the end of a Tweet. I have yet to extract much search/retrieve value from hashtags and have not embraced use in my own Tweets yet except at conferences.

Spam

Saving the worst for last. Fortunately, I’m not yet seeing the obscene or cheap prescription drug spam that infiltrated email and then blog comments — although I imagine it is only a matter of time before this starts sneaking through Twitter’s own filtering efforts. What I am experiencing is the Twitter account that Follows me along with literally thousands of others, has very few updates, and whose profile statement and web-site URL is blatantly commercial in an area of no interest to me. One of my more recent and less obnoxious examples: tigers1904. Folks, if you going to try to market to me via Twitter, pay attention to my very public disclosure of my interests, or get lumped into this spammer category.

Alas, this past weekend Twitter also saw a serious phishing attack.

Closing Notes

• Overall I’m not liking the move towards using Twitter as if it was a social bookmarking application, ala Delicious. If I want to follow your bookmarks I’d prefer to do that through FriendFeed (or other lifestream) or directly from your social bookmarking application (typically Delicious). I plan to do some further pruning of my Following list for a couple of folks I would really like to keep up with in social colleague sense, but I’m not interested in seeing every bookmark they declare.
• In this observation of the ongoing evolution in the Twitter microcosm I’m reminded of emergence as a formal theory and made some time to read and listen more seriously on this subject than I did during my my more casual look during the time of my What’s Emerging? post last April.
• Another sign of growing up: entire blogs now devoted to Twitter, e.g. TwiTip,  as earlier seen for blogging.  Who would have thunk 18 months ago when the most common reaction to Twitter seemed to be “why would you bother, what good is it?”
• And another: a Twitter application database, reference Twitter App Database: Will You Use It?
• Along with spam, another negative pattern on the increase in my Twitter network are users intentionally (or so it appears) repeating Tweets over the course of a day, some hours apart. Folks, think back to the earlier days of email…you have your caps key stuck on. Stop shouting.

Tags: hashtags, Jeremiah Owyang, Shel Israel, spam, Steve Rubel, Twitter, Valdis Krebs

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 4th, 2009 at 9:53 pm and is filed under emergence, software applications, use cases. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.