In the meantime, here is yet another reason why I stand by DotSpace. I’ve sort of stated this reason, but not quite in this way… and that is to very explicitly welcome new twitterers to twitter, and simultaneously introduce them to the people I tweet with. For instance, local eateries and pubs are now coming onto twitter, including one that has only been in business for two weeks. I know that nearly NONE of the 200-300 local people who follow me even know this place exists, let alone that they tweet. It’s too bad that 700-800 people who are not local have to see this tweet, but without DotSpace or other workaround, there is no way I can alert 200-300 people about it. Again, this is a perfectly social and proper use of twitter that there is no way around. And this business is cool socially too- I love their latest tweet: “Just entered week 2. Help us be the best by making suggestions, criticisms, ideas. Humor is good.”

First. I will repeat again. Twitter is a service. If you want to blame Ev or Biz or Jack or the developer that pushed the change into production, do that but blaming a company/organization is just a hype mentality that perpetuates a me v. the man attitude that I really don’t think is beneficial in online communities.

Second. It’s very clear from the blog post from May 12, 2008, that twitter has been working this way for over a year. The only a few difference between twitter then and now. 1) You personally are now aware of how the service actually works and 2) No user of the service has the ability to override this behavior. However #1 is a big difference and now that you know, you don’t like it and that brings me to….

Third. It appears that have now joined a “vocal minority” This minority is made up of people that 1) understand how twitter actually works 2) doesn’t like it 3) is employing methods to either make it work the way they want it OR get twitter to change it’s stance.

(Previously, per the twitter May 12, 2008 only 2% of twitter users knew about this behavior and wanted choose to override it. So at least in the past this represents a minority of those that understood twitter and choose to override its default behavior.)

This minority is obviously vocal as shown by the links you posted, this entry itself, and the conversations on twitter.

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Here’s where I’m at on all this.

We can chat about twitter all day long and in the end, people vote with their feet…or unfollow button. However to me there are two really interesting discussion that cut to the heart of what we are talking about and these I would love to see followed up on:

1) In producing content in a Web 2.0 world, how do the wishes of the content producer and the content consumer play into how content is created and consumed? What happens when they are at odds?

2) Vocal minorities. How do you treat an online vocal minority? Do absolute numbers in vocal minorities? (Is 2% of 100 less important than 2% of 1M?)

Cheers to the discussion and the ever transparent state of online communities.

Quiz: Who is going to see this tweet? Do you know? Do you care? Are you able to figure it out? Do we really need to take the time to figure it out under the new twitter rules? The answer is – only the people that follow both Mark McSpadden and myself. So if you were otherwise following along the conversation, because you follow both me and Jimmy Marks, or me and CU Warrior, this tweet will be missing from the conversation.

The point is, people shouldn’t have to figure out what tweet is going to be seen by whom. It’s WAY too complicated given the true nature of twitter… which is 20 million interconnected conversations.

The people who run twitter view it in one particular way – which really misses the myriad of ways that different people use it. If @ev and @biz ever conducted extensive focus groups, field research, or ethnographic research on how people actually use and view twitter, their minds would be expanded by a great degree. They totally missed the boat when they started messing with this one because of their preconceived notions of how twitter “should” be used. Don’t blame me for my use of Dot-Space. Blame the powers that be at Twitter.

It really comes down to that I see Twitter in a different way than some in the rest of this group is seeing it. I see it as a place to have open conversation that anyone can join in on, rather than an insular world where only the current crowd can view. To me, that view seems less social. I feel like this style I’ve chosen to adopt is more welcoming for people new to Twitter, and connects more people to more conversations. Again, that was the original appeal for me with Twitter… it was via Twitter (and thus seeing @-names) that I connected with so many of you pioneering types. Had this system been in effect all along, I may not have met many of you.

And I also want to make clear that this is not something I’ve done on my own. There are many others who have adopted this policy or something similar. Here’s some resources:

Social Support discussion

Ev’s description of how things worked way back in May 08

CNET article on ticked-off twitterers

TechCrunch on KISS Fail: You Can Now See Twitter Replies Sometimes, Except When You Can’t

I, too, use twitter conversation to decide if I will be a good match with people. I wouldn’t want to force anyone to do the same, but if there is a simple bypass that can be engineered into a product that we use, I think it would benefit those developers to include it.

Seesmic? TweetDeck? What do you think?

Can’t we always go back and look at all the tweets an individual has done if we want to see something specific? Remember when this all started and we found Twitter (or some of us anyway) lacking in certain aspects so went to Jaiku? We found out it wasn’t necessarily the program we use but the social group surrounding that program that was important. The use of second accounts (who doesn’t have a second account by now?) as well as the search functionality does show signs of somethings moving forward.

Sometimes I read all of what one person twitters sometimes not. Just because I subscribe to a magazine or newspaper doesn’t mean I read every article. What I really enjoy is when everyone gets involved with comments to a post like this. This sure beats the crap out of that 140 character limit!!!

Mark, if you are not upset with seeing such a tweet between Ron and Jim Novo, then really what you are complaining about is my blatant use of the period-space. This is a time saver for me because I then don’t have to worry about exactly how to word my tweet so it’s natural sounding with the name embedded within. But otherwise, it’s identical to putting the name in the middle of a tweet.

At the same time, if someone does not use the community has you want, you can unfollow or unfriend them. While that may seem harsh, sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.

I noticed that some of the professional people that I wanted to communicate with were unfollowing me due to non-industry posts. Ironically, I was doing this as this topic was being discussed on twitter. So, my solution to that was to create a separate account. I have to thank @itsjustbrent for the idea given his comment about moving to his @thehabdash account during the blog conversation yesterday.

As far as .@ posts, I have done it, but I use it rarely now for replies that I think others who follow me and may not follow the recepient would appreciate.

Morriss, I do like seeing your conversations with others, but can see how others may not. It all is about how people want to use twitter.