Anyhow, a recent news story came across my consciousness. I don’t recall which one, precisely – let’s say it was the balloon boy thing. Now, I have a decently established methodology for learning about what’s been going on, at least things that I care about. Generally, I don’t care about the balloon boy thing. General news falls pretty low in my process, I’ll admit, but I noticed the balloon boy thing, and one thing about it stood out. Almost everything of ‘general news’ that I’ve noticed lately I didn’t notice from the internet news services, or twitter, or my RSS feeds, or the paper on the tube.

So what do Ted Kennedy, Michael Jackson, recent US football scores, the balloon boy, the old guy on the Tube, and other general news stories have in common?

Facebook. People talking about these stories on this bizarre misanthropy of a social networking site, one that doesn’t quite seem to know what it’s purpose is. And I’m not an avid Facebooker, nor do I track down history streams (whatever they’re called?) when I don’t log in for a couple days.  Yet I still noticed all of these via my friend’s ramblings on Facebook.

So – I end up with heavily filtered, likely inaccurate pictures of what’s going on of general import. Once or twice was understandable… but lately its been a trend. Are we creating a method of social news distribution that is more focused on inaccuracy than accuracy? Sure, we can see what people care about – but people are going to come to rely on this, something the opposite of journalistic distribution.

Opinions?

*On the subject of Twitter – yes, I could learn of things like this from twitter, but for whatever reason I find twitter tends to carry more professionally relevant information. I can think of a couple reasons out of hand, but that’s not the point of this post.

“Oh! I just love Twitter.”
“Twitter is cool.”
“I can write on the move and the message goes out! Isnt that great!”
“I confess, I am indeed obsessed.”

These are some of the responses I have received from Twitter users who tweet more than 20 times a day. The community of users who adore Twitter and find it useful is no doubt huge. Along with it is growing the number of Twitter applications that could be used. Fancy some? The web is full of applications which could generate move value for a Twitter account with free to use functions like Personalised Auto responders to Twitter follow requests and messages, auto-follow whoever follows you, Twitter Rank Check, Twitter Friend Suggest or even you could try the Twitter CRM. There are thousands of applications, just google them up!

Twitter users are now increasingly using these innovative free to use tools, but do they ever check who owns these Twitter applications? I found that some of these Twitter applications were developed as school or college projects and were launched by students for people to use it for free. Amazing! isnt it? No, its NOT. Most Twitter applications ask you to supply your credentials so that the applications can work with Twitter and you dont know who is storing your passwords!!

And are these applications bug free? You never know, afterall they are student projects. I have just heard a sad story from a friend who lost all his followers because he was using a free tool to send personalised messages back. The tool malfunctioned and all his Twitter contacts were lost!

Twitter – the microblogging platform – boasts millions of subscribers, and its user base is experiencing exponential growth. The time is right for it to go the way of AdWords. With millions already invested, but a negligible Return on Investment, it is only to be expected that Twitter would soon start employing some payback strategies. Now, it seems, is the time for Twitter to follow in the footsteps of most other social networking sites.

I logged into my Twitter account early this morning, and I immediately noticed some strange looking boxes appearing just underneath my profile stats: see the picture.

Currently these boxes are displaying Twitter applications – they started appearing soon after Twitter returned after two hours of maintenance downtime. How soon before we see advertisements taking their place? Advertisements mean that Twitter is profiling its user-base to ‘sell the right products to the right people’. Read more about profiling by following Professor Ian Angell’s  post here.

The digital advertisement market is already facing heat because of the credit crunch, and it would interesting to see what strategies Twitter employs to stoke the fires in its engine-room.

Some readers might be tempted to think that Twitter, with only status updates, has little information with which to profile users. Think again! Twitter has real time information about each user’s current activities! They can target Ads with extreme accuracy, and will be experimenting with some clever profiling strategies. Don’t be surprised if, when you tweet “got my loan approved, Yipee!”, you find that predators are trying to sell you cars, holidays, or restaurants in which to celebrate now that you have “loadsamoney”!

Why so? It’s just another piece of marketing mail, of which we all of get masses everyday? Then why am I so annoyed?

I have good reason! This email has some very peculiar characteristics. I received this mail at an email address that is not directly available. I don’t use this email address anywhere – other than on my Twitter profile, and in an image format. Personal information, along with my photograph and email address is displayed as a background image there. I had thought it would be a good way to keep my email address safe from automatic readers, while at the same time personalizing my Twitter page. It’s not only me doing this. Thousands of people have their contact details visible as background images on their Twitter pages. Internet gurus recommend this as best practice – namely personalize your Twitter page to create a stronger social presence. That’s what I did, and I’m rewarded with spam email messages!

I always thought that because I don’t have a public profile on Twitter, I was safe from nuisance calls! A state of grace somewhat rare on Twitter. But I was wrong! Marketing companies are somehow even pulling out image-based email addresses. How are they doing this? Optical Character Recognition? Or possibly by employing low-cost human labour to collect live email addresses from the images? Here’s another phenomenon that needs studying by web ecologists.

It’s time to raise the alarm. Marketing companies are using all sorts of tricks to get every piece of information they can get about you, and as soon as they strike lucky you get spammed. Because the email is personally addressed, spam filters let it through straight into my email box!

Add one more type of spam mail to the list – Twitter Spam!

“But how?” – A discussion sparked between me and another Web Ecologist  – Railsbob. We were aiming to see if we could devise a way such that more people get to know about WebCoherence using Twitter’s platform and to setup an experiment around it. After going through a lot of Twitter updates Railsbob observed that users were using hashtags to communicate in a larger community. RailsBob suggested: ” If we use a relevant ‘#keyword’ as a  hashtag, we could possibly attract more users to our site via Twitter.”

“Interesting,” I exclaimed, “but where do we find the relevant hashtags?” “It is not like the #communia conference, which some of our colleagues attended. They had a ready-made shared keyword. We don’t.” Back to the drawing board!

RailsBob then suggested using the #hashtags database on www.hashtags.org to search for relevant Twitter #hashtags. Eureka! We now had a list of the most popular hashtags. We would use only those we found to be appropriate from among the most popular ones (namely listed at the top), and this would save hunting through the whole of what is a huge database. After all there was nothing to lose – the worst that could happen is that we remained unnoticed. As Web Ecologists, we were now ready to test the idea. We took top 5 hashtags from the database list and sent out tweets publicizing WebCoherence. We waited for 3 days to collect sufficient Google Analytics Reports and here is what we found.

The Results:
1. In less than 24 hours 12 more followers started following WebCoherence on Twitter! And in 3 days now the count has risen to 53 followers. A staggering growth of 430% in three days from an initial count of 10 followers.
2. Google analytics report shows 19 hits came to the website with the referring URL Twitter.com. The number of hits were quite less as compared to the number of followers who started following WebCoherence.org.
3. Interestingly, no comments were received from new followers.

This brings us more mysteries that need to be solved before we come to any further conclusions. We are now left with various questions:

Do users follow on Twitter just to increase their follow count?
How do users interact when they receive links to external websites on Twitter?
Why do users want to increase their follow count if they are not interested in reading Twitter messages?

We intend to reveal answers to these questions in our upcoming posts as we analyse results and make more observations, keep watching!

P.S.: If you have seen some odd behavior and if you wish to contribute by experimenting with WebCoherence, do get in touch with us by leaving comments to this post or by emailing us. Thanks in advance!

But this whole twitter-during-conference thing is an interesting phenomenon.  On one side, it’s rude – typing instead of listening, talking about the speaker as if they aren’t even there – and yet on the other side it creates a whole backchannel of information.  Sure, there are the usual idiots – you can’t fill a room with educated geeks, lawyers, and businessmen without finding some are actually 4-year olds once you give them anonymity – but it serves it’s own niche, and has it’s own culture.

I mean think about it.   By participating in the #communia hashtag, I met, virtually, other twitter users who follow the same topics, and now have a greater source of noise – I mean information with which to use.  These conventions – hash tagging, tracking by subject, forming a backchannel community of shared knowledge to be referenced later – all came together through the designs of users, not admins in the ivory office of tweeting.  And further, it’s become pervasive enough that it has been recognized as socially acceptable, not rude, and papers exist on how to maximize the microblog backchannel!  This is despite the heckling!  Emergent phenomena indeed.

And to what effect does this have?  It depends on your point of view.  I’ll say that in the afternoon, when most attendees lost internet access, I found it much easier to concentrate on the speaker’s content and not what my fellow attendees were saying.  But, I also was not gaining the oft-cited value of what the other people felt was important – and what sucked -  through their comments and what they chose to broadcast to their personal twitterstream.

Indeed, if I really wanted to get technical I could go in and see what the different types of twitter ‘animals’ there are… or you could.

clatter … clatter … clatter …

“Good Morning Ladies and Gentlemen”

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

“Welcome to the London School of Economics”

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

“and the opening session of the Communia Conference”

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

That’s what the 100 delegates to the conference heard as I stood up to speak. Because a full ten percent of the audience was online  - clattering away on their keyboards, oblivious of the cacophony they were creating. How did I know for a fact that at least eight were on Twitter ready to discuss conference papers in real time? Because, as a Web Ecologist, I was ahead of the game. My fellow Web Ecologist, Gabe, had already set up an experiment to check on Twitter conversations related to the conference. (I should note here that Gabe is the first Web Ecologist – since he coined the term!)

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

Then there were others answering e-mails, and one lady half way down the auditorium was even playing Solitaire (and half the audience could see what she was doing). This was another experiment: Gabe was sitting at the back of the room, observing the screens of the laptops arrayed before him.

… clatter … clatter … clatter …

Well I suppose I should be grateful.  At least the Twitterers were listening! Welcome to the lecture environment of the early twenty-first century.

… clatter … clatter … clatter …