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Talking with Will Taylor about Facebook & Twitter (11th February 2011)
This is the second page of Will’s article about Facebook and Twitter: PART 2 - TWITTER
If you wish to return to the first page of the article, please CLICK HERE
To visit Will on Twitter go to http://www.twitter.com/bigdaddywhale
To visit his blog go to http://www.bigdaddywhale.com
This is the second page of Will’s article about Facebook and Twitter: PART 2 -
If you wish to return to the first page of the article, please CLICK HERE
To visit Will on Twitter go to http://www.twitter.com/bigdaddywhale
To visit his blog go to http://www.bigdaddywhale.com
Outworkings of my Twitter experience
Various things have come out of this. About three or four of those people I’ve now invited on Facebook because I feel the relationship can go to a different level. I still talk to them on Twitter but on Facebook it’s slightly different.
Other things have happened. For instance, I’ve been interviewed by the guy up in Scotland, who is part of a group who run a podcast and they do interviews with people and I’ve been on there. Now because of that relationship, I’ve also been an interviewer for them with someone I know.
With Facebook you could never connect with someone with a similar interest who you’ve never met before who isn’t a friend on Facebook up in Scotland or in America. There’s no way of finding people with similar interests; it’s about connecting friends. I’ve found people on Twitter with similar interests and they have become friends, and I’ve Skyped with a couple of these people for no reason other than to say hi, introduce myself, see them, have a conversation and get to know them better. On Twitter I follow and am followed by hundreds of people now but my network of friends on Facebook is probably about twenty or thirty that I communicate with a lot.
Keeping tabs on People
RL: How do you keep tabs on all these people?
Will: Well you can set up lists, so I have Twitter lists. One list, say, is my inner circle and then instead of searching a time line - I think I’m following 400 – 450 people, and on my time line they will all come through, so either you are checking it every ten minutes seeing what is being said and reply which on a quiet day you can do if you are on a bus or train– you can go to your different lists, say my inner circle perhaps, that I talk to a lot, or then you can have specialised groups of people, or a news list and you can just look at those various news items.
Some people I will follow so that they will follow me. Some people you link to follow, will follow right back, and some people you go on to watch their blogs and they watch yours, because that is a deeper level of understanding with them.
The need to reach out
I think what I’ve said to a few people and will continue to say, is that when you join up with Twitter you can sit there and wait for people to come and ‘be my friends’, but then I went to find a few people and found a few people and followed them on Twitter and they didn’t follow back, and i thought, Oh, there’s no point in this then, nothing happens.
The biggest thing about Twitter, and Facebook to some extent, but Twitter mostly, is that if I become your friend we are friends and it is a mutual direction thing. You can see my posts; I can see your posts. With Twitter I could follow you but you could choose not to follow me and see what I say. So the question becomes, how do i get you to follow me? This will be if i think the relationship is worth having, at the very least to follow in both directions. And that comes down to the social side of the social media. Twitter is a media.
How to be sociable
To be social on it, think how you would be social in a room full of people. You have got to communicate with them, you’ve got to walk around the room, you talk with them, and you talk to the various people. In Twitter, similarly, if you just ‘sit in a corner’ of Twitter, it’s not using the media in a social way. To be social you’ve actually got to go out and make comments about yourself and about what you are doing, but you’ve also got to make comment on other people, to other people, and respond to what they say. Start dialoguing. That way you build and that way, I believe, it becomes a social media rather than just ‘sit-in-the-corner’ media.
RL: You’ve got to be a bit of an extrovert to go for this haven’t you? If you lacked confidence you wouldn’t be able to do this.
Will: Well it depends. A lot of people lack confidence in the real world but they can let go online because it is not actually having to talk; it’s about having to type into a computer. It depends on what people do. There are people on there that don’t talk back but make a lot of comments. I wouldn’t know how people are made up in their real life because with online personas you can literally be anyone.
The Various Ways to get Twitter
RL: You mentioned computers just now but don’t you do it mostly with your iPhone?
Will: Yes, mostly. When i’m at home most of my internet usage is on the iPhone. People can use a laptop, a desk top, they can use an iPad, an iPhone, or they can use an android phone, (that’s the make of the operating system, the software the phone uses, for almost any smart phone today you’ll be able to connect to Twitter). By all of these ways you can connect to this incredible network.
RL: Well OK, let’s stop there. I have a feeling we’ve only just started this talk and so perhaps we might pick it up and take it on again in a month or so. Thank you for that. I have a suspicion that there is a whole generation or two out there who will find that pure revelation!
Note: Quote from a Times article, taken out of context: “Facebook seems pointless, or incomprehensible to people brought up to communicate by letter or telephone.” Well we hope that this article above may perhaps change that in some small way. It is worth reading again.
Top of Page
To return to the first page of the article, please CLICK HERE
Various things have come out of this. About three or four of those people I’ve now invited on Facebook because I feel the relationship can go to a different level. I still talk to them on Twitter but on Facebook it’s slightly different.
Other things have happened. For instance, I’ve been interviewed by the guy up in Scotland, who is part of a group who run a podcast and they do interviews with people and I’ve been on there. Now because of that relationship, I’ve also been an interviewer for them with someone I know.
With Facebook you could never connect with someone with a similar interest who you’ve never met before who isn’t a friend on Facebook up in Scotland or in America. There’s no way of finding people with similar interests; it’s about connecting friends. I’ve found people on Twitter with similar interests and they have become friends, and I’ve Skyped with a couple of these people for no reason other than to say hi, introduce myself, see them, have a conversation and get to know them better. On Twitter I follow and am followed by hundreds of people now but my network of friends on Facebook is probably about twenty or thirty that I communicate with a lot.
Keeping tabs on People
RL: How do you keep tabs on all these people?
Will: Well you can set up lists, so I have Twitter lists. One list, say, is my inner circle and then instead of searching a time line -
The need to reach out
I think what I’ve said to a few people and will continue to say, is that when you join up with Twitter you can sit there and wait for people to come and ‘be my friends’, but then I went to find a few people and found a few people and followed them on Twitter and they didn’t follow back, and i thought, Oh, there’s no point in this then, nothing happens.
The biggest thing about Twitter, and Facebook to some extent, but Twitter mostly, is that if I become your friend we are friends and it is a mutual direction thing. You can see my posts; I can see your posts. With Twitter I could follow you but you could choose not to follow me and see what I say. So the question becomes, how do i get you to follow me? This will be if i think the relationship is worth having, at the very least to follow in both directions. And that comes down to the social side of the social media. Twitter is a media.
How to be sociable
To be social on it, think how you would be social in a room full of people. You have got to communicate with them, you’ve got to walk around the room, you talk with them, and you talk to the various people. In Twitter, similarly, if you just ‘sit in a corner’ of Twitter, it’s not using the media in a social way. To be social you’ve actually got to go out and make comments about yourself and about what you are doing, but you’ve also got to make comment on other people, to other people, and respond to what they say. Start dialoguing. That way you build and that way, I believe, it becomes a social media rather than just ‘sit-
RL: You’ve got to be a bit of an extrovert to go for this haven’t you? If you lacked confidence you wouldn’t be able to do this.
Will: Well it depends. A lot of people lack confidence in the real world but they can let go online because it is not actually having to talk; it’s about having to type into a computer. It depends on what people do. There are people on there that don’t talk back but make a lot of comments. I wouldn’t know how people are made up in their real life because with online personas you can literally be anyone.
The Various Ways to get Twitter
RL: You mentioned computers just now but don’t you do it mostly with your iPhone?
Will: Yes, mostly. When i’m at home most of my internet usage is on the iPhone. People can use a laptop, a desk top, they can use an iPad, an iPhone, or they can use an android phone, (that’s the make of the operating system, the software the phone uses, for almost any smart phone today you’ll be able to connect to Twitter). By all of these ways you can connect to this incredible network.
RL: Well OK, let’s stop there. I have a feeling we’ve only just started this talk and so perhaps we might pick it up and take it on again in a month or so. Thank you for that. I have a suspicion that there is a whole generation or two out there who will find that pure revelation!
Note: Quote from a Times article, taken out of context: “Facebook seems pointless, or incomprehensible to people brought up to communicate by letter or telephone.” Well we hope that this article above may perhaps change that in some small way. It is worth reading again.
Top of Page
To return to the first page of the article, please CLICK HERE
The World of Computing
Bits and bytes from computing
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