A music affinity group emerges on Twitter

One of the most fun things about messing around with Twitter is to see interesting things emerge. It's such a general tool that it's a lot like those college greens that architects leave without pathways, allowing students to develop their own patterns over time.

I've recently started seeing the emergence of a music affinity group on Twitter (one of many, probably). It occurred to me this is happening yesterday, when I got a follow from @peteyorn, a musician that I like but didn't even know was on Twitter.

How he found me, I don't know (perhaps Mr. Tweet does). Maybe it's my connection with @francisten from West Indian Girl, or @kmueller62 of WXPN (or even @fotteson, a local bass player). Maybe it's that I write about music a fair amount (including live Tweeting the My Morning Jacket New Year's Eve concert or my musical crush on NOMO).

At any rate, I've gotten follows now from @madalynsklar, @talkmusicnow and @sxsw. You can see the pattern emerging. And I like it. I want to know what musicians and music fans are tweeting about. I'll learn about new music & perhaps see a bit of the faces behind the records. It'll be fun to see how this group evolves over time. (And if you're a musician or music lover, give us a follow at @jmcaddell and I'll follow back. You can join the conversation then.)

Just another way @twitter is changing how we interact and learn.

Customers are talking: the Blackberry Storm/Twitter project

Like a lot of people, I've been trying to get a handle on what Twitter means for businesses. My professional interest is in finding unsolicited customer stories and making sense of them--wherever they are. In this, Twitter has a lot of promise. It's easy to use, brief and spontaneous. So are customers using this forum to talk about products? I decided to find out.

My test case was the Blackberry Storm. It received an absolutely terrible review from David Pogue, the New York Times' consumer-electronics columnist. It also had very good early sales numbers--500,000 units the first month of its release, according to the Wall Street Journal. The combination of these made it an irresistible subject to study: would the Twittersphere be flooded with posts from enraged buyers?

The project was made more interesting today, when the Wall Street Journal published an article entitled, "Bumpy Start for Blackberry Storm," which referred to complaints of early Storm users (but not Pogue's review), including this vibrant quote: "I found myself wanting to throw it in the ocean due to my frustration with its overall usability." The article also referred to a release of firmware soon after launch intended to address some of the early complaints, particularly response time.

I used Twitter Search to look for messages containing "Blackberry Storm" and a happy or sad emoticon (there's a button on the advanced search page that enables you to restrict searches this way). I looked at 88 English-language tweets going back to December 27. Here's what I found:



The biggest surprise to me was: where were the complaints from users? While half the Tweets were from Storm users, as opposed to people commenting on the Storm, or thinking about it, only 4 out of 44 (9%) of the users' tweets were negative, while 23 (52%) were positive.

(If you want to check out the searches I created for this project, they are here: happy search, sad search. Twitter Search has been acting funny the past few days--I'm only able to get one page of recent results, and can't search farther back. I used an RSS feed of the search over a period of weeks to gather the entire list of 88,)

From a customers are talking perspective, this isn't a terrible outcome at all for the Storm. Whether the firmware change made that much difference, or the Blackberry brand loyalists are immune to hardware glitches, or simply that devices like this aren't perfect and users expect that--they are not saying this is a terrible device. Many are saying that they like it. If I'm Blackberry and Verizon, I'm not discouraged by the Storm's initial reception.

By the way, the WSJ has already started to backtrack. On the web site, the article is now entitled, "Blackberry Storm Is Off To A Bit of a Bumpy Start."

(Disclosure, I am a Verizon customer and a Blackberry 8830 user. If you think I am a shill for Verizon, please don't make up your mind until you read this post, or this one.)

A silly but fun use of Twitter

Many people say, "What on earth is Twitter good for?" and there are lots of answers. One in particular: it's really great for providing a real-time status of a bad Mexican wrestler-monster movie that you watch while you eat dinner at the bar. See below (note to those unfamiliar with Twitter: the first post is at the bottom; the last is at the top). Enjoy!


Tags:
Twitter, communication,

Twitter and "Every Minute Accounted For"

I've been using Twitter for the last several weeks and I find it interesting, though I'm not yet at the point where I see breakthrough applications for it. They may be out there; I'm just not experienced enough to see them.

(For the uninitiated, Twitter is a micro-blogging tool that allows you to send 140-character notes from your PC or mobile phone, and for others to view them. You are asked a simple question: "What are you doing?" and your answer is broadcast to the community. You can also subscribe to others' Tweets.)

It's such a simple and open tool that the possibilities for using it are almost limitless. It may go without saying that most of the applications will be better at wasting time than improving productivity. Yet, Twitter has real potential to increase connectedness.

For example, I work with a team of people that are spread out across the US, UK and Ireland, and frequently shift from one location to another. It would be helpful to have Tweets updating where they are so that I can know when to call them (given that there is a 6-hour difference between Chicago and England), or when they're in transit.

You can imagine a million such applications. And right now hundreds (thousands?) of people are doing just that.

I find it fascinating that answering the question "What are you doing?" over and over again can create a life narrative--an autobiography of trivia, as it were. Which reminded me of an article I read in Harper's Magazine more than ten years ago about a guy, Robert Shields, who kept a moment-to-moment diary for more than twenty years ("Every Minute Accounted For" by David Isay--access free with magazine subscription). A sample is below:

10:00-10:05 I groomed my hair with a scrub brush
10:05-10:10 I fed the cat with tinned cat food
10:10-10:20 I dressed in black Haband trousers, a pastel-blue Bon Marche shirt, the blue Haband blazer with simulated silver buttons, both hearing aids, eyeglasses, and the 14-degree Masonic ring.

Two thoughts occurred to me. One: Shields could really have benefited from Twitter. And two: is Twitter growing more Robert Shieldses? How many people out there are notating their lives down to the minute and sharing them with the world?

The last paragraph of the Harper's article poignantly explains why anyone might want to leave such a record. (It is from a passage in the diary where Shields describes an interview with Isay, the author.)

I said I did not know why I kept it, especially since it is doubtful if anyone would ever read it. It is a compulsion. [Isay] asked whether I intended to keep it up until I die and I said yes. It is impossible for me to give any motivation for it, except that when I am gone, the words that I have written will be the only thing that survives.

Another article about Robert Shields is available here.

Related post:
Everyday stories hold great insight

Tags:
narrative, storytelling, social networking, connection, Twitter