Ariel Waldman

image via twm1340

Exploring the unknown territory of the space community’s involvement in social networks, I’ve compiled a list of space-related Twitter accounts that are on my radar. From telescopes to planetary explorers, astrobiology to robots, these accounts aim to add some education to your everyday.

At last count, I have 112 space-related Twitter accounts on the list I’ve compiled. I may expand my radar to include social networks beyond Twitter sometime soon. In the meantime, follow a few that interest you!

(I’ve been horrible at keeping up with a blogging routine lately, but that’s a subject for a later post.) I was recently asked over email what I thought could be a potential “Twitter killer” as well as an interesting way Twitter is being used. Thought I’d share my off-the-top-of-my-head response:

Potential Twitter killer:

Lack of community
Twitter as a company has stated in the past that they view themselves as a “communications utility” and not a community. This is an unfortunate and potentially poisonous viewpoint to try and maintain. My guess is that Twitter wanted to view themselves as a utility to further propagate the idea that they want to scale to a huge size. Again, this is unfortunate as Flickr is a prime example of a massive web service that is known for scaling not only their web framework but their community as well. Flickr has proven over time that it can maintain a sense of community at a large scale (remember, they serve about 35,000 photos a *second*) by truly thinking about every user experience despite it sometimes making their heads hurt. Basic psychology shows that people connect more positively and interact more when they share common things with a group. If Twitter gets its wish and there is no longer a sense of community, then what motivation do users have to connect via Twitter than any other utility or service? Twitter works because the people you care about are into it, not because it’s really necessary for your boss to know what you had for lunch on a public webpage.

Interesting way people are using Twitter:

Location Based Interaction and Dating
Typically when people talk about interesting ways Twitter is being used, it’s on this grandiose scale of “look how my business is profiting from being social and spreading awareness”. Ok, that’s already been done, boring. When you live in the same city as others that you have mutual connections with on Twitter, it’s a great platform for spontaneous meetups, dates, and occasionally meeting new people. The new form of dating is almost this passive, cheesy situation like yawning to put your arm around someone during a movie. The first ping involves someone saying something like they’re hungry, the returning pong suggest a location, and before you know it, there’s a rallying ping pong of Twitter replies to make an IRL (in real life) event happen.

Recently, there has been a rash of one-size-fits-all services that aim to provide a solution to “managing” various sites like Twitter, Pownce, Tumblr, Jaiku and Facebook all at once. As with most of my rants, they begin on Twitter and then trickle their way into a blog post – and if you’ve seen some of my tweets, you have seen my personal distaste for these services and the people who use them.

There is definitely an increased need to edit down the information influx we receive everyday via email, IM, web apps, etc. There is also definitely the stress of joining all the new sites your friends keep joining. However, just as a recent blog post pointed out the potential resurgence of separating public and not-so-public content, there is also arguably a need to cater which content resonates most with which audience.

A quote from 2006 that I often refer back to and has always resonated with me is “the internet favors infinite niches, not one-size-fits-all fare“.

So, why I think one-size-fits-all services like HelloTxt, Ping.fm, Twhirl, and Mahalo Share are missing the mark:

Spam
The one-size services assume your followers and friends are only following you on one site. In reality, most of us go between various different sites as much as we would go between kissing partners at a game of spin the bottle (as Sean has stated, I have a non-proprietary crush on Twitter and Pownce). This mass broadcasting may help you spend less time catering to each site, but will end up filling up all your friends’ social inboxes two or three times over with the same content. Undoubtedly, this will annoy them – especially if they really didn’t need to see that you’re broadcasting live on Qik in 3 different places every 5 minutes.

Rudeness
Worse than a wish-I-could-be-there video award acceptance speech, it’s centered around broadcasting without valuing interaction. Almost all people I’ve observed who use these services to cross-post, rarely ever login to the individual sites to see the replies, nor does it seem like they care. As a result, the content suffers significantly – as people learn to not click through or respond to things where they know their opinion won’t be heard.

Poor Catering
If not interacting with a community and spamming your friends didn’t hinder you enough, the services completely overlook the most important aspect: the content. On Pownce, seeing your 5 latest 140 character @ replies you had on Twitter is completely useless, annoying and a total giveaway to the fact that you’re probably never going to take the time to send me that new song you like or point me to a video you wanted to talk about outside of the 5,000 YouTube comments it received. As such, I’ve most likely already stopped following you.

To quote myself from 2006 in reference to advertisers, “So what if you reach a larger … audience? Did you reach the right audience? There’s so much talk about demographics, but in the end, people only care about numbers instead of the effectiveness, no less defining effective influence.”

Have these microblogging sites given rise to an advertising-like mindset of reaching numbers rather than niches?