Two Twitter rants for the price of one
April 8th, 2009 |
You want rants? We’re blowin’ ‘em out the door! I was just cleaning out my “Twitter rants to post” folder and decided to do two at once, one on the subject of #followfriday and the other on the subject of hashtags.
Rant #1 - Follow Friday
People use the #followfriday tag to post Twitter updates with the names of people they recommend others follow on Twitter. I guess it’s helpful to newcomers and it’s a nice gesture to the people who are recommended. When I signed up for Twitter I found new people to follow by doing searches, reading profiles, reading blogs and finding people with similar careers and interests.
I’m going to reserve judgment on Follow Friday in general, but several habits have cropped up in relation to Follow Friday that bother me.
First, while it’s good manners to thank the person who gave you a #followfriday thumbs up, I dislike the practice of responding to a #followfriday recommendation by tweeting “@soandso Thanks for recommending me for #followfriday!” The intent of this is obvious. It is a “clever” way of saying thank you and at the same time, shamelessly promoting yourself.
Second, Friday begins at 12:00:01 a.m. or thereabouts wherever you are. For some reason people start posting Follow Friday recommendations on Wednesday and they trickle well into Saturday. Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday are not Friday. Stop it.
Rant #2 Hashtags
While hashtags have been useful on Twitter so far, I think they should be seen for what they are — a workaround for missing features, an annoyance to people not involved in the hashtagged conversation, and a pain in the a** for users.
There are many useful and interesting conversations occurring on Twitter, and certain specialized ones, like Sarah Evans’s “journchat” use hashtags so users can “watch” the conversation with a tool like Twitter search or Twemes. But the tags, and in some cases the conversations themselves, can be annoying to those not participating. If Twitter supported “groups” like Presently and Yammer do, specialized chats could be done within a specific group. This has multiple benefits.The first of these is that people can participate in a coherent, continuous conversational stream without having to know a thing about hashtags and without interruption.
If no hastags are required, users are freed from the tasks of including, properly formatting and understanding hashtags. This not only makes conversations more fluid, it frees up space in the constrained world of 140 characters. A side benefit is that other users, who enjoy Twitter but may not want to observe these conversations, do not have to watch them in their timeline. (There is a very interesting dynamic in connection with certain event hastags, like #sxsw. Many people who do not attend the events see the hashtags and feel they are being snubbed.)
Hashtags are, in a general, very hard for many to understand and use. Central repositories either don’t exist or aren’t used, and one can often see debates on Twitter about which is the correct hashtag to use for a certain event or chat. Boolean search, such as that used by Twitter search, does not need the “#” character, so adding it should be unnecessary as long as a unique string is used, like web2.0. If Twitter supported groups, the capability of sending updates only to a select group of people, hashtags would be unnecessary.
Alternately, Twitter could add a couple of features to mitigate this. One feature could be what I call tabbed channels. Users would tag their various followers as friends, colleagues, music, news, whatever, and segregate them into tabbed timelines for more coherent viewing. Another feature, my favorite idea, would be to allow people to opt out of a certain tag, so for example, if I didn’t want to observe a certain conversation, I could add its tag to my Twitter preferences and tweets with that tag would no longer be included in my timeline.
Thanks for letting me rant. I feel much better now.
Tags: #followfriday, follow friday, hashtags, twitter, groups
| Sphere This |
Actually, I prefer to recommend people to follow on other days except for Friday. Seems on Fridays everyone is recommending someone and there’s too many people to follow so no one really follows anyone (the paradox of choice!).
Comment by Anthony — April 8, 2009 @ 11:52 am
I’m not a fan of Follow Friday, since if someone I follow is following someone interesting I am most likely already following. Also, I see too many people just do a dump of names. If you’re going to suggest someone to follow say why. It is a nice practice to give an endorsement of your cooler followers, but I am kind of hating twitter on Fridays. I will sometimes thank people for giving me a recommendation, but I never use a hashtag when suggestion or thanking, so don’t think I am engaging in the “Look at me” behavior you mentioned.
And as to hashtags, I think you missed other uses for them. @abartelby has used them to denote comedy, irony, and inside jokes. Sometime people use them to deliberately annoy, and my all time favorite use is when liberals send messages to annoy #tcot. And that last use is also why they are a failure. People can deliberately pollute a channel.
I tend to not use either of these things, but have on both in the past.
Comment by Christopher L. Jorgensen — April 8, 2009 @ 7:50 pm
i like followfriday but i agree with your 2 points on bad things about it.
1 more point to add to it. When you link up a group of people describe them! tell me they are business owners, marketers, jokesters…whatever but group people with similar traits so i can easily decide to check out the whole group.
Comment by Jared O'Toole — April 8, 2009 @ 8:16 pm
Yeah - I’m with you on FollowFriday.
The only time I think it works is when someone does a tweet just for one person, and explains why.
I’m never going to check out a naked list of people.
Though, it is quite gratifying to be included.
Hashtags are a total hangover from IRC. And I’m sure I’ve lost followers tweeting from a conference. Some kind of room/group/channel thing would work, I think.
Comment by Andrew Lightheart @alightheart — April 8, 2009 @ 9:12 pm
None of the people I follow have actually ever used #followfriday - I find if someone is worth following, people will recommend them anyway, and usually give you some context or a reason as to why they’re worth listening to.
I’ve thought about being able to opt out of particular hashtags also - I think that would be a great feature. Particularly in the example that you mentioned, #sxsw, I was receiving dozens of posts every hour during the conference, and I had no idea what was going on for most of it.
Finally, Joel, your point about tabbed channels - you can actually implement this in some of the twitter tools such as Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop. They allow you to put your friends into different categories and view them in separate columns. I haven’t actually implemented this for myself yet, but I was thinking something along the lines of ‘Friends’, ‘Associates’ and ‘Noise’.
/Matt
Comment by Matt — April 9, 2009 @ 7:22 am
A Few Food Friendly Folk For The #FollowFriday Fun…..
With the popularity that the #followfriday hashtag has achieved and, more importantly, continued to maintain, I though it might be appropriate to include a blog post of my own, highlighting said food friendly folks and, hence, recommending the followin…
Trackback by Scotty Snacks — April 11, 2009 @ 7:28 am
This is a very usefule site. I have been using #hashtags for a working group, and we have just started getting non-related, non-member spam tweets. Is there a way to monitor #hashtag conversations to pull that comment out of our rss feeds? Do you think there is a better web2.0 system out there to have an rss feed of the tweets of a particular small, private-usage group?
Comment by Janice — April 14, 2009 @ 9:14 am
@Janice I suggest you take a look at Group Tweet http://grouptweet.com/ (@grouptweet) for your working group. I have not used this service personally, but I definitely recall seeing positive commentary from long-standing Twitter members on several occasions.
Hope this helps.
Comment by Gordon — April 15, 2009 @ 11:17 pm
#followfriday is borked - tweet after tweet after tweet stuffed full of names.
The way to fix it, in my opinion, is to use a hashtag to recommend people that actually works.
My pick is #worthfollowing.
You can see why #followfriday & #ff & #ff2 are broken, alternatives and why I think #worthfollowing is best on my blog http://isemann.posterous.com (just scroll down a bit mkay!)
R! @isemann
Comment by isemann — August 18, 2009 @ 12:45 pm