Dave Cole

This post was generated by Dashter

Over the past few weeks, I’ve really been trying to pay attention to the pro’s and con’s of Twitter. Part of that’s due to the fact that I shut down my Facebook account, in an attempt to see what the non-Facebook Internet still felt like.

@KellyMitchell ahh gotcha. Over-exuberant following. Been thinking about that a bit myself.

— Dave Cole (@HeyDaveCole) April 4, 2012

Kelly and I had an interesting back-and-forth based partly around the idea that we follow people at odd intervals. Sure, it’s easy to add the first 20-100 people you follow on Twitter because you know them in real life. But then you start following people you’ve never met. And even the people who we know (or know of) don’t always tweet how we expect them to.

I’ve been toying with making a game that forces you to un-follow low-grade tweeters. Like The Bachelor for Twitter accts @KellyMitchell

— Dave Cole (@HeyDaveCole) April 4, 2012

So this idea started forming – the notion of giving a way to easily swoop in to your account for the express purpose of unfollowing people. It wasn’t a “Dashter” feature – this was a unique little activity that needed a unique place to go.

@heydavecole I love that!I would totally play. Lose the losers.

— Kelly Mitchell (@KellyMitchell) April 4, 2012

Lose the Losers is right!

The Solution: twitShowdown (you can go visit it here: http://twitshowdown.com)

I have unfollowed 16 tweeps, saving me from 53.11 tweets per day using #twitShowdown! You can too: twitshowdown.com

— Dave Cole (@HeyDaveCole) April 13, 2012

So this is the end result: A way to quickly unfollow people. But there’s a method to the madness, and I want to share (geekily) my thoughts on Twitter signal vs. noise, and the nature of social media attention span.

Social Media Attention Span

The real issue with Twitter is that it doesn’t have an “edgerank” filter like Facebook does. This is a good and a bad thing. The problem with Facebook is that they’re making judgements based on what they think you want to see – which leaves many of your updates off the radar of the people you’re friends with. Twitter on the other hand is virtually unfiltered. It’s a pure stream of consciousness – with one notable exception. That exception is by placing an @mention at the beginning of a tweet, it will only show up in the stream of someone who follows both people. Otherwise, it’s considered a conversation thread that is filtered out for you. That’s effectively the only filter on your Twitter stream. Everything else gets piped in.

I’m a big fan of big data. But humans aren’t really well built for big data – we depend on filters to provide us with relevant or meaningful subsets of data. Twitter is beautiful because it’s a big giant data pile, but it also costs you attention span to sort & sift.

Let’s do some back-of-the-napkin math on this. Let’s say that you have 30 minutes per day to interact with Twitter.

The average reading speed of a regular person is 410 Words per Minute.

In that 30 minutes of “Twitter time” you can read [ 410 x 30 = ] 12,300 words.

The “average” tweet consists of about 90 characters. Considering abbreviations, spacing, and the desire for brevity, let’s say each word is 6 chars long, yielding a word-count “per tweet” of 15 words per tweet.

So, assuming that you can read 12,300 words in your 30 minutes of Twitter time, and each tweet is 15 words long, your 30 minutes yields about [12,300 / 15 = ] 820 Tweets per 30 minutes. That’s around ~27 tweets per minute, or 1,640 tweets per hour, give or take.

Alright, so that’s how much you can read and comprehend. So what about your attention span?

On Twitter, it’s really easy to follow someone. But you don’t always know what you’re actually getting when you click that “follow” button. That’s one of the reasons we built Archetwypes in to Dashter – to give you a fair warning about someone’s tweet style and let you decide whether or not their methodology is aligned with your preferences and values. But what about people you already follow?

Let’s break it down this way. Let’s say you follow 100 people on Twitter.

Let’s further assume each person on Twitter tweets 3 times per day.

That means that you should see about 300 tweets per day. That’s easily read-able within your 30-minute daily “tweet-span.” You can (in theory) be up to date on everything in your Twitter social network every day, and still have time for out-bound engagement & conversation.

But what happens when you follow 500 people? Now you’re talking about 1,500 tweets per day in your stream – meaning you’re not reading almost 50% of the tweets you’re receiving. What about following 2,000 people? Now you are being exposed to roughly 6,000 tweets per day, but you’re only able to read 820, meaning you’re only getting about ~14% of the total signal.

And there is huge variation in tweet yield as well. Consider this screen grab from TwitShowdown (click to see full size):

Tweets per day ranges from 0.15, 0.41, 3.12, 6.17, 13.81, 17.42. The mean is 6.85 tweets per day (TPD) while the median is 4.65 TPD. Notice those heavy tweeters pull the mean drastically towards the high end. I’ll pull another random sample (not shown): 0, 0.57, 0.60, 0.68, 5.83, 11.34 [mean= 3.17; median= 0.64].

So why TwitShowdown?

Alright, so that explains the theoretical problem. You probably follow too many people on Twitter. In theory, you should be following about 10 people for every 1 minute you plan to spend on Twitter per day – in order to stay abreast of all the happenings. But we (as social creatures) don’t do that at all. We follow loads of people. And Twitter (rightfully) has made it super-easy to follow new people. It’s how they build their platform. But un-following isn’t quite as easy. We feel a pang of regret at the thought of missing someone’s tweets. There’s an economic / psychology term for what I’m thinking of, but I can’t remember it just this second. But effectively we convince ourselves that we made a correct decision by following someone and justify that decision in an ongoing fashion by not un-following them. Even if that person spews an supply of useless or un-entertaining tweets, we’re don’t exert the effort to un-follow because we believe we’ll be worse-0ff by removing them from our feed on the off chance that a future tweet will be well worth our while.

So, that’s why TwitShowdown looks the way it does.

It’s pretty simple. You log in with your twitter account, and you’re shown 6 random people that you follow. Once you drop someone, it’ll refresh and give you a new batch of people to choose from. The only real data you’re provided is their avatar, their name & screen name, their Tweets per Day, and whether or not they follow you as well.

The avatar & screen name are there because you’ll probably instantly associate their name & face. If they’re someone you know, or someone you remember being interesting – you’ll recall that virtually instantly.

The “Tweets per day” information is there because that’s what we’re really after. Let’s say you recognize someone, but their tweets per day is off the charts. And you can’t really recall engaging with them or being particularly moved by any of their tweets. Suddenly, you’re presented with a golden opportunity: Clear up a TON of attention span by dropping someone who is not particularly valuable to you.

The “Follows?” state is just to let you know whether you’re in a reciprocal relationship with them or a one-directional one. Odds are, if you’re in a reciprocal relationship with someone, you’ll be less inclined to drop them. They’ve accepted your noise as signal; and in turn you may prefer to retain them as a colleague or friend.

The layout of the page is intentional. Odds are, about 10-20% of the people you follow are not adding very much value. The more people you follow, the more likely that is the case. But it’s tough to decide that in isolation. Rather, the idea behind this layout is to provide you with a 1-in-6 opportunity to spot the weakest link. Think of it like a Twitter version of Jack Welsh’s Vitality Curve: 20% of the people you follow are A-players – you’re probably engaging them frequently; 70% of people are “B” players – you read them, you smile, but you don’t do much with them; and 10% of the people you follow are C-players – and not worthy of your limited attention span.

Of course, if you’re in a gambling mood, you can also play Russian Roulette – and 1 of the 6 people shown will be randomly chosen and un-followed.

So that’s it.

That’s the story behind TwitShowdown. If you’re getting too much noise, and not enough signal on Twitter, I welcome you to come play around with it. My hope is that by cutting out some of the noise in your Twitter stream, you’ll actually get more value out of it. If you’ve got any questions or thoughts, I welcome you to share your comments below. Thanks for reading!

Tags: twitShowdown

Social Tools Should Be Useful

Name any social or online content platform, and you’ll likely hear a great debate raging about scheduling. The problem with the always-on 24/7 digital lifestyle is that all too often, you end up with tools that aren’t focused on delivering results… They’re just delivering special effects.

@mhess4 Scheduling tweets necessary for spacing reviews or giveaways but it’s organic conversations that make Twitter interesting #smwbooks

— atRandom (@atrandom) February 15, 2012

This is a great point – social scheduling is helpful under certain circumstances, but in general you will want to also maintain an active and robust dialogue online. It’s one of the reasons we designed Dashter with the Auto-Post hold feature. Certain automatically-generated tweets can now be postponed until after you’ve posted a “human” message on Twitter. That prevents the automated part of Dashter from overwhelming your human followers.

Tags: smwbooks

Over the last couple weeks I’ve had the chance to have several good conversations about social scheduling. One of the areas of discussion (specifically related to Dashter) is – why schedule tweets?

It’s a good question – and requires having a little familiarity with Twitter, but here’s my short answers…

Etiquette: When someone logs on to Twitter, they’re going to see a stream of the latest tweets in their “home” display. This is true for most clients like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck as well. Generally, there’s an implicit assumption that when you log in you’ll see a stream of the latest tweets from around your social circle. But, if someone you’re following logs in and posts all their tweets all at once, that tweet stream fills up with just them. It’s not particularly courteous.

You’re Missing the Spread: One of the best advantages to spreading your tweets out throughout the day is that you can cover the whole audience. Remember – 7am on the East Coast is 4am on the West Coast – and that’s just in the US. If you’re trying to reach / appeal to a global audience, the clock never stops – and twitter adoption continues to rise globally. Remember, Twitter is attempting to position itself as the “universal” social network thanks to the low adoption threshold (140 text characters can be managed by just about any cell phone on the planet) – so global audience & reach is essential. Assume that your audience logs in to Twitter once or twice per day and scans 20-30 tweets, and that’s it. Wouldn’t you like to increase the odds that they’ll see your tweet?

Tweets Don’t Last Very Long: There’s a couple schools of thought in terms of “how long” a tweet lasts on the network. That’s because of the signal vs. noise challenge. In general, I’ve heard that Tweets have a “lifespan” of anywhere from 5-15 minutes; all the way up to 2 hours. After that, it really has run its course. By and large, people don’t interact with Tweets older than a few minutes.

Maintain Multiple Conversations: If you get involved in a couple simultaneous conversations on Twitter, suddenly you will be posting multiple replies over a span of a very short period of time. By scheduling tweets, you can spread out the likelihood of holding one conversation at a time – allowing you to carry on better one-on-one conversations than if you have to have many at the same time.

The Signal vs Noise Challenge: There is a lot of noise on Twitter. Even the best selected group of people to follow will result in a wealth of conversations and “starters” that really don’t matter to you. The same will be true of the people who follow you… Some people will be deeply engaged, but generally few will be interested in your individual messages. That’s the advantage of the short lifespan of a Tweet. But how do you overcome the noise? By seeding your tweets throughout the day via scheduling, you’ll have more chances to have your message reach its audience and provide true signal than if you posted all your messages simultaneously.

Heavy Active User Paradox: It would make sense that your messages will be more effective if the people you engage with, follow, and follow-back were all heavy active users on Twitter. They’d be ready to spread your message, right? But the paradox is that active users on Twitter tend to interact and engage with heavily active users on Twitter. So the signal processing gets overrun again…

Here’s what I mean: If you are followed by someone who follows 10 people (and each person posts 1 message per day) you have a 1/10 (10%) chance of being “read.”

But if the person who follows you follows 100 people, and each person posts 10 times per day, any single message now has a “read” chance of 1/(100*10): 0.1%.

That’s the challenge with Twitter – as people find more interesting people to follow they end up hitting a wall of signal. So how do you improve the likelihood that your message will at a minimum get viewed (and hopefully RT’d, quoted, replied-to, or curated)? You schedule your tweets to spread them across the potential audience-online timeframe.

Remember – if someone logs in to Twitter and browses through their last few messages, they’re only 1-click away from your profile to view all your latest tweets, so your tweets should always be interesting and a reflection of you. You want your messages to be quality and consequential, but you ultimately want them to be read and ideally engaged with. By using scheduling, you can reach a broader audience, have better engagement with the people who follow you, and improve your objective outcomes on Twitter.

Tags: scheduling, twitter

Alright, let’s start off with where this article came from:

Jeremy Blanton – @jb140
RT @respres: “a social network isn’t a product; it’s a place” http://t.co/QVZlUdrA

I caught Jeremy’s RT of Jeff’s post a couple days ago, but I was out in Vegas for PubCon so my attention span was running a little short. But I read the linked article, and I knew I had to dish out a response. First off – I want to make it totally clear that I’m not a Google+ apologist. I’m not sitting around on Google+ waiting for new comments or likes. But to the same vein I’ve almost entirely stopped participating on Facebook too. I’m working on Dashter – I’m living in Twitter – things are good. Conversations abound (especially when you’ve got the right tools).

But this article (written by Farhad Manjoo @fmanjoo) just seemed so far off base I had to whip up a rebuttal – or at least a pragmatic alternative to the doomsday prediction he provided in his article.

What initially caught my attention to the line that Jeff quoted in his tweet was a strong disagreement that his premise is correct. Social Networks are places in as much as any website is a place. But social networking isn’t a place – it’s a process. It’s a verb. And because of that – the place is less important than the process provided.

Is Google+ A Dead Man Walking? Keep reading…

Tags: facebook, google plus, newspapers, social networks

This post was generated by Dashter

Heaven is a Cupcake – @heavensacupcake
It annoys me when someone follows you, so you follow back and then they unfollow! Not good twitter etiquette. :p

So “Heaven”‘s tweet here caught my eye, and I wanted to just share my thoughts on some Twitter etiquette that might go a long way towards building better relationships in your Twitter account. Obviously – playing counting games (like is described in the tweet above) is just silly. Un-following someone should really just be a product of their bad etiquette – not some sort of accumulation scheme.

Ahmad Hammoud – @Hammoud_
Twitter Etiquette 101: Never ask anyone to follow you.

On the other end of the etiquette spectrum are opinions like what Ahmad’s shared here, that you shouldn’t be asking for follows. I’m not sure I’d go with “never” when it comes to this sort of thinking – but I think it’s definitely true that you don’t want to harass people with suggestions that they follow you. Keep reading…

Tags: etiquette, twitter

This post was generated by Dashter

Oscar Gonzalez – @notagrouch
@RossTeasley http://t.co/9ZXwoT9I – Please take a look at this guys. Pay attention to the URLs you click on.

The link provided goes to an image posted by Ross – with a very common phishing attack designed to snag login info from your Twitter account.

So why does it matter? It’s not like you’ve got personal information on your Twitter account, right?

The dangerous part about a site like Twitter is two-fold: Network effects, Twitter app access and short URL’s.

Network effects can be powerful: Your single account can be hijacked and distribute links to your followers (and random people interacting with your Twitter account) extremely quickly. Keep reading…

Tags: phishing, scams, twitter, twitter apps

I just got my first chance to play around with the new Twitter functionality in iOS 5 (aka iTwitter), and right off the bat – I’m thrilled! They updated the keyboard by adding an “@” and a “#” button, and the appearance / feel of sending images is good. It’s not texting or instant messaging, but it’s not emailing either. Sending a tweet is sorta like saying “Hey, here’s a thing!” and there’s even a cute “tweet” sound that chirps once you hit send.

As someone involved in the Twitter eco-system, I couldn’t be more thrilled with how easy they’ve integrated the little blue bird in to the iPhone. From a development perspective, we’re thrilled here at Dashter that the new iOS 5 integration uses the new Twitter “media” entity – because now these tweet’d pics are easily referenced from within the API. It’s very clean – and we can’t wait to show off how we’re taking advantage of this technology on our end.

But one other thing does come to mind with this level of integration: It’s one-way. Part of the beauty of Twitter is that you can post “blindly” to your followers – the expectation of reciprocation is low, compared to paired networks like Facebook and LinkedIn. But that also comes with the potential for people to forget that Twitter is a wonderful conversation medium. I liken Twitter more to a public text messaging service than a private social network. But with the ease of connectivity that is included in iOS 5, I think the potential is there for people to forget to participate on Twitter.
Keep reading…

Tags: iOS 5, iPhone, twitter

Hail the Hashtag! Img remixed; original by Doug Ellis Photography

One of the things that I think Twitter deserves a lot of credit for is the inclusion of #hashtags. Without that simple technique – to add a “#” symbol on the front of a word or phrase, so much of Twitter’s value would not have emerged. But thanks to the inclusion of the self-managed, personally-generated hashtagging process, Twitter users around the world can anchor themselves to a wide range of conversations and communities. I think the best thing Twitter did was choose not to operate any sort of index, directory, or authority on hashtagging; but rather it’s part of the process of becoming a savvy user.

But hashtagging may be a little misunderstood, and is frequently mis-applied.

Brian Vickery – @dbvickery
Don’t hashtag everything RT @albertqian: Add Data Common Sense to Your #socialmedia #marketing Strategy – http://ow.ly/5YpRq

I think Brian’s takeaway from the article (based in a large part off research & results from Argyle Social) is astute. Hashtagging is an art. It doesn’t take much to go from a nicely tagged tweet – accented with the right balance of hashtags and content – to become an amalgamated mess of pound-signs run amok.

Mario Dávalos P. – @davalette
Creating a #hashtag is not a brand strategy, nor adding # to every idea you have is not one either. Edit your ideas before you publish them.

Mario, I completely agree with your thoughts here. Keep reading…

Tags: hashtag, socialmedia

Mentioned in this Post: @dbvickery, @albertqian, @davalette, @doughamlin, @dougellisphoto , @jeffisageek

Danny Sullivan – @dannysullivan
posted late yesterday, How Being “Friends” On Google+ Leads To Better Rankings http://selnd.com/o2m3mk – this surprised me.

Danny Sullivan’s article here stoked some interesting questions about Google’s search results – questions I’ve had for a couple weeks now, after experiencing “social search” modifications to my search results. My initial reaction was blase – so my search results would be tweaked based upon what my friends, followers, and social connections have marked. No big deal.

But the more I think about this, the more I think this is a HUGE deal. I think Google may be playing with their entire brand & business.

Think about this: Google has spent virtually their entire existence reinforcing the concept that they’re the information portal. Keep reading…

Tags: google plus, social search

Mentioned in this Post: @dannysullivan, @pegobry

Just playing around today, trying to better visualize Google Plus’ circles-based sharing mechanisms.

I’m still on the fence about how sustainable Google+’s circles will be in the long run. I’m comfortable with thinking that Dunbar’s number applies for individual one-to-one relationships, but how effective are we at managing groups of relationships? Paul Adams’ (@Padday) slideshare is one of the most traveled examinations of complex real-life social networks, and has been referenced by a ton of other sites when Google+ launched (not surprising since Paul is an ex-Google Facebook-er, and ergo as close to an expert on this stuff as it comes).

Tags: dunbars number, google plus

Mentioned in this Post: @padday, @_Yuriam, @kirstenwright