Today is my 1000th day on Twitter officially. In reality there were probably 100 days or so at the beginning where I barely used it and couldn’t quite grasp the point. Still it feels like a landmark nonetheless so I have banged out a quick wordcloud of my tweets thanks to Tweetstats and Wordle. I think I am mainly surprised that ‘beer’ and ‘pub’ aren’t featured more 
Over on the Groundswell blog this week the published an interesting post with a much more interesting graphic based on an update of their ‘Social Technographics‘ work that Forrester use in their consultative work and if I remember rightly was featured in the Groundswell book (which I’ll admit I’ve never finished..)
I’ve added the graphic below and the big change was the addition of ‘Conversationalists’ to the ladder. These people are defined as
..not just Twitter members, but also people who update social network status to converse (since this activity in Facebook is actually more prevalent than tweeting). And second, we include only people who update at least weekly, since anything less than this isn’t much of a conversation.
I like this addition as it reflects my experience of the social web much more. Unlike many of my colleagues I am still a regular user of Facebook and have watched it change to a much more conversational platform over the last year or so and Twitter, for me at least, has also become much less about broadcast and more about conversation (though that may well have more to do with my new ‘follow’ and ‘block’ on Twitter than anything else!) Most of my friends on Facebook wouldn’t see what they were doing as contributing to the social web and almost exclusively find Twitter ‘weird’ – yet they increasingly use Facebook in much the same way as I use Twitter.
To be clear while I like the terms in this ladder (though I appear to cross-over into an awful lot of them) I do not recognise the figures used at all. The idea that only 17% of people aren’t regularly using the social web (with regular being monthly or weekly for this purpose apparently) seems very low if it was mapped against the UK but that is just a gut feeling and I could be wrong.
Like most Fridays last night I was out for a couple of beers (I can tell you are all shocked!) but this time it was a little different. Despite having followed each other since the pretty early days of Twitter, worked for the same people within weeks of of each other, been based at the Hub at the same time in theory briefly and having very similar interests work wise last night was the first time I had met Ed Mitchell (@edmittance). I also met Mark Wheatly (@grumpymandj) for the first time and was joined by Nic Alpi (@spyou) who I have met a few times now but originally ‘met’ on Twitter before he joined Jiva as well as Stef Goodchild (@stefangoodchild). It was a good night full of geeky chats and Ed and I particularly covered an awful lot of common ground in ideas for events that would have taken forever 140 characters at a time – hopefully something a bit more concrete will come out of that in the near future. Mark is also to blame for my getting the phrase ‘fuck buttons‘ stuck in my head. Apparently its a Bristol band – check them out!
When my head started to clear this morning I got to thinking about my Twitter ‘community’ and just how many people I had actually met in a face to face setting and how many other people there were there that I’ve only known via Twitter. So using Tweetake I download all the people I follow as a CSV file and did a quick, rough analysis.
Out of the 554 accounts I follow I reckon I have properly met 140 of them. When you drop a few company or ‘robot’ accounts I reckon it is almost exactly 25% of the list I know in real life as it were. This percentage would have been very different a couple of weeks ago before I unfollowed 200 plus people but at the moment I am finding this number of people OK.
Of the people I haven’t met yet there are some people that I really would like to meet and share a beer/cuppa with and that I feel I should start looking to rectify quite quickly. Also there a number of others that some work events in the coming months that will provide opportunities to meet. There are some people I have been having Twitter conversations with for years and they live in the same city as me and I have never arranged to meet up with them – that is just rubbish and I have decided that 2010 is the year of Twitter Live!
I don’t know what suits other people but I intend to get up to a ratio of nearer 50% by the end of the year while sticking to a similar number of people I follow hopefully. Haven’t quite worked out how I’m going to achieve this but I think as well things like Bathcamp and Ignite there might be a call for a few more random Tweetups from my direction this year.
So anyway if you are reading this blog post and came here via Twitter (which most of my traffic seems to!) I’ll hopefully meet you sometime soon.
So I’ve now had a day or two to recover from Bristwestival and I have to say that I think it was a great success and alot of fun. As hoped I got to meet a few Twitter types face-to-face for the first time, enjoyed a number of pints of Bitburger (following on from several pints of ale in the 7 Stars thus the evil hangover!), managed to come second in a couple of frames of bowling (though I think Mr Beadle aka @timmyb should have had some kind of handicap as he was sober) and listen to some cool music and one talented beatboxer (though I was less convinced by the 2nd guy – but 25 years of listening to old school hip hop makes me a harsh judge of these things) – much to my own surprise I really enjoyed Fortune Drives set – I’m rarely a fan of guitar based bands but was impressed and the drummer in particular was quality.
Had a few drunken debates on both geek matters and truly life and death stuff (like the upcoming Bristol Rovers vs Brighton game) so all-in-all it was a great success from a personal point of view and as I understand we made almost £1500 for charity:water and 200 folk showed up so I guess it was a success for the organisers as well.
On a side note in comparison to the photos I’ve see from the London Twestival the Bristol one seemed to have a different flavour to it with more students, academic types and Bristols usual slightly ‘hippy’ element to it than PRs and social media types.
[I would have added a few photos to this article but as the majority of pics from the event seem to be 'all rights reserved' I won't be - seems a bit out of step with the event if I'm honest - would have expected some more CC pics - but there you go]
Well as of 12.50 on the 12th all is well again and Sweet Tweet is ticking along quite happily.
As of this morning 12/02/2009 – something has gone pearshaped with the DNS for Sweet Tweet and it has been replaced by domain squatters by the looks of it – will update when Stef or Theo get into the office
Two of the guys in Jiva have been proving what can be achieved in just a couple of days when you have a decent idea and the passion to turn it around quickly. On Monday Stefan had the idea to build a kind of anti-Cursebird with a bit more of a Barry White feel – it was gonna be all about the love. So as he tends to do he drew a few pictures, then fiddled a bit in Photoshop and twisted young Theos arm to get his Rails hat on to build the back end. Three days later Sweet Tweet was born (though not without some initial issues with hosting and the Twitter API etc – these things are sent to try us after all!)
There are actually more features on the way (including the ability to check the love-o-meter for individual users) and its all been done outside of work hours in their spare time and encroaching on what I would consider prime drinking time in the 7 Stars.
I’ve been keen for us to do some smaller fun projects just to showcase what a talented bunch of guys we have at Jiva now (not including a blagger like me of course) and this will hopefully just be the start.
