I’ve seen a fair amount of skepticism leveled against Twitter, from sarcastic Youtube clips to the verdict of a friend of mine: “I don’t think I need to read every brainfart that comes out of my friends’ heads.”
It seems Twitter suffers from this reputation a fair amount. To its credit, there are many other ways to engage with Twitter than just posting everyday tidbits. For newcomers it is often puzzling to see how quickly strange followers can be attracted, and how much spam can accumulate in a short period of time. How do you know the person you think you’re following is real, and how can you find people you’re really interested in following among all the confusion? Like every social media tool it needs some massaging in order to work best for you.
On Twitter the diversity of the personalities present is reflected in a diverse range of behaviours. The blog Media Caffeine posted an interesting survey of personalities you can find. Which personality group(s) do you think you fall into, and which do you prefer to read yourselves? Do any of them grate on you?
Personally I think I fall mostly into the Link Mogul category. I add a lot of people (especially in Web 2.0 and technology) who post news, and retweet their links to try and spread the word. I think Twitter is a great tool for education and news aggregation. In terms of social networking, it’s open to a far wider population than Facebook, and allows users a quick and direct way to share information.
I think of Twitter as an online Swiss Army Knife. With all its minimalism and simplicity it has tremendous versatility. Take for example Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing’s request to his readers to create a personal note organizing system based on Twitter’s hashtags. What a creative way for him to build on existing tools and engage with the Boing Boing community.
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Interesting survey on Twitter personality types. I think I’m Everyman’s Friend – only because I find it easier to respond to people than post something myself. And I enjoy the Clever Purists – perhaps that’s what I’ll aim to be. But I think it’s true, very few people fit strictly into one category.
Thanks for posting this, Rob. I’ll have to think about where I fall…I think it differs, week to week.
Yahoo had a fun little marketing tool that they used to rank your personal Twitter “mojo.” http://yahoo.knowyourmojo.com/
It analyzes your tweets to tell you just exactly what type of Twitter personality you are, and I get the feeling they are pretty close to those 14 types. Apparently, I am a “Concierge”… directing people to the best URLs around the web. Not a bad compliment, I guess.
In a slightly related vein, another nice tool I saw to cut down on the confusion and get to the good stuff on Twitter is http://whofollowswhom.com/ . An easy tool to plug in a few usernames of people you admire, trust or want to tweet like, or whomever, and it will generate a little network of the followings and followers that they have. Pretty nice for figuring out some solid tweeters to add to your feed, especially if you are new.
Looks like I’m a “matchmaker,” which means I link people to URL’s they might like. I’ve been playing with Who Follows Whom too. Great site!