Twitter | jonathan nguyen

tweetdeck vs. new twhirl

January 25, 2009 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

this is a subjective evaluation based on what’s important to me, and how i use twitter.

the short version for those short on time or attention span

twhirl	tweetdeck	winner
multiple panes that can be moved around the screen	one big giant windows	twhirl
no groups	has groups	tweetdeck
keyword tracking	no keyword tracking	twhirl
very clean interface	cluttered	twhirl

the new twhirl is a fantastic improvement but the winner is still tweetdeck because it has groups. as soon as twhirl gets groups, i will switch. at the time of writing twhirl version 0.8.8f was released and tweetdeck 0.21

if you have a bit more time or attention…

background

i started using twitter some time back as a complement to my blogging. there was a vast pool of interesting thoughts flying around in the twittersphere that were useful to draw inspiration from. i was still working as a systems architect at the time and did not need to be on twitter the whole day.

when i started working as a

full-time flack

i started to use twitter more extensively because it helped me get a feel for what the big issues were and to tune in to any issues my client’s customers were having. i’ve also found that many of the journos i engage with also used twitter so the use of twitter full time became a logical progression.

the twitter website

is fine if you are an occasional user or don’t follow more than 10 or maybe 20 people, but is impossible to use meaningfully if you follow more than than that. i’m following 462 at the time of writing and it’s hard to keep abreast of the conversations from the website. it would not be a viable work tool if i had to use the website! what i found especially difficult was that i could not be responsive enough to @replies and direct messages because there is no notification from the website when you get them.

so i started hunting around for alternatives and

found twhirl

i loved the clean interface and the fact that you get a nice little pop up telling you when you get an @reply and direct messages. of course as my twitter usage increased yet again with twhirl, i found that i missed important work related conversations during the day because of an interesting phenomenon:

different people are important at different times of day

so between 09:00 to 18:00 work related people were important:

clients;
journos and
colleagues.

whereas in the evenings it was more the:

family;
friends and
“interesting people”. which meant that i needed to be able to tune into these groups separately.

enter tweetdeck

whose biggest selling point for me is groups. i can add the people i’m following into different groups which means i can get a separate column for each group. very useful, i can tune into the different groups depending on what is important at the time and i am not simply at the mercy of a continuous tweet stream.

the problem with tweetdeck is

it gives you one massive screen that you have to scroll across all the time. this is a pain (pardon the pun).

so i tried twhirl 0.8.8f

which was announced by seesmic ceo, @loic yesterday. some of the useful stuff for me are:

keyword tracking
multiple movable panes and
tracking @replies where my name appears anywhere within the message (incidentally tweetdeck has this feature).

which is all very good for me especially keyword tracking.

but it still doesn’t have groups

so i will have to stay with tweetdeck which is not the pleasure to use that twhirl is.

the race is on, will twhirl get groups first or tweetdeck get movable panes?

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: compare, evaluation, groups, loic, seesmic, tweetdeck, twhirl, twitter

citizen journalism is not: melbourne airport example

January 23, 2009 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

timing could not have been more opportune, there was some debate after my posting on citizen journalism.

so here’s the problem with selling twitter as a mainstream news source: without fact checking it’s just one big rumour mill.

see what happens when jonoh tells the world that there is a fire on a plane today in melbourne. the “news” spreads like wildfire and the twemes go crazy when in fact jonoh was not even on the flight!

twitter is a brilliant medium, but we need to still apply some rules to make it credible as a news source.

Filed Under: case studies Tagged With: airport, citizen journalism, fire, haysom, jonoh, journalism, melbourne, plane, twitter

citizen journalism is not journalism

January 18, 2009 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

every time there is some horrible disaster the twitterati / blogosphere lights up with almost jubilant vindication. it’s starting to grate.

i was not conscious of this until i saw a Tweet by blogger @longzheng:

it’s a shame it takes an accident to “show off” the power of Twitter and community journalism. let’s just accept it works already.

first and foremost, let’s stop using disasters to sell and justify social media – it’s verging on ambulance chasing now: denver plane crash, mumbai terror attacks and most recently usair crash in the hudson to name a few.

furthermore, having had some time to watch all of these events unfold and evaluate what’s being said, i don’t think that citizen journalism is really journalism. i think at best they’re eyewitness accounts at worst they’re complete fabrications. the fact that someone captures something on their camera phone or tweets something doesn’t make it journalism.

do we call it cctv journalism when cctv footage is captured of a robbery by cctv?

it becomes journalistic when:

someone takes that footage;
interviews witnesses;
interviews police;
interviews the victim(s);
writes / records a meaningful story and
someone verifies the facts quoted.

i don’t dispute the value of social media tools in recording an eyewitness account but let’s not engage in social media jihadism about it. twitter and twitpic are certainly useful for feeding information back in real time about an event. a journalist or blogger can then go back over this information and use it as part of the steps above to write a piece of journalism.

the intelligent consumption of media means that you constantly evaluate what you are reading and not merely accepting it as fact. this is less likely to happen if you are reading an established publication that you already trust because of their reputation. Calling a hashtag news does not fall into the “intelligent consumption” category, in fact I would call it indiscriminate gluttony of the social media variety.

finally, just from a purely consumer perspective i don’t want to consume my news in a fragmented piecemeal fashion over 50 different social media sites. i want a cohesive account – a story. i may read several stories to get differing viewpoints but i don’t want to read my news in 1000 140 character chunks.

eye witness accounts will always have a place – as will “citizen journalism”. will it replace the millions of talented individuals who pore over the information and tell us a story? not in the next hundred years.

Filed Under: pr Tagged With: citizen journalism, hashtags, journalism, journalists, mumbai, twitter, usair

don’t believe the social media jihadists

November 23, 2008 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

i have been thinking alot lately about the development and evolution of social media. i have also been tuning into alot of twitter conversations and reading alot of blogs. what is becoming apparent is that there are many social media jihadists out there that think social media is the only form of media for the future.

to a certain extent, i think we need the extreme viewpoints because it’s the extremists the fuel the discussion. you don’t get the moderate middle without the extremists on both sides. like religious extremists though, i am quite ready to listen to their viewpoint but i certainly would not counsel anyone to act on their diatribe.

the problem with social media jihadists is that they make social media the point of the conversation, rather than the media that facilitates the conversation.

social media is irrelevant. whatever. i couldn’t care less.

what is relevant and what is important, is the contents of your message, the people you need to hear your message and choosing the right medium to talk to those people.

there are people out there who would have you believe that everyone needs to get onto twitter now, and that friendfeed is the the bee’s knee’s of all social networks. rubbish.

if your customers, friends or family are not on the these networks, you need to ask yourself the: “why?” question.

in ten years time, it won’t be “social media” it will just be media. it is media because it is simply a medium of communication. the general public doesn’t care whether it’s social media or web 1.0, or web 2.0. to them it’s just the internet. the important part is they get the information they need.

when the phone rings, do you care that it’s a cell, landline, voip, copper line, cordless, or the line uses 8 kHz using 8 bit ulaw coding? i don’t. i care about what the person on the other end is saying though.

as practitioners sometimes we get carried away with our subject matter because we’re immersed in it every day. we also have to defend our views on social media everyday, thereby enforcing them. it is important though that for our clients – who pay us good money to help them communicate better with their publics – that we advise them objectively and not get carried away with the medium.

Filed Under: social media Tagged With: advertising, facebook, friendfeed, pr, social media, twitter

can we expect kevin rudd to personally tweet?

November 13, 2008 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

well today our prime minister decided to join twitter. welcome kev. this follows hot on the heels of the current leader of the opposition, malcolm turnbull’s very successful entry to twitterverse.

probably, but not all the time. what is good is that his people are transparent when it’s not him updating his twitter page. see below.

highlighted in green, the team post, clearly marked from the kevinpm team. highlighted in pink is a tweet that would seem to be from kev.

i wouldn’t expect him to tweet all the time or read and respond to all of his own tweets. let’s face it, it would be a full time job. the man probably doesn’t read all of his own email or answer all of his own calls.

what will be interesting to see whether he takes the feedback and do something with it.

let’s see what happens with the internet censorship issue because i’m sure there will be a few people asking him about that one.

Filed Under: column j Tagged With: kevin, kevinruddpm, malcolm, minister, pm, prime, rudd, turnbull, turnbullmalcolm, twitter

social media case study: drupal.org-part i

October 15, 2008 By Jonathan Nguyen View Comments

few posts ago i wrote about my experiences tweeting about drupal and then having the drupal redesign guys start to follow my tweets.

well, i was immensely impressed with the proactiveness of this approach and i reached out to the team to find out more about the project.

for those of you who don’t already know, drupal.org is an open source content management engine. in some respects it is in competition to wordpress but the feeling i get is that it really is in a slightly different market. drupal boasts some impressive community users including the people behind the internet, icann.

as an open-source project it is community driven and does not leverage funding in a commercial sense. so i was curious as to how they staffed this social media project.

i reached out to @drupalredesign on twitter and asked to interview them. i got a response the next day.

after a few emails i was able to get a clearer picture on how the they are running their communications efforts.

i have included the q & a below.

the interview

do you guys have commercial backing?
from twitter? no, we are simply using the search function to view all tweets that include the word ‘drupal’.

where did the idea come from to leverage twitter as an ideas feed?
this was leisa’s idea. leisa is a ux researcher and ia strategist who has joined us for the duration of the project. leisa also regularly speaks and writes on twitter and ambient intimacy

do you run scripts to monitor for keywords?
we haven’t automated the process at all (except for automatically adding people back who join our twitter group). we use search.twitter.com to monitor mentions of drupal

has the campaign been effective for you?

i suppose the answer to that depends on what context you monitor effectiveness. In terms of raising awareness of the redesign project, then yes, most definitely it has been effective … a good example is the fact that you asked us for an interview.

it also means that we can reach out to a large pool of drupal users all at once, pointing them to the blogs where they can leave detailed comments if they so wish.

how many hours a day does it take to monitor the feedback?

i keep the search window open all day in the background. then i dip in and out of it throughout the day and follow anyone who’s comment about drupal interests me. it’s a process that you could spend all day looking at, refreshing the tweets and following people etc … i chose to dip in and out so some days i hardly get chance to monitor the feedback and another day i may spend up to an hour or more sifting through it.

as well as the search window, i also log into twitter as the drupal redesign group, look at our followers and follow them back if we aren’t already.

do you approach people who have said negative things to get better information?
definitely! if we didn’t then the comments/feedback would be too one sided. there is no hard and fast rule for who to follow. sometimes it is comments that have interested me, sometimes it is a random choice. an example is a tweeter who said they couldn’t understand drupal and didnt like it, so i followed them as we may be able to get more detailed info off them further down the line regarding why they dont like drupal etc.

do people respond well?

absolutely! Many users have directly messaged us saying they were glad we were following them and they were looking forward to getting involved. clearly you were impressed with it too so it seems to be pleasing people rather than annoying them. We have 398 followers as i type this and that number is increasing daily . in order to ensure we don’t annoy/offend people, we have decided not to follow everyone who includes ‘drupal’ in their tweet. a bit of selection is needed. the people we follow have mentioned drupal in their tweets so its fair to assume that they are engaged with it somewhat and therefore would be interested in the redesign process.

how many people monitor the stream?

myself and leisa.

finally, what’s your role on the team?

i work for mark boulton design as a project manager, so my core duties are to oversee the project and do all that I can to ensure it comes in on time and on budget.

what are the learnings?

you’ll have to wait for the next post for that!

Filed Under: case studies Tagged With: blogging, blogs, case study, drupal, pictures, random, redesign, responsive, social media, twitter

jonathan nguyen

citizen journalism is not: melbourne airport example

citizen journalism is not journalism

can we expect kevin rudd to personally tweet?

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