Consider adding your photo to your Twitter profile background image.

Without telling anyone, Twitter changed the rules of its API, thus rendering big chunks of Pluggio inoperative.

• Instead of addressing their capacity issues they change what they want and break everyone else.
• Instead of working with developers and giving them some notice of the change, everyone wakes up one morning to broken apps.

The culture will survive only if developers can see some stability and predictability.

• Twitter bought Tweetie and intends to rebrand it “Twitter for iPhone”
• Twitter investor Fred Wilson said the days of creating apps that fill holes in Twitter’s functionality are over.
• Twitter has announced that they are building their own link shortener

To me, this means that Twitter has made a strategic decision to move into the customer-facing facet (for lack of a better word) of the business. I think that’s a wrong move for two reasons.

There is Much Work to do on the Back End

I still get ‘Twitter is Overloaded’ messages several times a week. The various Twitter APIs are disjointed and in some cases incomplete. In my opinion, there is So Much work that needs to be done on the back-end to turn it into a robust industrial-strength platform. Wilson evangelizes about building great apps on top of the Twitter platform, but that platform needs to provide a level of reliability, availability, and robustness that just isn’t there yet. TIme and energy spent on the customer-facing side is time and energy that won’t get spent shoring up the back end.

Killing the Goose

Twitter owes its popularity to the hundreds of little developers that found a need and filled it.  Bit.ly, TwitPic, TweetDeck, etc all sprung up to fill holes in Twitter’s feature set.  It was applications like these that made Twitter actually useful for me.  Without them, I would have dismissed Twitter as an interesting toy.  Millions of people adopted Twitter because of the work of little developers. These recent strategic moves by Twitter will discourage the very activity that made it successful.

There is a second aspect to this: It’s not just the functionality provided by these developers, it’s the evangelism.  Hundreds (thousands?) of small developers hyped and promoted Twitter specifically because of they apps they developed.  By discouraging these developers, Twitter is encouraging them to move elsewhere and take their evangelism with them.

The original purpose of FollowFriday (#FF) was to recommend great people to follow.  It was a great way – and still is – to find interesting people to follow.  With the advent of Twitter Lists and applications like Twellow, we now have many ways to find interesting people to follow.  Maybe we no need FollowFriday.

I think that FollowFriday is just as useful today as ever – but its use has evolved.

I now use FollowFriday as a vehicle for publicly acknowledging and saying ‘Thank You’ to important people in my life – people who have helped me solve a problem or get to where I am in life (though all of my FollowFriday recommendations are certainly people worth following).

For example, Suppose you have a product you market to plumbers. You can easily find people with ‘plumber’ in their twitter profile who have specified their location as ‘Phoenix’.

The tool is called TweepSearch.

In the search field enter;

plumber location:phoenix

Recently Twitter made a change that I really really really dislike.

Once upon a time if Twitter users A and B where having a conversation and you were following only A (and not B) you could see A’s @replies to B.

I liked this.  It allowed me to discover interesting people.  If one of my friends was having what appeared to be an interesting conversation I would often begin to follow the other party as well.

The other day my friend @KarrollK and I were having fun.  You see, Karroll loves almonds.  We were having fun coming up with song titles containing the word ‘DIamond’ and substituting ‘Almond’.  You know, like:

Almonds are a girls best friend
Almonds are forever

SIlly?  Yes.  But it was fun.  Two intellectual minds having a little R&R. Karroll is a very bright guy and worth following.  I would hope that anyone seeing half of our exchange was curious to learn what the fun was all about and proceed to follow both Karroll and I (and maybe join in).  That’s the way our community grows.  That’s the way we discover interesting people.

For a while, Twitter had an option in the Settings page to turn this behavior off.  In other words, you could tell Twitter to show you @replies only if you were following both parties in the conversation.  Unfortunately, Twitter just took that choice away from us and made it the standard behavior.

It’s actually more complicated than that.  To use the example of A and B, and you follow only A:

• If A types “@B hello” you will see it.
• If A hits the ‘Reply’ icon to create his reply to B you will not see it.
• If A says “I’m going to visit @B” you will see it.

I liked the old way better.

My friend Jason Dragon thoughtfully replied:

So what is considered a spammer. Where is that line exactly. It seems that different people have different ideas on this. I only post updates about my business yet people unfollow me. I like to see how other people are doing. To me spam is posting the same worthless information over and over again.

Maybe it’s kinda like that famous line about pornography: “I know it when I see it.”

In the case that prompted my tweet it was pretty clear:

• It was a DM from someone I’ve never exchanged tweets with before
• The user name was just a randome collestion of letters, not a real name
• The content of the DM was, “Test out the new Mac Mini and keep it for free at [url I won't repeat here].

If your only tool is a hammer then everything looks like a nail.

Which means, I suppose that if you are a spammer then everything looks like a spam delivery channel.

In general, I give people the benefit of the doubt, but in clear cases like this I just unfollow.  This is after all, permission marketing:

• I choose to follow you.
• In return, your obligation is to provide me with content I think is worth my time.

 ”But Dave, you keep saying Twitter is the best prospecting tool on the planet!”

Yes, it is – when used properly.

Mine is not the final – or only – opinion regarding what is – and what is not – acceptable Twitter behavior but in general, I suggest that you approach the twittersphere in much the same way you would approach a Chamber of Commerce mixer: Don’t hit-and-run.  Be there for the long haul.  Get known; Get credible; Get trusted.  When you observe someone articulating a problem you can solve, help them.  When someone asks a question you can answer, answer it.

If someone articulates a need or desire for a product or service you offer, consider it an open invitation to make them aware of your offering but in  a way that’s not hard-sell.

In general, you’ll get the most ROI for your efforts if you look for people expressing a problem you can solve and then reach out to them and help them in some way.

I’ll be right up front and say that for me the Gold Standard is still TweetDeck, but if Seesmic had just one more feature then I’d switch.

Seesmic is a stand-alone desktop UI for Twitter. If you are serious about using Twitter as a business tool then you need to use something that make you much more productive and organized than your web browser.

Like TweetDeck, Seesmic organizes things into columns. You can stretch Seesmic across your screen and see multiple columns or you can shrink it down so that only one column is visible. In one-column mode, clicking on the labels in the sidebar selects the contents of the single column.

It gets confusing though when you are somewhere in between. Lets say I have three columns: Home, Replies, and a Search. If I stretch the window out so all three columns are exposed I must them go through a series of clicks in order to display them all simultaneously. Then when I want to shrink Seesmic back down to a single column some button clicking is required to collapse the columns and make them once again respond to clicks in the sidebar. TweetDeck is much easier in this regard. All I have to do is to grab TweetDeck’s resize handle and change the size of the window.

I don’t like the fact that many of Seesmic’s buttons are missing tooltips. Some are there but enough are missing that it is aggravating to hover your mouse over a button and wait several seconds before you realize that you’ll have to look elsewhere to find out what that button does.

My main gripe about Seesmic (and this is the show-stopper) is the way you populate groups (called userlists). You have to wait until the desired individual shows up in one of your other columns then click on the approriate button that appears when you mouse over the individual’s photo. Being able to add people to a group this way is great (You can do it this way in TweetDeck too) but for this to be the only way to populate my groups sucks. Until Seesmic fixes this I’m sticking with TweetDeck.

On the other hand, Seesmic has one huge advantage over TweetDeck: support for multiple personas (accounts). If you need to tweet from multiple Twitter accounts then TweetDeck then isn’t very useful. (If TweetDeck adds just that one feature then the only way you’ll get me to switch is to pry it from my cold dead fingers.)

Another thing that has become aggravating about Seesmic after living with it for a few hours: Every operation seems to require one or two more mouse-clicks than it does on TweetDeck. For example, To create a tiny url, I must first click the ‘add a URL’ icon to pop up the window containing the url field. In TweetDeck it’s always there. Seesmic takes one more mouse-click. I suppose that if you are from the Nintendo generation then all that extra clicking makes Seesmic more game-like but to me it means that each interaction with Seesmic take more time. Business owners have businesses to run – they want to minimize the amount of unnecessary time spent.

And one final thing: even in single-column mode, Seesmic occupies more screen space than TweetDeck. When operating with a 15-inch laptop screen that is an important consideration.

Simply put, #followfriday is a mechanism for recommending people to follow. So if I create a tweet that says:

#followfriday @goodmansales

It means that I think Michael Goodman is an interesting person and I recommend that other people follow him.

• I recently attended a party that it’s host had named ‘Bling Nite’. Several of us talking about this party on Twitter included the hashtag #BlingNite in our tweets. ANyone could then search for ‘#BlingNite’ to find all the conversations about this party. (It was a great party – Thank you, Jennifer!
• Many people are using the hashtag #swineflu when publishing breaking news about swine flu. By searching for that hashtag you can keep up with breaking news about it.

Just as we tag blog posts; just as we tag photos on Flickr, we use hashtags to say, “This is what this tweet is about” or mark specific words has being significant.

The idea was originally put forth by Chris Messina in this post. They were used extensively during the San Diego fires in 2007.

One really novel use of hashtags is my attendees at conferences. While the speaker or panel is underway the audience uses a specific hashtag to discuss the topic.

Anyone can create and use a hashtag.

In addition to making it easy to search for and follow a specific topic, hashtags off another novel use. THere is a sight named hashtags.org that tracks hashtag usage. If you follow @hashtags then your hashtag usage will be tracked too. Hashtags allow you to guage the popularity of a topic. For example, here is a graph displayed by hashtags.org displaying the use of the #swineflu hashtag:

In other words, hashtags not only help us find conversations about specific topics, they help us understand what people are talking about. This is kind of ‘meta search’, where we are less interested in the search results themselves that the data about the search results. An interesting concept and one that has yet to be fully explored.