Twittering

Links and Twitter

Steve Dale writes about his uneasiness with a new Twitter mashup service, Twitchboard, which automates the posting of content from Twitter to other social web services. At the moment, all it does is links: if you post a URL to Twitter it also gets pinged to your Delicious account.

I may be in the minority here but I feel slightly troubled by apps such as Twitchboard that want to think for me. I’m perfectly happy to create my own bookmarks in Delicious, which are reasonably well organised and categorised, or to click on Stumble! to add a link to a particularly interesting article I’ve read to my Stumble!  These are conscious decisions I’ve made to provide the ’semantic glue’ for my personalised social web. I tend to Tweet about fairly trivial stuff and will occasionally link to an article or picture that I’ve found particularly amusing. I don’t necessarily want to store these links for prosperity, or worse, create my own personal tag cloud around a random stream consciousness.

I can see some of the value, just in terms of time saving, for cross posting links to Delicious from Twitter. But I think Steve is right in this case – having Twitchboard perform this service would make you think twice about what you post to Twitter, and that’s just no fun. Presumably you also still have to go into Delicious to add tags and stuff (which is where most of the benefit lies) – so it isn’t that much of a time saver after all.

I mentioned in a comment on Steve’s post that actually doing this in reverse makes more sense: links I save in Delicious get automatically shared on Twitter. This is fairly easy to get set up, simply by using the RSS feed from my Delicious account and Twitterfeed to parse each link I share into Twitter.

It will be interesting to see how this works…

Who to follow on Twitter?

There has been quite a bit of twitterfuss over the last week about Mr Tweet, a hideously named service which analyses your current network and then suggests new people that you ought to be following, amongst other snippets of information.

To get your report, all you need to do is follow Mr Tweet on Twitter, and then you get a direct message when your feedback is ready. I’m still waiting for mine.

Other places you can go to find cool people to follow includes my Govwebby list, or the Twitterpacks wiki, which has lots of different feeds listed in a directory structure, whether by topic or location. Worth checking out.

Who would you like to see on Twitter?

Tom Watson is making a list of people who aren’t yet on Twitter, but who ought to be for all our benefit.

Stephen Fry (if it be he) has become an instant success using micro-blogging platfrom, Twitter. Life would be enriched if more of Britain’s treasured characters were sharing their daily thoughts with social networkers. So I’m compiling a list of the 50 well known people who should tweet. Good, bad, charming, rude, the rogues and the pious, you name them and I’ll write to them over Christmas to urge them to join Twitter.

Add your suggestions in the comments on his post.

The UKGovWeb Twitterverse

The real value of Twitter is in the network, and if you are just starting out with it, and don’t have many people to follow, or much of a following yourself, it can seem a bit quiet, depressing and pointless. As you build up your network, though, suddenly things change and it becomes a vital communication tool.

So, if you are a public sector worker wanting to make the most of this great network, you might need a bit of help tracking down some people to start following and interacting with. Here’s that help! I’ve tried to break the various groups up into categories, to help you find who you want.

If I have missed anyone out or put them in the wrong place, please let me know in the comments! There’s gotta be more tweeting politicians, surely?

Central Government Official Feeds

Civil Servants

Local Authority Official Feeds

Local Authority Web Teams

Local Authority Officers

Other Public Sector Bodies & Officers

Politicians

Freelancers, Consultants etc

Twitter, qwitter and keeping up with your followers

Qwitter is an unusual service in that it fills a need that probably doesn’t exist. It simply tells you that someone has stopped following you on Twitter, and what your last tweet was before they did the deed, in case it might offer a clue why they did it.

This is such a tiny, niche service that I can’t believe anyone is actually going to make use out of it. I’ve signed up, just because I am interested. Am I likely to take any action as a result of someone not following me? Probably not.

Mike Butcher at Techcrunch says this of the Ireland based service:

Now, you can’t secretly unfollow friends or associates anymore. If someone unfollows you, you’ll know and you’ll be able to ask them why. That means it may break up a few twitter friendships. Then again, it may even improve a few. At least you’ll be able to ask someone why they unfollowed you. Maybe people will will learn to use Twitter in a smarter way?

Seeing Qwitter did make me want to take a bit more of a look at the people I follow and those that follow me, though. As of writing, I follow 274 people and am followed by 520. The main reason why there are so many followers is down to spammers, in the main. I keep my updates public and don’t bother blocking obvious spam followers – I just can’t be bothered.

I did think about how I could check which of the people I follow actually follow me in return. A quick question to Twitter resulted in a couple of responses:

Of which the best is Karma. It lists everyone connected to your account, along with whether you follow that person, if they follow you, or both. It’s a really easy way of spotting people you really ought to follow, or of figuring out why that person never replies to you.

Oh, and I just have to finish a post about Twitter with this:

Yeah!

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