Down To Earth In The Twittersphere

Twittercounter informs me they’ve been ‘following’ me since July 16th of last year, which sounds about right, although I had 10 followers on that date so I probably started a week or two before. Since then my audience has grown steadily rather than dramatically and today I tweet to 67 followers. This, together with the frequency of my tweets, gives me a TwitterGrader score of 85.
So What? Exactly. Hardly a pimple on planet Twitter, let alone throughout the whole blogosphere. And yet there is something most interesting about this Twitter phenomenon, and overall I enjoy being an admittedly small part of it.
One of my favourite bloggers, Dave Winer (@davewiner), has written extensively about Twitter, both from a technical (much of this hovers a significant distance above my head) and social networking point of view. He has a wonderful grasp of its strengths and weaknesses and clearly he too finds its possibilities and limitations fascinating.
One point he hinted at when he kindly replied to a comment I left on his blog is that there is a universe of difference in the Twitter experience for those of us with an audience of up to, say, a hundred and the so-called Twitter elite with perhaps 10,000 followers. What he describes is the way in which, as one’s audience grows, so the ‘two-way’, conversational element of Twitter is dramatically diminished.
This was highlighted to me yesterday when I replied to a tweet of another of my favourites, Darren Rowse (@problogger). Although I didn’t expect a response, when I looked at his page and saw he had more than 28,000 followers, I realised that a reply to even the most scintillating tweet imaginable was highly unlikely.
One way the mainstream media has become aware of Twitter is in its discovery that many celebrities tweet. However, as Dave Winer has observed, if we think that just because we can follow and even tweet back to such notables as the currently disgraced Jonathan Ross (@wossy) or Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) we can expect a response, in the vast majority of cases, we are sadly deluding ourselves.
These examples show there is a point at which Twitter becomes a form of broadcasting, and the response element virtually disappears altogether. Those mainstream celebrities and high profile techies and bloggers have come to use Twitter in a way which is perhaps different to its intended use. For the former it’s a way of both informing fans as to what exciting projects they are involved in and who they’ve seen while at the same time appearing to be ‘of the people’. Techies and bloggers seem to use it to let us all know about the latest trends and products; their own and those of others. This is more useful on a practical level but the interactive or conversational element is minimal.
Not that any of this (to me) diminishes how good Twitter is. As I’ve written before, on a day-to-day basis it fits perfectly with my other commitments. I think it has also led me into ‘proper blogging’ on a more regular basis. And even with a mere 67 followers there is a need to separate those who I merely follow and those to whom I regularly reply. For that I use Tweetdeck. S’very good.