Tag Archives: twitter

Rands in Repose takes a good look at the art of the tweet.

There’s another type of tweet that I want to talk about briefly and that’s the conversational tweet. What does this tweet tell you?

@commanda No clue

Not a thing. As you’ll see with the three following guidelines, my Twitter expectation is that each time I glance at my Twitterstream that I can something of value in any tweet. While conversational tweets are interesting for you and the recipient, they leave the rest of us in the dark.

More of a side note to this observation is the fact that @replies are generally confusing to begin with. Yes, you have to be friends with both parties to see their @replies, but what about referential tweets that aren’t necessarily a reply, but rather a roll-call of sorts?

If someone @replies you—note, this means they start a tweet with @yourusername—you will see that in your main timeline ifyou follow the person.

Twitter doesn’t really clarify beyond this tidbit, so I’m still left wondering what audience remains depending on how I reply to tweets. This seems to be largely a byproduct of audience demand, so the chatter can be inane but works for many to get more mileage out of Twitter.But ultimately, Rands in Repose makes a good point about the content seekers versus the personal touch.

Twitter is you. I’m a big fan of the retweet, but I have the same fundamental problem with it that I have with literal answers to “What are you doing?” My question about the zero-add retweet is, “So what?”

I, too, wonder about my tweets and their relevance or necessity in my network’s stream of 140char data. I’ve also been guilty of making superfluous tweets that don’t encourage or project my online persona. Being more conscious of tweeting as of late, I am starting to understand that gaining an audience will inevitably shape Twitter from being a very friends-only-mass-text-message service to a more accessible form of communication to people who find value in your opinions and thoughts (on the Internets, of course).