As we develop websites at The Bivings Group, our designers often sketch out concepts on pen and paper before creating more formal wire frames or draft design compositions.  Given the work we do, it was interesting to see these pen and paper mockups of some of my favorite websites, including Twitter, Flickr and Vimeo.  Check out the initial sketch for Twitter below:

Interesting tidbit: the idea for Twitter originally came about in July of 2000.

<via Ajit Verghese via Boing Boing>

Due to scalability problems, the micro-blogging platform Twitter has struggled mightily to stay up and running the last few months.  As a result of the problems, a lot of folks are threatening to abandon Twitter for the social aggregator service FriendFeed.

I personally won’t be abandoning Twitter for Friendfeed.  Here’s why:

(1) There is too much noise on FriendFeed.

I’m currently following around 160 people on Twitter.  Some of these people I know well in real life.  Some casually.  Some not at all.  I’m able to follow and learn from this large group of  people because all I see is what they type in their Twitter status bar periodically.  Sure, some people tell you what they had for breakfast.  But most people exert some level of editorial discipline on themselves, and only write when something at least semi-interesting happens.

They don’t tweet about every meal they have, just the really, really good ones.  They don’t share every item they come across on the web, just the interesting ones.  The result is a usually compelling stream of anecdotes that is updated throughout the day.

FriendFeed has no such editorial discipline.  In addition to receiving those few choice anecdotes each day about the people you follow, you also learn what they are listening too on Last.fm, what is in their Netflix queue and what they dugg on Digg, among other things.  I might be interested in knowing that stuff about my 10-20 closest friends, but certainly not about all 160 people I follow on Twitter.  It is just too much.

(2) I have no desire to recreate my Twitter network on FriendFeed.

I’ve been on Twitter for close to a year and a half now.  I’ve amassed a modest network of followers and, more importantly, have developed a good list of people I follow.  This happened organically over time and I have no desire to start over on FriendFeed.   I’m not Robert Scoble - I can’t just say I’m going over to FriendFeed and have everyone move with me.  I’m in the same boat as Patrick Ruffini, a fellow poli-tech blogger who wrote:

But the main reason I can’t brook switching to FriendFeed is the sunk cost of building up my Twitter network, and the fact that FriendFeed is still mostly for elite tech blogger groupies. I now have 898 followers on Twitter, and my posts still generate far more conversation on Twitter than they do on FriendFeed. That’s because most of my followers are interested in politics, and political users aren’t (yet) over on FriendFeed.

(3) For whatever reason I don’t like the FriendFeed user experience.

Tantek Celik wrote a great post a while back about how Twitter is successful due to its dead simple interface that minimizes keystrokes.  On the occasions when Twitter is working, it feels much less like a website than a utility that is part of you.  For me FriendFeed still feels very much like a website, and a slightly disorienting one at that.  It is just not the same.

Traffic on The Bivings Report has been going crazy the last two days due a link to our blog within the extremely viral Inside CRM piece “The Twitter Hall of Shame: 50 Tweets That Will Echo in History.” The Inside CRM post could serve as a guidebook on how to create a viral article:

1. It is a list post.  People love list posts.
2. The article contains links to 50 other articles and blog posts on the web.  Most of the bloggers they link to will read the post, and then probably pass it around and/or add a link to the Inside CRM article (as I am doing now).  Inside CRM also smartly sent us a quick email to let us know about the article, in case we missed it or didn’t notice all the traffic they were sending our way.
3. The article is about Twitter.  First of all, people are just generally obsessed with Twitter.  Second of all, people obsessed with Twitter love to share stories about Twitter on Twitter.  I would guess Inside CRM is getting a lot of traffic from people passing this story around through Twitter.
4. The article is pretty damn entertaining.

Anyway, check it out.

Update: Regarding #3, my colleague Chuck, who works on our ImpactWatch team, points out that there have been 122 mentions of the phrase “Twitter Hall of Shame” on Twitter in the last 22 hours, according to Summize.  Lots of other people probably linked to the piece without using the exact article title.  So it looks like the piece is definitely making the rounds.

In our post announcing the launch of our Bivings Twitter account, I mentioned being inspired by the way other companies/organizations are using Twitter (what is Twitter?). The organization that I was thinking of specifically when I launched our account was Zappos.com. Lots of organizations are jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and using the tool to publish RSS feeds and have one way conversations. But very few at this point are using Twitter to actually engage with customers and stakeholders. Zappos.com is one of the few.

Zappos has set up their own Twitter micro site to highlight the company’s use of Twitter. The site features:

• A “Beginners Guide to Twitter” that does a good job of explaining what Twitter is exactly.
• A leaderboard, sorted by number of followers, that lists all Zappos.com employee Twitter accounts (252 of them). By doing this, Zappos is empowering all their employees to engage with customers through Twitter.
• A reverse chronological list of all employee tweets.
• A reverse chronological list of all Zappos.com mentions on Twitter.

Importantly, Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh is the company’s most active and followed Twitter user. Just in the last few days, he has used his account to:

• Share some details about what he’s up to personally and professionally.
• Provide some behind the scenes info regarding what its like to work at Zappos.com.
• Launch a Twitter contest asking people to help them rewrite their confirmation emails.
• Incubate an idea for polling customers on Twitter.
• Explain why he is using Twitter.

Don’t believe they are into it? Check out Tony’s business cards.

Zappos.com is successfully using Twitter to put a human face on the company and engage with customers more deeply. I’m impressed. If we do half as well with our own Twitter account, I’ll be happy.

Around a year ago, I registered the username “bivings” on the micro-blogging platform Twitter on behalf of our firm, The Bivings Group. Our original intent in creating the account was to squat the username and protect our brand. We didn’t really intend to do anything with it.

This week, we decided to start actively using our account for a couple of reasons:

1. More and more, we’ve been counseling our clients to experiment with Twitter. It feels strange to give this advice when we aren’t using our own account effectively. “Doctor, heal thyself” as the saying goes.
2. Twitter doesn’t cost anything to use and the time investment required for us to update our account isn’t that great. So why not?
3. In the last few months, we’ve come across some great examples of companies using Twitter to further their brand. We were inspired by these success stories. Look for a blog post showing some examples later today.
4. Twitter isn’t mainstream yet, but it is on the cusp. It seemed like we should get in while the getting is good.
5. Lots of us here are already using Twitter and we like it. We thought thought it would be fun to launch a Bivings account we update collectively.

In terms of content, here is what you can expect from our Twitter account.

1. We’ll be automatically publishing all our blog posts to the account using Twitterfeed. If this is all we did on Twitter, it would be worthwhile. As I’ve started using Twitter more heavily the last few months, the time I spend reading RSS feeds has dropped dramatically. I discover stuff to read on Twitter instead. I think others are doing the same. Twitter is becoming an important distribution channel for content.
2. We’ll post links to sites we launch and updates on things we are working on.
3. We’ll post short, quick thoughts that we don’t want to try to stretch out into full blog posts.
4. We’ll enter into discussions with people we follow on Twitter.

Anyway, you can access our account here. Please follow us! We’ll do our best to be interesting.

And if you have any suggestions as to people we should be following, leave them in the comments.

At the New Communications Forum conference I attended last week, Twitter was the topic of a great deal of discussion.  During panels and hallway chats, three things became really clear to me:

(1) There are a lot of smart people who have no idea what Twitter is, or who only know about it in the vaguest sense.

(2) Hard core Twitter users assume that everyone knows about it in the same way that everyone knows about YouTube or Facebook.  They don’t.   Twitter hasn’t hit the mainstream yet, although it is knocking on the door.   Check out this Compete graph:

(3) Twitter is really hard to explain to people.  You pretty much have to just break out the laptop and show the thing. 

We’ve been writing a great deal about Twitter here on our blog, and I fear that we have done so in a way that is inaccessible to folks that haven’t checked out the tool yet.  So below is some background info that hopefully helps out newbies and also Twitter vets trying to explain it to folks.

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[This is cross-posted at The ImpactWatch blog.]

J.W.'s American Idol Twitter prediction about which contestant would end their run last night was wrong.  Brooke White did not go home despite having a disastrous restart during her song while Carly Smithson performed well this week — even garnering praise from Simon Cowell.

I think that J.W. had a novel idea, but why was his prediction wrong? 

There's an excellent chance that those who use Twitter aren't representative of the ardent American Idol voter.  While I don't know the demographics of the voting population, Twitter is new and geeky enough that it wouldn't surprise me if this was the case.

Here's an anecdote about why I know Twitter isn't that widespread yet. Twitter inputs my tweets into Facebook and lists them in my status updates.  My friends see: "Steve Petersen is twitter: …"  Although my friends do show social media tendencies by using the site, some of them have no idea of what Twitter is.  One asked me, "What's with all this twittering?''  While another wondered if I was constantly nervous.

Now, I'm not saying that my friends accurately represent the American Idol voter, but they probably are more like the voter than a group of people who use a geeky (I use that with pride) site.  If some of my friends understand and enjoy social media enough to use a social network but are not aware of Twitter, then tweeters are in a smaller subset of the population than my friends who use social networks.  Needless to say, I have many friends who either don't want a Facebook account or lack the desire to social media (let alone Twitter) on-line.

Further, I doubt that everyone who positively tweets about a contestant votes for that person.  Also, I know people who vote multiple times for the same person each week, and even if a Twitter user voted for the contestant whom they wrote about, how are we sure that they voted once, twice, or nine times?

My predictions were absolute rubbish, it seems.  Apparently, tweets cannot be used to accurately predict who is going home from American Idol.  In fact, two of the top three positive tweet-getters were the ones that were unceremoniously in the Bottom Two.  Syesha Mercado and Carly Smithson had the least votes after their performances on Tuesday night, despite having the most positive tweets found during my Tweet Scan.

Interestingly, Mercado and Smithson were the two contestants with the fewest positive tweets BEFORE their performances of this week.  This may indicate that overall twittering can predict the voting habits of America better than spur of the moment written notions.

Will we ever find a way to predict American Idol?  I researched some of the other methods previously mentioned in this post, and none of them predicted a Carly elimination.  With that, Fox Television continues to remain a mystery.

For the second part of my study concerning whether tweets from Twitter could be used to predict the losing contestants of American Idol, I decided to wait until noon to make sure that there were enough new tweets to equal the amount used in the analysis last week.  Fortunately, there were more than enough fresh, unique tweets discussing last night's episode.

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Last week, Hugh MacLead of Gaping Void (his cartoon above) announced that he was leaving the micro-blogging platform Twitter because he found it was distracting him from what he really wanted to be doing: writing books and drawing cartoons.

Rex Hammock responded with a sensible post calling for moderation:

I like Twitter and have written on this blog about how I believe it can serve many positive purposes. But yes, it can be a time-waste. That’s why I try to keep my Twittering in the background and turned off while working. I’ve found the program Twirhl, a desktop Twitter (and other services) client is helping me filter out lots of Twitter noise and have a better framework and context for the use of Twitter.

This struck a chord with me, as I am finding my current Twitter use unsustainable and have more or less abandoned the tool over the last week.

I find Twitter most useful when I read most of the updates of the people I am following. That way, you truly get to know the people you are following and can participate in the conversation that is taking place on Twitter. If I don’t read most of the updates, I find Twitter disorienting - it is like picking up a book and trying to read it backwards.

I’m currently following around a hundred people, and I would guess that I would have to be on Twitter an hour a day cumulatively to truly keep track. I’m not willing to make that kind of time investment. Given that, I’m left with a few choices:

1. Abandon Twitter altogether like Hugh.
2. Trim my list of people I’m following to a more manageable level.
3. Abandon the conversation aspect of Twitter and use it as a glorified listserv, a la Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Seth Godin. Basically stop listening, or drop in and out of the conversation at best.

I’m not sure what I’ll end up doing. I suspect other people are facing the same dilemma, as with many Twitter users you see periodic fits of activity followed by long periods of silence. I would guess these people are like me - they stop seeing the value because they don’t have time to follow the conversation.

Note: I just read an anecdote that pretty well sums up the Twitter time dilemma. Blogger Ryan Kruder recently called out Seth Godin for using Twitter as a one way communication vehicle (Godin never participates in conversations on Twitter and nearly all his posts are automatically imported via Twitterfeed). Godin responds:

If I twit, and do it well, as Garret seems to say, then what shall I give up? I already don’t sleep or comb my hair…

That pretty well sums up how I feel about Twitter right now.

Twitter is an addictive micro-blogging platform that has experienced explosive growth since launching a few years back (my account is here). I’ve come across a few cool Twitter tools in the last few weeks so I figured I’d share.

(1) Twhirl

This is a slick little application that allows you to receive and send tweets from your desktop. This is a powerful tool, but the main things I like about it are:

• You can manage multiple Twitter account through one interface.
• The interface allows you to sort your tweets in a variety of ways. I found being able to just view tweets that were direct replies to me a very useful feature, as I was missing a lot of these due to the way I was using Twitter before.
• It has powerful tools for shortening URLs and adding pictures to your account via TwitPic.
• Most importantly it is an application that I can open/close whenever I want, so that Twitter doesn’t clutter up my IM windows or phone. It makes Twitter less of a distraction and allows me to get more out of it in less time.

Below is a screenshot of the interface.

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[This post is cross-posted at the ImpactWatch Blog] 

To follow up on a recent post concerning Comcast’s effort to answer consumer complaints via Twitter, I used Tweet Scan to search specifically for Comcast posts and research exactly with what we are dealing. A basic one-word search found well over 1000 tweets about Comcast within just the last couple of hours, so I narrowed my focus down to the most recent 300. I read each of them, and categorized them in three different ways.

The first specification was whether the tweet was positive, negative, or neutral, overall. The results are as follows: 26 of the tweets were positive, 86 were neutral, and a majority of 188 were negative. It is a pretty negative environment for Comcast on Twitter right now.

The second category dealt with what category of complaint or praise under which the tweet fell. There were four distinctions: Not Working, Slow, Prices, and Company. “Not Working” and “Slow” deal with complaints about the Internet and cable service. “Prices” concern any complaints or praise about cost or billing issues. “Company” refers to any mention of the company that does not fall into one of those categories, or short tweets with little information (i.e. “grrr…Comcast”). 178 were about the company itself, 66 were problems with the Internet or cable completely not working, 33 were about slowdown, and 22 were about pricing concerns. It is interesting that on Twitter there is a lot of general venting about Comcast (bad for the brand), and less specific complaints.

The final category is whether or not the tweet contains cursing of any sort. From a quick skim of the 300 tweets, it seems like this is a good indicator of the level of frustration by the writer of the tweet. 35 contained curse words, and 265 did not.

Found below are some examples of Comcast-related tweets, as well as a document containing all the graphs above. This post is similar to the kind of analysis we perform through out service ImpactWatch. Interesting to note is that several of the tweets among the 300 were by the same user, who claims to be a representative from Comcast. Also, many of the tweets contained links to articles referencing the recent customer service use of Twitter by Comcast. Unfortunately, the representative could only handle one consumer problem at a time, so the use of tweets was just as effective as phone consumer services. The links below represent the tweet-by-tweet written data, some examples of Comcast-related tweets, and analytics.

All Data Collected

Example Tweets

Graphs Made in IW

Over the weekend, two of the users I follow on Twitter, David All and Techcrunch (Michael Arrington), had separate problems with Comcast and vented about them via their Twitter accounts. Comcast apparently monitors Twitter and proactively reached out to both of them.

Here is the relevant tweet from Techrunch:

And here is the tweet from David:

An article in the Consumerist confirms that other users have received responses after complaining via Twitter. In a follow up article about his problems, Michael Arrington offers advice to folks with a Comcast service problem: “Skip the hold time on their customer service line and go on the attack at Twitter instead. You may find your problem fixed in a hurry.”

Three thoughts on this:

(1) I think it is great that Comcast is listening to people on Twitter and reacting proactively to fix problems. Based on a quick search, there appear to be plenty of problems to that need addressing. More companies should monitor and participate in Twitter in a meaningful way (we are working on doing Twitter tracking through our ImpactWatch service).

(2) As a consumer, I’m bothered by the precedent of the squeaky wheels on Twitter getting preferential treatment over people who go through normal channels.

(3) Not speaking specifically about Comcast, I think the focus some companies place on social media is more about PR/crisis management than a true commitment to customer service and dialogue. Performing triage on complaints that come in through Twitter may keep the customer revolt at bay for a short time, but when that levee eventually breaks, it isn’t going to be pretty.