There are times when logging on to Twitter all you see is a list of “RT @thisperson”, “RT @thatperson” and updates with “pls RT” appended to them. And of course the retweeting often means you are seeing the same update over and over from various people.

Retweeting can make Twitter a pretty noisy, and echoey place at times.

If everyone had the option of seeing @replies to people they did not follow, the need for retweeting would diminish somewhat. By removing the option you make ReTweeting a more vital part of discovering new people.

As long as you can see @replies to people you don’t follow, and people send @replies instead of retweeting you will be alerted to the original posters update, and you have gained some insight into the replier’s viewpoint on it.

A retweet on the other hand is a passive form of update – you can assume the ReTweeter agrees or likes it, but they are simply repeating what another person has said.

The problem is that retweets are now seen as currency, and I think it’s largely because most people were not seeing @replies to people they were not following, therefore if you wanted to be heard outside your circle people had to add text such as RT before the @name in order for people who were not following you to see the update.

If you wanted to get more followers, or get your content seen by more people, you had to get people to retweet you. But if everyone could see @replies to people they are not following they would become aware of you through the interesting conversations you had with the people they do follow.

Twitter say that only 3% of people chose to see @replies to people they did not know, but then they also admitted on the settings page that “The @ Replies setting can be confusing. Read the help article if you’re unsure” – perhaps this confusion was part of what led to the low take up of the feature.

If everyone had the clear option of seeing all @replies, the retweet could take it’s proper place as a useful tool for certain types of updates. Not the holy grail of updates some people seem to think it is.

At a large party you can drift around pausing to talk to people you know. If they are engaged in conversation with strangers, you can join in if you find it interesting. Now imagine a party where all your friends are constantly coming up to you saying “Did you hear what this guy said? He said…”

I know which party I’d rather be at.

Update – I’m back! Twitter support reinstated my original twitter username on 17/July/2009!

The short version

1. I registered as frankiep
2. I decided I would like to capitalise to FrankieP
3. Twitter said “That’s You!” and then “Username already in use”
4. Decided to try changing username to something different and then back to FrankieP
5. Twitter wouldn’t let me change back to FrankieP or frankiep saying username was already in use
6. frankiep and FrankieP still resolved to my account for 48 hours
7. After 48 hours they resolved to another users account – which was last updated 16 days prior to my username change
8. I have lost my username due to a glitch and I would really like it back.
9. I would love frankiep back, would ideally want FrankieP, and in an ideal world both would resolve to my profile!

The long version

Registered frankiep & couldn’t change to capitalised version

I registered with Twitter as frankiep. I was happy enough, but one day I decided that I would be happier if I had FrankieP – same username but with capitalisation. So I did some research and found conflicting reports on the web about whether capitalisation would be a different username, or the same one.

The only thing to do was to try and change my name – so I went into the settings and tried to change from frankiep to FrankieP. No luck – twitter told me the username was already in use.

I checked, and both http://twitter.com/frankiep and http://twitter.com/FrankieP resolved to my account.

Could change to capitalised version FrankieP temporarily

A couple of days later, Twitter implemented some cool changes in their web interface, and I wondered if by any chance they had fixed the problem which was preventing me from capitalising my username. So I went into the settings to try again – this time when I edited my username to FrankieP the interface when checking availability told me “That’s You!”.

When I then tried to save the change, Twitter told me that it couldn’t save because the username was already in use, but my account would show as FrankieP until I logged out. When I logged in again – using FrankieP – it would revert to frankiep.

For a while I changed the settings every time I logged in, in the hopes that one day the issue would be resolved and the change would stick.

I sent an @ reply to Twitter a couple of times asking about it, but no reply.

Thought changing my username to something different and back again might help

Someone saw my question to Twitter and suggested changing my name to something else and then back to FrankieP. That kind of made sense because if Twitter was being confused by the fact that it thought it was me anyway, maybe by changing and then reverting back to the capitalised version it would be a clearer change.

I knew I was taking a risk, but I felt if I acted fast enough my desired username would only be available for a moment or two.

So I changed my username to TheFrankieP, and then went to change it again to FrankieP – but Twitter said that FrankieP was already in use, and so was frankiep.

I checked and frankiep and FrankieP both resolved to my account – which was now officially TheFrankieP.

While I had username frankiep, I think another user was able to register capitalised version FrankieP

At this point I was worried, but I figured that there might be some form of caching or holding pool for recently changed usernames. So I waited, and tried to change my username every so often – always with the same results.

Until about 48 hours later when not only could I not get my username back, but frankiep and FrankieP started resolving to another user. I couldn’t believe it – I assumed at first that Twitter had released the name and someone had just got in before me, but then I noticed the guy had one update – 16 days ago when I still held the username.

My best guess is that someone else was somehow able to register as FrankieP while I was frankiep, but that he found he couldn’t use Twitter because Twitter allowed him to register but then wouldn’t recognise him as I had the other version of the name.

Now unable to get my username back

In the meantime, I’m stuck with a new username I don’t want and can’t get my old username back, worse, someone else has it, due to what would appear to be a weird glitch in the system.

I have submitted a support ticket, but I’m not holding my breath – reports on turnaround times are not good.

If anyone can help, I’d greatly appreciate it.

I’ll leave you with the advice not to mess with your username on Twitter at all, for the time being!

With some excitement about confirmation that paid pro Twitter accounts will be rolled out sometime in the vague future, I got to thinking about what features might be useful.

Right now I personally have no need to pay for increased Twitter functionality but if I was a ‘power user’ there might be additional functionality I would pay for.

Existing third party features for Twitter that could be made ‘official’

There are loads of features that might be useful to power users, but lots of them are handled by various third party tools such as:

• Autofollowing people (like TweetLater)
• Sending automated direct messages (like TweetLater)
• Sending automated updates based on search terms (like TwitterHawk)
• Managing multiple Twitter accounts (like HootSuite)
• Multiple users per account (like HootSuite)

Most of the above features I have no use for, but if I was a power user with a global marketing plan I can see how they could come in handy.

Statistics and analytic tools for Twitter

The main functionality I can see people paying for is statistics, because that kind of data / functionality can only be provided by Twitter. What kind of stats might be useful?

• Number of visits to profile page / individual updates
• Most Retweeted Content
• Most clicked on links & their containing updates
• Search terms used to find updates, referring sites and other standard web stats

Easier maintaining of Twitter followers

A feature I would like to have access to is making a yes/no decision about following people. Right now, I get email notifications about people who follow me. It’s disruptive to check out each one as they come in, so they build up and I do them in batches. But it’s time consuming.

There are sites like Friend or Follow and Twitter Karma which make it easy to see my non reciprocated follows – but they show all of them. Because Twitter offers you the option to follow but no option not to follow, people I have already made a decision about show up in that list.

What I want to see is a list of the non reciprocated people who are following me, by date, that I have not made a decision about yet. With follow yes/no options and an ability on the same page to expand their details to show bio and last 5 updates.

You could also see a list of people you had decided not to follow, and a list of people you follow.

Now imagine an official Twitter tool which did all of the above. Would that be worth paying for? One location for all features, and improved confidence in the tool.

The secret ingredient to maintain Twitter’s integrity

I think the biggest feature on a pro Twitter account is one that hasn’t been figured out yet. A feature which would allow for businesses to market their wares on Twitter without compromising the integrity of Twitter.

If Twitter keeps going the way it is now, with businesses and marketers using auto follows, automated searches, auto updates, auto dm’s and the like described above, we may all find ourselves either swimming in a sea of advertising or aggressively culling our followers back to our closest friends – and even then there are two problems 1) even our nearest and dearest might still be auto marketing and 2) it kind of defeats the purpose of connecting with people on Twitter.

I’ve already been thinking about this on Pat Phelan’s post about Twitter marketing (my comment here).

Look at FaceBook for a moment – it has separated out how users interact with people and businesses. This was a wise decision and allows much greater options for the future of marketing on FaceBook.

What could Twitter implement to protect us from a relentless tide of marketing, but allow businesses to interact with people? It would be great to be heading toward a future on Twitter where regular users continue to use Twitter as is, but businesses sign up for a paid account to gain access to marketing tools.

What about a pro business feature which inserted business updates, marked as such, into the streams of people who’s content has been algorithmically deemed contextually appropriate? The algorithm would also protect from over saturation of marketing stuff. While at the same time getting more ruthless with autofollows & auto messaging of any kind, and possibly frowning on marketing in regular updates with a thumbs up / down system on updates to allow Twitter to monitor for abuse.

Your feature suggestions?

The above idea is only one of, I’m sure, potentially millions of approaches. What do you reckon? Comments welcomed with open arms

FaceBook introduced polls you could pay for back in June 2007, but they then disappeared again completely – however there have been some rumblings of a return with reports of FaceBook demoing the polls recently.

As things stand, I think FaceBook polls, were they reintroduced, might be ignored by users, much as FaceBook ads are largely ignored. Filling in a poll is an invasion into the ‘freeness’ of Facebook – a price to be paid in one’s time for someone elses gain.

Would offering a potential reward mean the polls would be seen as further free stuff to be had, rather than a price to pay?

FaceBook Ads seemed like a great idea – you could target your ads specifically to age groups, locations, gender etc, but it turns out they’re not so great after all – click through rates tend to be very poor.

FaceBook ads are not going to be the revenue generator FaceBook had hoped for, they need to find another way to generate revenue from their huge userbase.

Could FaceBook be re-examining polls as a way to generate revenue?

The way it worked before was that one could pay to poll users with a multiple choice question which shows up in their feed when they log in. TechCrunch have a short article explaining more about how FaceBook polls worked when originallly introduced.

Now that the global economy is looking a little worse for wear the ‘freeconomics’ business models will be under a lot more pressure to find that pot of gold under that free rainbow, however when Chris Anderson wrote about free being the new economy he said “the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.” It’s known as the penny gap.

Free is the market FaceBook users have become accustomed to and filling in a poll may well turn out to be a price they are not willing to pay.

Whether this type of system would impact on the quality of the data would have to be assessed in some way, but what if you offered a possible reward to fill in the polls? Any user who fills in the poll is entered into a draw. Now you have gone from asking a price of your users to offering them more free stuff.

Rewards could be set by the companies who wish to do market research or could be handled by FaceBook on a larger scale where not every individual poll has a prize but rather groups of polls, or polls within a certain timeframe.

What do you think? Would you complete a poll in your FaceBook feed? Would you complete one if you might win something?

This post has been updated to fix inaccuracies caused by being a little trigger happy with the publish button and not paying attention to dates on articles when researching! The rumours of FaceBook polls returning may have been premature in any case, but I’m glad they got me thinking about this anyway

The article advised setting up 10 email addresses and then joining each social site 10 times and bookmarking your blog posts 10 times on each site over a period of a couple of weeks.

Apart from being rather underhand and dubious morally, who the hell as the time for such tactics?

However it did get me thinking about whether people did have strategies when it came to promoting their blog posts, and so I put together a little survey, which I them promoted on Twitter.

A big thank you to the 100 people who took part, and apologies for the delay in writing up my findings!

First of all, let me be the first to admit that this is for fun, and not at all scientific. The results are interesting, but not in any way conclusive. Bear in mind that the small pool of participants are all pretty much entirely made up of Twitter users, and therefore are a certain type of computer user to begin with. For one thing, we can assume they are positively predisposed to Twitter as a social site!

Overview – what I learned

As well as the obvious caveats above, I realise now that I possibly should have aimed this survey at business bloggers, as several of the questions make much more sense to a business blogger than to a personal blogger. As it turned out, of the 69 people who answered about what kind of blog they had, 41 had personal or hobby blogs – that’s 59.4%.

Interesting that so few people bookmark their own blog posts – 86 out of 99 people (86.9%) questioned don’t bookmark their own blog posts, and therefore neither do they have a strategy for same. The only strategy for bookmarking ones own blogposts seemed to be using ‘Share This’ type buttons and plugins on the blog posts themselves, which allows your visitors to bookmark them for you.

On the other hand 46 out of 91 people (50.5%) questioned bookmark other people’s blog posts, which would certainly make it seem worthwhile to include that ‘Share This’ button on your posts. to make it easier for them!

Only 34 out of 76 people (44.7%) questioned broadcast their own blog posts on social sites such as Twitter and Facebook, another number I expected to be higher. For those who DO broadcast their own blog posts Twitter came out top of the heap for broadcasting one’s own blog posts, followed by Facebook.

Twitter and Facebook cropped up together several times as being the most popular sites, interestingly, Twitter and Facebook were the two sites thought to bring most traffic to people’s blogs, but Facebook disappeared from the picture when people were asked what sites brought the most valuable traffic – Twitter remained at the top.

When asked whether time spent on social sites had brought value to their blogs, 31 out of 65 people (47.7%) answered Yes. This was still higher than those who felt it had not brought value to their blogs (43.5%) but I was surprised it wasn’t a higher number.

In any case, the actual results are below, hopefully you will find some other interesting info in there. Thanks again to everyone who took the time to partake!

Question 1: Do you social bookmark your own blog posts? (by social bookmark I mean Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Shared Google Bookmarks etc)

Yes – 13.1%
No – 86.9%
99 people answered this question.

Well that’s probably the most interesting result right there. From time to time I do bookmark my own posts, usually as a result of thinking that i must be the only one who doesn’t, but it appears I am not alone!

Question 2: How many sites do you social bookmark your own blog posts on?

1 – 7.9%
2-5 – 5.6%
6-10 – 2.2%
over 10 – 0.0%
as many as possible – 1.1%
none – 83.1%
89 people answered this question

Obviously, since a high percentage of people said they don’t bookmark their own posts it stands to reason that this question would only be relevant to a small portion of the participants.

Question 3: Do you social bookmark other people’s blog posts?

Yes – 50.5%
No – 49.5%
91 people answered this question

It seems a much higher percentage bookmark others blog posts than their own.

Question 4: Do you use any tools to submit your blog posts to social sites?

Yes – 17.3%
No – 82.7%
81 people answered this question

See the graph below for some of the tools mentioned by the few that do use tools, as you can see Del.icio.us seems popular, particularly the FireFox extension.

Question 5: Do you have a strategy for social bookmarking your own sites?

Yes – 3.8%
No – 96.3%
80 people answered this question.

The following comments were also left on this question, two pointing out they use those ’share’ buttons to allow other people to easily bookmark their posts, and two more tongue in cheek comments

• I use “share This” to let others bookmark the post they like
• I include a ’share’ button with links to digg, delicious, email, etc.
• Wish I had now after answering these questions!
• Christ no.

Question 6: Do you broadcast your blog posts on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace etc?

Yes – 44.7%
No – 55.3%
76 people answered this question.

The following were left as to what social media sites they used to broadcast blog posts:

Twitter obviously turns up a lot, which is to be expected really given that these are nearly all Twitter users, but it’s interesting that Facebook is clearly popular for broadcasting blog posts too.

Question 7: Is your blog of a business or personal/hobby nature?

Business – 15.9%
Personal /Hobby – 59.4%
Other – 24.6%
69 people answered this question

Of those that answered other, most did so because their blog is a mix of business and personal.
I expected more of the responses to be business related to be honest. Even if we add Business and Other we get 40.5% – less than half.

I wonder if the responses to this survey would have been significantly different if I had specified this was for business blogs only?

Question 8: What social site do you feel brings you the most traffic, and what social site do you think brings you the most *valuable* traffic?

41 people answered this question

The responses to this question are below. Only 41 people answered, does this mean a lot of people are not interested or paying attention to their traffic? As a lot of participants were talking about personal sites rather than business sites this is possible.

Question 9: Do you feel your time spent on social sites to date has brought value to your blog?

Yes – 47.7%
No – 41.5%
Other – 10.8%
65 people answered this question

Of the people who answered ‘Other’ most were unsure of whether the time spent had brought value to their blog, though one individual answered:
“I don’t like ’social sites’ as they are collecting information for US intelligence agencies.”

Question 10: Without considering value, or traffic, or anything like that, what’s your *favourite* social site, and (very briefly) why?

48 people answered this question

You can read through all the responses below, but you can see from the graph that Twitter is by far an away the favourite – however as mentioned the participants were all garnered from Twitter so that’s not a huge surprise!

Facebook once again features heavily which is interesting, and StumbleUpon doesn’t do too badly either.

• delicious
• Delicious – because i think people use delicious to bookmark websites/blog posts/etc that they personally find interesting or useful. Digg and Reddit – are more about what people think other people might find interesting so they can gain points/karma.
• delicious – clean simple and integrates nicely with firefox
• delicious – easy to add to. digg. good way to fnd new good websites/stories.
• digg – really great thing to check in on at intervals during the day during a break for a quick fix of something to have a look at.
• Facebook – as it is feature rich. MySpace because that is where my customers are.
• Facebook – as it’s the only one I post on at the moment
• Facebook – Best of a bad bunch. Most people are on it.
• Facebook – greater reach
• Facebook – Keep in touch with friends, people travelling, view and share photos. Its highly addictive!
• Facebook – Was facebook, purely because so many people I know are on it (and bugged me to join). So I joined. But I don’t like it that much. It’s spam with a login. But it helps keep up with what everyone’s up to because we’ve lost the art of smalltalk and the conversation that goes nowhere
• FACEBOOK. LESS STUPID THAN MYSPACE. TYPING IN CAPS MAKES THIS MORE LEGITIMATE. :<
• friendfeed, as i can merge all sources of info to one
• Google Reader – I don’t know if this fits the question but Google Reader is my preferred social site at the moment, allowing me to catch up on blogs and comment.
• Jaiku – because of accessibility
• none
• none
• Plurk – it’s where me and my real friends hang out.
• rune scape – because u can kill and talk to people
• skimbit.com – its just a great tool for research and love the way its visual too
• Stumbleupon – Because Digg has waaay too much bullshit associated with it. I don’t really use any soc-nets for promotion though.
• stumbleupon – because it gives random sites.
• stumbleupon – i don’t have to socialize
• stumbleupon – it owns.
• stumbleupon – it’s fun.
• StumbleUpon – keeps me entertained when bored!
• They all make my teeth ache. No time for all that.
• Twitter
• Twitter – because it’s often the first way I hear about things and I would not have heard about some of those things (or come across some interesting people) without Twitter
• Twitter – because it’s real people you interact with about everything
• Twitter – brevity
• Twitter – Currently Twitter because it’s simple and clean and I have it set up. The fact that it was easy to implement and attracted the kind of people I wanted to attract and doesn’t require the kind of frontage Facebook does for example made it most attractive to me
• Twitter – for conversation and raising local profile
• Twitter – friends – place we interact
• Twitter – good fun – not to be take seriously for me
• Twitter – Haven’t figured out why I like it yet. I think the word limit makes it unique.
• Twitter – I easily spend the most time on Twitter and find it most entertaining and useful for work
• Twitter – I’m relatively new to it, but have found both the social and learning aspects of the site extremely good.
• Twitter – it’s fun, informative, great way to meet people and find new things of interest
• Twitter – it’s lightweight and carries a lot more professionals
• Twitter – It’s where my peers hang out.
• Twitter – Its a human knowledge base.
• Twitter – its random access to people thoughts is interesting
• Twitter – keeps me up to date, relevant, doesn’t get in the way as it stays (mostly) in a Firefox sidebar.
• Twitter – Possibly because I have control issues.
• Twitter by a long stretch. No other social tool comes close to creating the type of online community feel that Twitter does.
• Twitter, because it encourages conversation and creativity with words.
• Twitter. Get to talk to people, like. Make nice new acquaintances.

I recently got to thinking about some of the social bookmarking sites that are out there, and the way in which different people share their blog posts. My curiousity got the better of me and I put together a very brief survey – 10 questions only.

Please take the survey, and I’ll post the results later along with my thoughts and any interesting stuff I think arises from the survey.

Hopefully you are as interested as I am in how people use social media to get their blog posts out there, and you might spread the survey round a little. It’s just for fun, but we might get some interesting discussion material out of it at least

For a company starting out in the area of social media, it can be a serious matter if well established and respected bloggers decide to berate your company for a ’social media misdemeanour’ – your burgeoning online brand can be damaged to a point where it may be difficult to be taken seriously in future.

The misdemeanour could range from the way they set up their blog, taking advertising on their personal website, to sending unsolicited emails to large numbers of people. Individuals are named and shamed, and often rightly so. For anyone looking to dip their virtual toe in the online waters seeing this can be quite discouraging.

I have experienced a lot of this reluctance when encouraging companies to get more involved online, and judging from informal chats with other consultants, it’s pretty common.

I see this as quite a serious issue, especially when you consider that there are in fact very few rules, and the so called rules that do exist are by no means black or white, and many will disagree about them.

For example Brendan mentions taking advertising on a personal blog as being a misdemeanour. I see nothing wrong with taking advertising on a personal blog, and there’s certainly no law against it!

Even spam is a word that is bandied about all too often these days – I have seen blog posts from what Brendan refers to as ‘elders of the online community’ which berate companies for spamming them, when in my eyes it’s a borderline case at best.

Brendan finishes his post by getting to the nub of the matter:

Should they be taken aside for a quiet word in their ear or should they be publicly ridiculed for their stupidity? Personally I know how I’d like to be treated when I break the rules (unwittingly) in any club or community I’m a member of.

Communication should always come before publication. I think that should become the mantra of the blogging community.

When a company commits one of these social media misdemeanours, they should be given the opportunity to explain their side of the story. If you are incenced by their actions, pick up the phone, or drop them an email explaining your anger.

If they blank you, or are not willing to listen, then go ahead and write your blog post.

Let’s not get too hippy about it, but we’re all human. I have witnessed at least one occasion recently where a writer softened their position on a company they villified when the actual personalities behind the company came into play.

There is always more to a story, there are always at least two sides to a story. Why not at least know both sides before you potentially damage a company’s online brand.

Experienced and popular bloggers should be encouraging, not demolishing.

If you liked this, you might be interested in my blog post ‘Advice on weathering a blogstorm‘

To find the Casino Royal Boat should be easy, it’s a big pink boat, near enough to the Main Stage. Go to the Electric Picnic site and download a pdf map if you want to see exactly where. It’s no.11 on the art trail.

All welcome! Don’t think about it or stress about it, just turn up! Look for Peter.

If you think you might make it along, please leave a comment on Peter’s blog.

And also, please spread the word! Blog about it, Tweet about it, or share the Facebook event.

See you there!

Here’s a link to my Twitter profile – come say hello, and check out Twitter for yourself!

In a nutshell, you sign up for Twitter and find people to follow. You can post short updates to Twitter of 140 characters. Once you follow someone you see all their updates. If they in turn follow you, they can see yours. If you are mutually following each other you can also send direct messages to each other that no one else sees.

Everyone’s experience will differ depending on who they are following, who follows them (and so converses with them) and how they choose to interact with people on Twitter.

It can be used for self promotion, to keep up with others in your industry, or for entertainment. I’ve heard people proclaiming it’s wonderful for keeping up with breaking news, finding job opportunities and even finding romance!

Self Promotion
Self promotion seems to be a popular reason for using Twitter, but in my opinion the vast majority of people get it wrong.

The best way to promote yourself on Twitter is not by constantly linking to your own blog posts, but rather to engage in conversation and have something meaningful or helpful to say. This will result in people checking out your profile page and subsequently your website. Twittering is often referred to as ‘micro-blogging’ and as such the same rules apply in terms of raising your profile and becoming recognised as an expert in your field.

Another way to promote yourself on Twitter is to monitor Twitter for mentions of your company or your name and respond to people who praise or criticise you. Respond in a meaningful and helpful way and you will begin to build a reputation as a company/individual who is listening, available and ready to respond.

What I use Twitter for…
For me, I used it to get an insight into what was happening in the tech & web design industry in Ireland, and to keep my finger on the pulse.

Twitter allowed me to very quickly obtain a window into the Irish tech and web design industries and see who was who and who was doing what.

In order to do that, I found people I knew – such as Tom Raftery or Donncha O’Caoimh – and I checked who they in turn followed, then if I recognised any names, faces or companies I followed them too.

I then watched what they were saying and anyone who cropped up in conversation repeatedly in interesting conversations, I followed.

Soon I had my window into the Irish online world. I found this extremely useful for getting a quick snapshot of what was going on.

The echo chamber effect.
Within a short space of time, I realised I needed to expand my window to peer into more than just the Irish industry – once I had soaked up a good overall idea of who was who and who was doing what, the daily Tweets began to lessen in value.

I have now begun to follow anyone at all who I come across who seems to have something of value to say.

Change is good, don’t let your Twitter experience stagnate.
Despite the fact that I follow a small number of people by general standards, I think in order to address the signal to noise ratio, I will have to begin to ‘unfollow’ people.

Somehow though, it feels rude to stop following someone, as it may be interpreted as an insult. of course, it’s not a personal slight if I unfollow someone, it’s just that their input isn’t currently in keeping with what I am trying to get out of Twitter – the onus is on me, not them.

My instinct is that for Twitter to be of value it must be a shifting experience. Follow the signal, unfollow the noise, and what I perceive as signal today may be noise tomorrow. But do I have the patience and the time to manage a Twitter experience in this way?

Is Twitter a distraction, or a valuable tool?
Already I find Twitter to be another attention drain – does the value to be had from Twitter really justify the distraction it causes?

Hugh MacLeod deleted his Twitter account because he felt it was ‘too easy’ and his time would be better spent doing more productive things – of course he subsequently signed up again and is twittering away to beat the band… what does that say about the Twitter experience?

My experience of Twitter has been positive, because it gives me a much needed quick glimpse of what’s going on in my industry – but then my industry by it’s nature, lives online.

Is Twitter just another attention drain? And what industries other than tech have found it useful, or even just entertaining?

So I was surprised to log in to my Google Analytics and find I had 100 visits on April 4th. Curious as to how 100 people had suddenly discovered my site on the same day I looked through the traffic sources and found… StumbeUpon.com.

StumbleUpon is primarily a way to discover new sites, and to share sites you like with others. You can install a toolbar in your browser which allows you to quickly add a site to StumbleUpon, review it, or be served up a random site and give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down – StumbleUpon also has social aspects to it (mandatory these days!) and a host of great features.

As I am signed up with StumbleUpon I was able to discover that afarnsworth had found my blog post on inbound links and had given it a thumbs up.

This was a timely reminder of how useful StumbleUpon is for sites wishing to build up new traffic, something I knew from my experience with BifSniff.com. If we look at the traffic to BifSniff from January 1st 2007 to January 1st 2008 we can see that StumbleUpon is number 4 in the list of referring sites.

Stumbleupon accounted for 9.45% percent of all traffic to BifSniff in that year, and that was with little or no input on StumbleUpon on my part – but what is even more interesting than the volume of traffic is the bounce rate. Bounce rate is the percentage of people who land on your site, look at the page they landed on, and leave – most sites will want people to stick around, have a look at some other stuff, and maybe even buy something or become a member or subscriber or whatever else the goal of your website might be.

The bounce rate for BifSniff has always been high – it doesn’t have clear goals, it’s a simple blog for fun. The bounce rate for anyone coming to BifSniff through Google is 71.48%, but the bounce rate for traffic from StumbleUpon is 30.91%.

Why the bounce rate from StumbleUpon is lower is something for another discussion – perhaps the focus of the site means that the userbase are simply more open to exploring sites once they find them, or it could be down to how exactly people discover new sites on StumbleUpon – if they are following links from other StumbleUpon users they trust then perhaps they are more likely to explore your site.

I’m not the only one who sees lower bounce rates from StumbleUpon visitors either, Donncha reported similar findings on his blog a while back.

So if you’re not a member of StumbleUpon, I recommend signing up. I know that after this reminder, I will be increasing my activity on StumbleUpon and adding more sites and pages (including my own) to the StumbleUpon database!