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Earlier this morning I deleted one of my twitter avataar and account @d7y. This was primarily meant for communication with friends, and people at large for topics not related to software engineering. Which meant pretty much a whole bunch of trivial and non trivial topics.

Twitter is a firehose. And for a brain which thrives on information its an addictive firehose. That was something I had dealt with a little earlier and felt comfortable I had worked around. It did require continued effort to make sure it didn’t become a waste of time.

I realised some aspects of twitter which worked negatively

a. Twitter is a great way of expression. But increasing incidence of #wtf and #fail made me realise just like others I was using it more (even if I didn’t tweet the specific hashtags much). In general when you find yourself in a world where tons of people are out criticising tons of other things – the negativism levels rise even if you don’t want to feel negative. Much as in my mind I malign the younger generation of thinking too highly of themselves (an accusation that probably applies to any generation from the one preceding it), I was realising twitter is an environment where if you are not careful, it is quite possible to start believing yourself to be more important than you deserve to be.

b. Twitter debates do not have the real life feedback so necessary. There are no facial expressions, no grunts that warn you etc. And it has some extremely opinionated and expressive people. In many ways I thought it provided the right fertiliser for my argumentative outlook. I like being argumentative but did not like that over a period of time twitter was reducing the threshold at which I became argumentative. And that was not good for others and certainly not for myself.

This is not to say twitter isn’t a good tool. Its just to say its a tool and so long as you can wield it creatively and effectively its great. If it starts wielding you – its time to say good bye.

So twitter launched lists and many believe these will be a new mechanism for computing reputation instead of the current defacto followers. It is not a restricted knowledge that using follower counts as a measure of effectiveness of twitter is a extraordinarily error prone and brave exercise due to the obvious. Given the appearance of twitter lists, I was keen on figuring out if there is a way to reasonably measure effectiveness of a twitter id. This post details the exercise I went through. While there could be discussion around the exact semantics of such a computation and whether the results are consistent with everyone’s expectations, let me assert that I find the result sufficiently superior to anything else I’ve seen or I’ve been able to imagine so far. And that may stem from or despite the fact that two of my twitter handles (@dnene and @d7y) feature in this list.

As an input I took the top 50 handles from pune from twittergrader.com. Why top 50 ? Only part of the process was automated – the remaining required manual input. I did not want to spend too much time on doing data entry. This also gives you the twitter grader grade. I subsequently looked at the reputation of the handle in Klout, looked at the lists which included the handle and finally also looked at the twitter rank as expressed by yet another site twitter-friends.com. I computed rankings using each of these. I finally created a sum of all the ranks, and create a composite rank based on the sums. The interesting aspect of this computation was not just the end results but also some of the intermediate results.

So without further ado – here’s what I found

Ranked as per twitter grader

1. shinils
2. arthut
3. indianguru
4. sandeepjain
5. tmalhar
6. brajeshwar
7. rohit_shah
8. ghoseb
9. rkartha
10. prateekgupta
11. ajinkyaforyou
12. gauravsaha
13. inkv
14. aparanjape
15. scepticgeek
16. meetumeetu
17. nishantmodak
18. czaveri
19. phpcamp
20. ngkabra

The rank based on followers or twitter grader ranks was not well correlated with the other ranks. In my mind there is a sufficient rationale to question the effectiveness of both followers count or twitter grader as an ability to reach or influence or engage with others, even though twitter grader grade is slightly better than a folliower count. Thats why the other ranks turned out sufficiently differently ?

Ranked by Klout

1. brajeshwar
2. scepticgeek
3. gauravsaha
4. ichaitanya
5. sahilk
6. indianguru
7. irohan
8. rkartha
9. phpcamp
10. dnene
11. ghoseb
12. ngkabra
13. prateekgupta
14. d7y
15. trakin
16. aparanjape
17. adityab
18. punetech
19. inkv
20. nishantmodak

To my lay reading this had a stronger emphasis on people who engaged with others, were conversational and had a high update count as well.

Ranking by Twitter Lists

1. sandygautam
2. indianguru
3. scepticgeek
4. dnene
5. brajeshwar
6. phpcamp
7. ghoseb
8. adityab
9. inisa
10. rkartha
11. aparanjape
12. gauravsaha
13. prateekgupta
14. meetumeetu
15. punetech
16. ngkabra
17. trakin
18. freemanindia
19. aaruc
20. rush_me

To me this reflected not the spread of the following as much as the strength of the following. Notice how @sandygautam who very tightly focuses on psychology and is well respected twitterer in that area moves to the top (in a rather dominating way I might add)

Rank using Twitter Rank computed by Twitter-Friends

1. scepticgeek
2. ghoseb
3. prateekgupta
4. gauravsaha
5. aaruc
6. dnene
7. rkartha
8. adityab
9. aparanjape
10. sandygautam
11. trakin
12. d7y
13. meetumeetu
14. irohan
15. aditto
16. clickonf5
17. rush_me
18. sahilk
19. punetech
20. brajeshwar

This is an interesting metric and while I couldn’t help clearly identify what drove this, would be certainly willing to lend a ear if you want to come up with a suggested rationale.

So the final 20 pune power twitterers based on a composite of the 3 metrics, which in my perception is not terribly different than a list that I would come up with using my gut feel (though perhaps with different rankings) is …. drumroll … drumroll ..

Pune power twitterers

1. scepticgeek
2. gauravsaha
3. ghoseb
4. dnene
5. rkartha
6. brajeshwar
7. prateekgupta
8. indianguru
9. adityab
10. aparanjape
11. sandygautam
12. phpcamp
13. trakin
14. sahilk
15. d7y
16. irohan
17. ngkabra
18. punetech
19. meetumeetu
20. ichaitanya

Note : All the computations results are visible in the attached PDF. Also in a few case klout ratings or twitter friends rankings were not available. In such cases I have applied a klout rating of 0 and twitter friend ranking of 999999. Obviously it reduces the probability of such handles appearing in the overall rankings substantially – but there was no other reasonable option I could think of.

Disclaimer : At the end I am certain there can be a number of views on how such an exercise could be conducted. There might even be some complaints. Being aware of that, I list results of what I believe to be a “fair” exercise. Whether it is a “just” exercise is left to the reader. Also be aware that I have two of my twitter handles in the list above. You may choose to believe my assurance that I did not tweak the logic based on a first pass of results – the logic I decided to apply was not changed once the results were visible.

That does sound counterintuitive indeed. But here’s why as you twitter more, using friendfeed is only going to help you get better at it.

Brief Introduction

Friendfeed is a lifestreaming service. You create an account and link it to many other of your information sources eg. your blog, your twitter account, delicious, flickr, google reader etc. This is called your feed. Anytime you post a blog entry, bookmark on delicious, post a photo to flickr, or share a post on google reader, friendfeed’s watching you. It pulls it all together into one feed – your friendfeed. Friendfeed has a similar subscription model like twitter as well. You subscribe to your friend’s friendfeed. You now start getting their unified feeds getting streamed into your home page on friendfeed.

So how does using friendfeed help ?

Friendlists

Friendfeed gives you three friendlists – Personal, Professional and Favorites in addition to the default Home list. You can create additional friendlists. eg. I create lists like interesting, geeks, social-media etc. etc. The people I would generally like to monitor, I put them in my Home list. In addition people whose tweets/feed items I don’t want to miss – I put them in the Favorites list. In addition, I classify people into other lists based on my preferred categories for following. Now I know that even when I am back to my computer after a long time away, I can still follow my favourites by clicking on the Favorites group. People I may choose to follow only infrequently, I can move to a list different from the home feed. Use it whichever way you want. A little experimenting and you’ll be on your way.

Twitter Integration

If you are a power twitter user, the first thing you would want to do is link your twitter account. This is bidirectional. All your tweets will appear in most cases near instantaneously on your feed as well. In your settings panel there’s a link called “Twitter Publishing Preferences”. Click on that and that will allow you to have the entries in your friendfeed getting posted to twitter as well. Make sure to tick the checkbox “Link to source site instead of FriendFeed conversation (does not apply to comments)“. This will ensure that whatever gets tweeted to from friendfeed will not point back to the friendfeed entry but to the source entry instead. You can also selectively choose the feed items that you would like to push to twitter. Now anything you tweet is pulled into friendfeed and anything you post to friendfeed (and the entries it pulls in from other sources as well) are pushed into twitter. Sometimes all you’ve to do is to just click an hyperlink to tweet it (eg. Like).

These are the things you no longer need to explicitly tweet (assuming you’ve set up the integration and the feed into twitter).

• Interesting Pages : Use the Friendfeed bookmarklet to mark the pages you like. They now find their way to twitter.
• Bookmarked Pages : Friendfeed will pull your entries from delicious and push them into twitter.
• Pages in your RSS feeds : Just share them on google reader and they will be soon tweeted to your friends.
• Photos : Just post the photos to flickr and your followers on twitter will know
• Interesting messages : Just click ‘Like’ against the same on Friendfeed. This is similar to retweeting

Come to think of it – isn’t it a reasonably large proportion of your tweets ? Notice the pattern ? You are doing your actions right at the source. You now no longer need to come to twitter, typing a message, adding a URL and then tweeting it – its all automatic.

Not all my twitter friends have an account on friendfeed

For starters you can have friendfeed scan your twitter friends to check if they are on friendfeed and you can start following them immediately. There are some who may not be on friendfeed. There’s a solution there too. Add that person as an imaginary friend, and against that imaginary friend set up his various streams (eg. twitter, blog, delicious etc.). You’re ready to go. Note having a friendfeed account helps all your other friends too since they do not need to create and maintain an imaginary account for you. If you are not on their must follow list, they just might choose not to spend that effort.

But the twitter web api / tweetdeck gives me a way to scan replies/references to me on twitter and create search streams

Fear not – that has a solution too. Run the search on twitter (for replies/references use “@twitter_user_id” as the search string. You will see a RSS feed corresponding to that search. Now take that rss feed and plug it into another imaginary account as an RSS feed, and all the search results will now be visible on your home feed (or in the group feed wherever you’ve associated that imaginary user).

Other services

Well, as an example I cited your blog, delicious account, and google reader account as information sources. Friendfeed supports tons of them. So the integration into twitter can be extended to (amongst many other possibilities)

• Tumbles into tumblr
• Stumbles on StumbleUpon
• Books you recommended on GoodReads or LibraryThing
• Pages you dugg on digg
• Posts you voted up on reddit
• Any other status messages you posted to facebook or brightkite
• Music on iLike or Last.fm
• Comments on backtype, disqus or intensedebate
• Videos you posted on vimeo or youtube
• Presentations you posted to slideshare
• Events you posted to Upcoming
• Any other RSS feed you may want to send out to the twitterverse

Thats quite a bit. What else ?

You can click on the best of day / week / month to find entries made by your friends which were liked the most. And if you are into cyberstalking, you can really get a virtually realtime capability by creating an imaginary friend and then linking it to all the services you want to follow for him/her (I know I am being mean – but what the heck – friendfeed pulls in only the publicly available information)

I am now getting greedy. Sure there’s nothing more

Hmm .. you can create groups and subscribe to them along with many other friends. Any specific focused topics you are likely to get into that you don’t want to bother a large part of your followers with ? Don’t send the messages to your default feed – send them to the group. Now these will only get delivered to the friendfeed users subscribed to the group and your twitter followers can have a easier time because you don’t suddenly flood their twitstream with (in their perception) arcane / irrelevant stuff. And have you ever irritated your facebook friends by streaming your tweets into facebook just because you didn’t want to enter status updates twice ? Well now you can stream facebook into friendfeed into twitter. So if you want the update to be in both twitter and facebook, just enter it in facebook, and if you would like to see it in twitter alone of the two, enter it in either friendfeed or twitter.

So get cracking – create a friendfeed account. If you are not too sure who to subscribe to, I’m a nice person to follow. On both twitter and friendfeed, I maintain two personas. d7y (twitter, friendfeed) is the personal and free wheeling side of me, while dnene (twitter, friendfeed) focuses on programming, software design and architecture aspects. See you on friendfeed and twitter simultaneously.

Why ?

Setting up a friendfeed room for collective liveblogging serves many purposes :

a. Provides realtime feedback to the livebloggers at the event from other livebloggers at the event on the same page (without having to subscribe to each of their feeds). Makes collective realtime liveblogging feasible.

b. Provides external followers a single URL to be able to view all liveblogs. I think they can even stream the feed to gtalk etc.

c. Provides both attendees and external followers to comment on the liveblogging stream in realtime against the original post/tweet

For Pune Blogcamp 2 I’ve set up the friendfeed room as http://friendfeed.com/pune-blogcamp-2-liveblog

But I use twitter for live blogging :

No probs – all the stuff you liveblog here can be fed to your twitter account as well. Your twitter followers will continue to receive these streams as well.

How ?

Here’s how :

1. Get a friendfeed account if you don’t have one at http://friendfeed.com. If you use a separate liveblogging account for twitter, may I suggest you create a separate friendfeed account too ?
2. Login to friendfeed and goto http://friendfeed.com/pune-blogcamp-2-liveblog
3. Now do you see the Subscribe link in a blue bar at the top left just below the pune blogcamp icon ? Click it to subscribe. (If you see Unsubscribe it means you’re already subscribed – don’t click that)
4. If you’re going to stream to twitter too, do you see the checkbox just below the text area between “Cc:” and “Twitter” ? Select it. It will pop up a new window for OAuth (ie. to set up the authorisation for your friendfeed posts to get automatically tweeted to your twitter account). Enter your twitter login credentials (userid / password) here and click allow.

Thats it you’re setup.

Now just post whatever you want in the message box / text area. If you’re streaming to twitter pay attention to the no. of characters (they shouldn’t go beyond 140). The count of characters appears just before the Cc: text after you start typing in a message. Even in case you exceed the 140 char limit, the tweet will have a link to a friendfeed page containing the full text (I think thats how it will work for photographs too).

Update: If posting to twitter as well, PuneTech Liveblogging suggests its best to restrict yourself to 122 chars to account for the additional chars used by friendfeed url.

And if you want to post photos or other files, right below the message box you see hyperlinks to photos and files. Use them.

Now you can post to friendfeed, watch everyone else’s posts show up on the same page and your posts will get automatically tweeted to the twitter account if you set it up and have the check box against twitter on.

Pune Mirror ran a fairly comprehensive feature on twitter today on the centrespread by @vedaaggarwal. It included quotes by @sahilk and myself (@d7y and @dnene). I found it flattering since I came out sounding far more cogent and articulate than in real life. Since I couldn’t find a online version of the article, I put up a scanned copy of the same. Unfortunately the scan contains only a small portion of the full centrespread dedicated to the twitter feature. So go pick up the copy while you can to read the remainder. And thanks to Pune Mirror in advance for not objecting to my publishing the scanned writeup (since I didn’t seek their permission in advance thats the least I could do ). And if they do come up with an online version of their feature, I shall certainly link to it as well.

Click on the thumbnail below to get the readable medium resolution picture. Note that it is about 2Mb so could take some time to download.

Pune Mirror writeup on twitter

After observing a conversation turn quickly dysfunctional on twitter, decided to post some of the practices I follow to avoid conversations getting dysfunctional on twitter. These are some quick random thoughts in no particular order. Feel free to add any other tips in the comments section below.

• The window view is not the world view :
  We are a product of our experiences and these experiences are our window view of the world. While real, it is not a comprehensive view. Thus before contesting someone’s experiences ask yourself if there is a possibility that his window view is also a reasonable window view even if not consistent with one’s own view. Remember the humanity thought for a long time that the sun and stars and planets revolved around the world before it was conclusively proven otherwise.




• Be clear if you are looking for expression or conversation
  Twitter and blogs are a great way to express. They also are wonderful medium to have a conversation. However the rules of the game between an expression and conversation are different. It is a little easier to get away with treating the twitter account or the blog as just a soap box in hyde park a.k.a a Speaker’s Corner if one is looking for expression. However if you are conversing, rules of normal civil conversations apply. Once you apply the rules of conversation, you have to decide how much you want to temper your freedom of expression. Thus aggressiveness, profanity, bravado are all fair game, if you have established that as accepted conventions with the other participants. If you don’t know them – play it safe.




• Avoid being judgemental if you can
  This is one of the most important rules of a conversations. Focus on issues and avoid labeling tags on each other. Moment you attach a judgemental tag, the entire conversation shifts around a debate over the judgement than over the issues.




• Move some attacks to third person, or better don’t make personal attacks :
  Attack the issue not the person. If one has to bring in a person, is there a way to tweet in a third person context rather than a second person context ?




• Escalating debates are hard to exit out of. Quickly move to private conversations.
  Twitter supports a free flow of conversations with many people looking on. As a conversation gets intense, remember that we find it harder to exit a conversation gracefully due to fear of losing face. Quickly move to a private channel ie. a DM if feasible, even if it seems to all the onlookers that you seem to have left some points uncontested. Know that its a lesser of the two evils. If you can’t DM the other person, publicly request him for an email id over DM to carry the conversation offline. But please remember to make sure that you never, never, never make a DM or an email public. Unless agreed upon thats a complete No-No. There is an exception zone of it being for the greater good of public / someone else (eg someone threatening suicide or violence on some third party), and even in that case, make it non-private to only a select audience.




• Feed positive energy into the system :
  Realise that twitter is not just an information stream – it is also an energy stream. It is built to amplify and reflect the energies. Don’t, repeat do not, feed negative energy into the system. It will soon enough boomerang and hit you on the rear. If you have to make a point figure out how to make it in a manner where you are feeding positive energy into the energy stream. If you can’t figure out a way to say something positively, thats probably a cue to exit the conversation.


A couple of related posts on the topic :

• Don’t feed the negative energy monster
• Tips for Software / Programming blogging