Twitter Packs Goes off the Rails Quick

Wow. I missed all the action. I was hoping the blogger/journalist debate would be the fun one today. Looks like I should have fed my drive for conflict over in this “drama”? ;)

Chris, I checked out the wiki page. Personally, not for me. But that’s just me.

Yes…everyone can edit and add themselves. But most people just don’t WANT to do that. Most people want to see that OTHERS have done that already. There is something about adding yourself to a list that feels different than seeing your name already where you want it to be. And something horrid about seeing your name on a list you would prefer it wasn’t. It’s about control really.

I think the idea was a good one. Seems not too much of a stretch from other ways we like to box, group, club, clique, or “identify” ourselves daily. We ALL have roles we use to validate ourselves at times. Which also makes it a bad idea as well.

But I’m with those who take the bigger, harder leap to really attempt to navigate profiles and read up on the streams and take the brave step of exploring anyone and anything.

What I MOST enjoy about twitter, is that it’s the social network I use for so many different things, mostly creating a party of followers and those I’m following that makes no sense on any list except that somehow, through me, they are connected.

If that makes sense?

ps. I’d have put you in the “cool guys who take road trips” group personally. ;)

e

Dang, I just got a phone call about this tonight and had no idea this existed.

I hate to say it, but it’s times like these I -get- the top down ‘conversation-control’ aspect to big media. Namely, having to do things like log in to Spock just to MANAGE what is known about me, puts me in a position to have to manage how I-as-a-person am perceived. I bury a lot of terms.

I like things like onXiam, because it enables ME to put forth information about where to find me on the web. I like facebook’s ‘Lists’ and Pownce’s ‘sets’ because *I* am making the groupings for people– this idea with packs, however, puts it out in the open for others to do.

I’ll give an example of one place I struggle with this. The most irritating thing you can say to me is ‘So, how’s Second Life?’ as if that is all that I’m defined by. I’m actively trying to thin that perception and almost distance myself away from SL, only because there are other things I’m focusing on LIKE it, that are NOT it. It also impedes my ability to work with many other virtual worlds if I’m perceived to be focused on one piece of software.

If someone doesn’t follow me (blog, twitter or otherwise), they’ll have no idea how broad my own reach is– that I’m more about gaming industry + social media + OTHER worlds– and I’ll be typecast as X.

I’m also considering if I want the ‘blogger’ label as I’ve thought about scaling that to include blog activities and more mainstream activities as well (I’ve kinda already done it under the radar like). That’s a label I’ll never be able to shake.

I’m listed in the virtual worlds pack and yet I’d rather be in the video pack instead of that. I’m not established enough to be in the ‘writer’ pack. That’s not to say I don’t WANT to be in the VW Pack, but yeah, you can see how it gets all weird.

I still think 2008 will be the year of the anti-social media for reasons like this. It’s becoming an unbearable amount of effort. It’s a testament to the flaws in social attention. Good idea perhaps, but certainly a victim of its own construct. Social means people. People don’t mean the same thing across the board.

Wow–I missed the whole thing today. Chris, I agree that newcomers need a hand getting started with Twitter. I admire that you come up with all these fabulous ideas and go for it. Some are going to work, and some aren’t. But that is part of the whole social networking web 2.0 beta experience. Thank you so much for doing this. The reactions are interesting, and definitely something to learn from. You never know what is going to trigger emotion and controversy.

Don’t be put out–you are really driving and inspiring so many of us! Thanks for doing this.

Cheers,
Connie

When you launched, you and I chatted a bit in the Twitter timeline and then via DM about specific categories I had issues with — more specifically, those that had nothing to do with location, vocation or interests, but rather value judgments: the visionaries, the friendlies, the sweethearts, the randoms.

Is anyone going to add themselves to those packs, or will they just hope that someone else does… and then get disappointed if their popularity doesn’t make the grade?

Those were the weird spaces in the whole thing for me. For example, I think establishing six people as the “friendly” people on Twitter is just completely bizarre.

There are gazillions of friendly people on Twitter, and finding the ones who fit you is part of the experience.

But we ended up agreeing on all this stuff. I just wanted to leave a long comment. :)

“If no one is pissed-off with you then you are dead but just haven’t figured it out yet.” – Tom Peters.

I’m not upset or angry, and I’m so very thankful for all the various opinions. If we all agreed, this would SO suck more.

But did we LEARN? I know I did. Were you surprised by things you learned about this? Did you see anything differently? (You don’t have to answer here, but hey… weird, eh?)

I don’t understand all this commotion. I made my own Twitter Pack a long time ago, way before I signed up for a Twitter account. It sat there on my workbench, next to my Mac IIfx, for years. I had no idea what to do with my Twitter Pack and almost threw it away several times. Now, I finally have a chance to use it. Unfortunately, this juncture seems to be yet another pickled herring.

Most people probably know this already, but I figured I’d point it out…

If you want to search for people based on info they put in their profiles, there’s no need to wait for special tags. It’s already possible to search for any word in Twitter profile.

See http://terraminds.com/twitter and make sure you use the [Search in Users] button instead of the default [Search in Updates] button.

[Search in Users] will search through Twitter profiles only and ignore updates.

@mdy – Yes, but if it were a tag that one deliberately identified, it would cut down on some confusion.

Also, I’m not just carping without a solution. I’ve got a couple of ideas that might marry the best of all worlds:

1 – Opt-in interface that doesn’t just scrape passive data.
2 – Self-selected tags that are controlled only by you in your profile.
3 – Easy interface for mass-adding (or removing) new Twitterzens to follow.

It might happen…

OK, I’ve only been a part of Twitter for a week now, so I guess I’m in the demographic that Chris set TwitterPacks up to help. And you know what, I did find it helpful. Extremely! Want to know how I used it? I looked at each pack in turn, clicked on the names, scanned down their tweets and made a decision about whether or not I wanted to follow them. After deciding who I was going to follow from the pack, I then checked out who they followed and so on. In other words, it acted as a way in for me to what had first appeared a rather bewildering prospect. I’m assuming that was its purpose? Anyway, that’s my 2p worth…

@Ike – any improvement is always welcome, IMHO. I hope some of your ideas will come to fruition, since everyone will benefit.

I can’t speak for Twitter, but it’s been my impression that it’s their philosophy to keep the service simple enough so that it’s usable on as many mobile phones as possible (in other words, usable via SMS).

As of today, we don’t even have a way to update our Twitter profiles via SMS, much less add tags to our profiles. I, for one, am looking forward to the day they when that feature becomes available.

Since twitter has decided to keep its service very basic and straightforward (at least for now), I think it’s more than welcomed and waited that a lot of “satellite” services will soon flourish around it. Personally I prefer to have alternative ways of viewing information since I believe it’s the only way to discover things that otherwise could be missed. So, I am pretty Ok with lists, directories, search, tag clouds and even more radical ways of representing data that’s why I really like Digg Labs.

Chris,

When Sara Nicole ( a new user of twitter ) asked about where were the Starter Packs we kicked of the conversation at Podcast Boston and from there created the Social Network Starter kit.

What surprised me was the amount of people who just dumped on the idea as not being sensible or feasible. At the time I applied to the Rule of Two Feet to them and suggested that a large group wanted to build a list so why dont we ?

I confess that the wiki caught me short since it wasnt clear to me on several readings that the password and invite key had been posted on the front page. Honestly I kept seeing it and not reading it .. Screen Dyslexia if ever there was. So of course I felt excluded ( not at all what you intended or planned ) but I liked the list and I saw a value in it.

The List the Pack didnt fail there were issues raised by others but the list itself was a grand plan.

It’s funny- I tried to get on a few times yesterday, to edit, but could never get a lock to do it, so I gave up, figuring I would try today or tommorrow.

This past weekend I was at a wonderful conference, and I found a whole new subset of twitters to follow i never knew existed. I love the mash up nature of twitter for me- I have marketing friends, “real life” friends, associates, education types, creative types,people I barely know, and others I have a great relationship building over time, because of what their interests are and what they share on twitter.

What the brou haha here tells me from a sociology POV is that people take their self-identity with different communities and subsets very personally, but some other people may see them as part of larger groups or categories.

And let’s face it- tweeterboard, twitterposter and other things like that are essentially doing the same thing as Twitter packs, but with less information on the outset.

The internet never ceases to amaze me with its ability to connect, and it’s ability to alienate. The speed at which we can build and destroy something. The reactionary nature, and people’s lack of patience to see how something develops over time before making blanket declarations of Good or Evil. Time does cure a lot, and we can’t expect something to be instantaneously perfect, (especially on a wiki). So before getting on your judicial robes, sleep on it, and see if what was true yesterday is still true today.

Patience is a virtue. Acting like children who don’t get their way and having a tantrum is not. If you decide to take all your toys and go home, and let something this silly drive you away from all the good of twitter, that’s your choice.

And above all, the conversation of how things evolve over a short period of time may be the most interesting part of this in the end.

I thought from the beginning and still believe that Twitter Packs are a great idea. I read some of the commentary that people wrote who were against the idea, and part of me felt that they were against it just for the sake of opposition. Or, perhaps, there was a frustration from certain self-proclaimed social media “gods and goddesses” that they weren’t at the forefront of this effort nor could control it. Who knows. Regardless, kudos to you for actually developing a way for communities of people to come together, and leaving it to them to do it in a way they want.

I think this is a case in which you can’t make everyone happy. It’s not as if you are limiting people to only one category. I, myself, have put myself into four. And in only one day I met some phenomenally interesting people I otherwise wouldn’t have met.

The only complaint is that editing the wiki and adding oneself and others to categories is daunting, but Shannon Whitley came up with a great idea for fixing that (http://www.voiceoftech.com/swhitley/).

I think that rather than the Twitter community at large clamoring against a directory, they should be working together positively to try to improve it.

Funny you should mention that, Jennifer. Shannon and I had already been working on that solution together. Please remove me from your “clamoring and whining” list and move me over to the “helping and improving” list.

That said, I’ll throw another idea out for the group. If you want to help others jump into Social Media, that’s a laudable goal. But others could use this same concept to subvert the system. There’s more than a little backlash against feed stats garnered by those select few that got into certain Google Reader packs a while back. It’s an appearance of influence with little real value.

I would promote any tool that makes it easier for people to do what they want with a technology. But those who are *really* serious about getting others to understand Social Media need to put the disclaimer out there: NO ONE CAN DO YOUR WORK FOR YOU. It would be a disservice to all of us if companies and individuals came into these communities with the expectation that someone else can do the heavy lifting. Do we want Amalgamated Industries waltzing by and buying 3 bushels of Twitter, and 5 cords of blogging? When it becomes too off-the-shelf, it becomes too commoditized, and those entities are doomed to make big mistakes.

Let’s cultivate an expectation that it’s about communities of people, and not about quickly assembling something that resembles one.

Oy vay. Are we in high school again? Are the geek girls jealous of the cheerleaders? Are the jocks bullying the nerds? LOL!!!

I don’t see Twitter as clique-ish at all. You join and your community grows organically, but … you have to do your part to be social. Do you fit into all the groups of people you meet IRL?

Who cares if you only Twit with 4 of your nearest and dearest or have a following of 400? The app is there to use as *you* wish.

And come on, groups of people who communicate on twitter with each other (I prefer to look at them as flocks) are NOT like some underground cabal plotting the end of the universe.

This was an interesting sociological experiment, to be sure.

I think it’s cool to see twitters by geographic location. It helps to “place” everyone.

I think it’s really funny that people need to bash each other either way for making salient criticisms OR supporting the whole endeavor. When I shared my thoughts and people rushed to bash what I was saying or make snarky little remarks, I was like… what? Are we adults? Are you serious?

Why does discussion on the Internet need to be so sarcastic and belittling? I mean, I know why, but man… for the “future of social media”, we sound more socially awkward than anything.

I’d love to see a discussion happen that didn’t involve immediately defaulting to the “bitch” setting.

Just a thought.

@meg — well, it’s not a *real* internet debate until Godwin’s Law is invoked.

Chris, I want to thank you for replying to my question regarding your derivation of the term “pack.” In my geekier days, I used twenty-sided dice, rather than cards, to play my games, so I wasn’t aware of the term.

I think that some of the fear that arose from this wiki was the fact that we were perceived to have lost control about what people said about us. Theoretically, I could go into the wiki and put Chris into the “black lesbian Dodgers fan” pack, and no one could prevent me from doing so.

I took a step back and thought about this more generally, and asked myself, “What level of control is appropriate for a given information source?” And since you’re obviously not going to please everybody, should you err on the side of openness, or on the side of caution?

After thinking about it, I concluded that we’d be better off erring on the side of openness. Yes, someone could label me as a black lesbian Yankees fan, and I’d have to remove it. But that’s better than having a moderated, controlled group calling me a black lesbian Yankees fan, in which I wouldn’t have the ability to correct the record.

One note: if you’re wondering who edited what, you can review the information at http://twitterpacks.pbwiki.com/changes.php. I couldn’t find a link to this page on the wiki itself, but it does exist (a similar page exists for the Twitter fans wiki, which is how I knew to look for it).

even if someone “mis- categorizes” me, i think it may lead to interesting conversations and of course you have no obligation to follow them back.

I love the meta of the conversation, especially in the context of quotes with the vibe ‘oh what’s the big deal are we in high school’ because it illustrates (not wrong or right, not calling people out, it’s a very real emotion there) a part of ‘social’ ________ that has nothing to do with technology but human-ness. You can’t solve prejudice with software.

It’s like the top 8 on myspace, kinda like having to pick your favorite child. Who’s gonna be pissed off they didn’t ‘make the cut’?

Ask people with differing opinions on ‘mommy bloggers’.. Some wear that like a badge and others avoid it/despise it like the plague. Now if that’s not part of ‘social’ I don’t know what is.

We must include the nasty side of social when talking about it in order to be all-inclusive. Cliques and in-crowds and idols and enemies are just as real as community, networking, bonding, connections and collaboration.

My only regret in all this is that I’ve been so busy with my “day job” that I haven’t had time to get immersed in all that’s happening with your Twitter Packs! I read your post, went out and made an edit and have completely missed out on all the goings on… my bad for sure.

But I must say, I truly appreciate the idea and hope I get to reap the benefits. I’ve been twittering for a couple of months now, but pretty aimlessly. I’m hoping the Twitter Pack will point me in the right direction! Thanks Chris.