Is Twitter a conversational mechanism

I hear a lot of people says that Twitter is a great tool for enabling conversations. In my experience Twitter can be used for conversations, but it is far from ideal for this purpose. I think that what people are really saying is that they are surprised how much conversations happen on Twitter given that the platform was designed primarily as a broadcast mechanism (for distributing news about what you are doing).

A conversation takes place when a person reacts to what they hear someone else saying either by responding to the original speaker or by passing in the message they heard to others. In some ways, Twitter is seen as a replacement for email. In order to judge whether Twitter is more likely to be used for conversations than email I decided to compare the what percentage of the contents of my email inbox and my Twitter stream involve conversations. The results are summarised by the following table:

Channel	ReTweets or Forwards	Replies	Neither
My Email Inbox	11%	22%	67%
My Twitter Feed	11%	4%	85%

It is clear that I see much fewer conversations happening via Twitter than via email, because although 22% of the emails I receive are replies, only 4% of the Tweets that I read are replies (to my email or someone else's). It seems that both mechanisms are used equally good at spreading news because 11% of the messages on either format are forwarding an email from someone else or re-tweeting a message that someone else twittered.

These results are skewed by the fact that not all emails or Tweets come from normal people. Some of the emails I receive are from automated programs e.g. the automated software build system we use will notify when a new build is available. In a similar way, some of the Tweets appearing in my stream come from semi-automated sources e.g. the Irish Times feed is really just an automated series of links to news stories on their web site. I am not sure I am a totally normal person (if such a concept even exists), but I decided to analyse the statistical profile of what I write:

Channel	ReTweets or Forwards	Replies	Neither
My Sent Emails	14%	64%	22%
My Tweets	39%	18%	43%

Although the numbers are different here, I still see that I clearly use email more for conversation than I use Twitter - the vast majority (78%) of my emails are either replies or forwards of someone else's message while only 57% of my Tweets involved either replying or forwarding someone else's message. I think that the relatively high percentage (39%) of my Tweets which are re-tweets of someone else message is an indication of the fact that I am not very confident that I know how to use this new medium and so I play it safe by re-tweeting other people's content whenever I find it interesting.

I don't claim to be an expert in advising people about the best way to use Twitter, but it is sometimes easier to identify people using the platform badly. I was amused to see the twitter feed for Poolbeg (an Irish book publisher). The feed was established on 16th of January and started off well with several tweets in the first few days, but at the end of the first week they posted a status message "Evening all - it's been a busy week for Poolbeg. Wine time now though!". Then there are no more tweets in the intervening 6 months. Clearly the person who was responsible for updating their Twitter account thought that drinking wine more interesting than Tweeting :-)

Using BlueTwitSideBar for microblogging on several platforms simultaneously

Since I am a user of several different microblogging platforms I have tried out several tools that help me manage my interactions on all of the platforms in one place. I recently came across a useful Firefox plugin called BlueTwitSideBar which is very handy because it allows you to manage your status updates from within Firefox. If you are like me you probably have Firefox running pretty much all of the time so using BlueTwitSideBar means I don't need to launch a new tool to read or write a status update. Unfortunately it is only available inside of IBM for now, but this might change in the future.

This plugin is fairly easy to use, but since there is no user guide associated with it I thought I would write up a short description of how to use it. The first thing you need to do after you install it is configure your settings. To do this you will need to select the Firefox menu option Tools\Add-ons.. which will bring up the following dialog showing the list of add-ons that you have installed.



Clicking on the preferences button for BlueTwitSideBar will bring up the following dialog in which you specify  the details of the services that you will be using and the feeds that you would like to appear in your stream of updates. The URLs shown in the screenshot work for the IBM internal services.



After you have installed and configured the plugin you will see a small icon at the bottom right of your Firefox window which shows you whether or not you have BlueTwitStattusBar Alerts enabled or not. If you have alerts enabled then you will get an alert window appearing every time someone sends an update to your stream (which I personally find annoying because the alerts are pretty constant). When you right click on this icon you see a menu to toggle alerts on or off, and you also see an option to open/close the BlueTwit Sidebar.

           

You can see below an example of what the sidebar looks like. The sidebar shows the updates in your various streams and you can also post an update simultaneously to the BlueTwit, Twitter and Lotus Connections Profiles service. You can choose the target platform(s) for each update by simply selecting the check box beside each icon.


 
In the screenshot above I am sending an update to all three services at one. The two most recent updates are both on the Twitter platform - you can tell this because a small Twitter Icon is overlaid on top of the user's icon beside the tweet. The following screenshot shows what a few updates look like on the BlueTwit and Lotus Connections Profile service - I deliberately smudged part of  these screenshots since I cannot assume that the employees are happy to have their status updates seen outside the firewall.




You will see that as well as seeing the updates, you also get a few more options:

• Retweet: Clickingon this button will simply copy the text of the update with the "RT @user" prefix into your status update box. You will get an option to manually edit the text before posting it (potentially to services other than the one the update was originally posted to).
  
• Follow/Invite: Updates on the Twitter and BlueTwit services have a Follow button which can be used to add the user in question to your following list. If the author of the status update is already in your following list, the button changes to become an Unfollow button. The Lotus Connections Profile service does not allow people to follow anyone they want, instead their model is that you must invite people to your network and they must accept this invitation. Therefore the updates to the Lotus Connections Profile service have an Invite button in place of the Follow button.
  
• Reply:Updates on the Twitter and BlueTwit services have a Reply button which can be used to compose a reply to this update i.e. it places @user at the start of a status update in your own update stream. The Lotus Connections Profile service handles replies slightly differently from the Twitter and BlueTwit services. Unfortunately BlueTwitSidebar does not (yet) implement a reply service for this platform.
• Translate: Clicking on this button will invoke a machine translation engine to translate the text of the status update into your preferred language (in my case English). I don't know much about this, but it seems to work quite well for me. It translated a few  tweets from my Japanese colleagues, but since I don't speak Japanese I can't comment on the quality of the translation.
  

What do I think of BlueTwitSidebar

• In general I think it is a very useful tool for keeping up with the different microblogging platforms I use.
• I think that using a Firefox plugin is very handy for reading status updates, partly because Firefox is an application that I typically have already running when I decide to check status updates from my neotwork. It is also handy that when you click on links in status updates it does not need to launch a different tool to display the link contents.
  
• One minor issue is that fact that ReTweets containing "@user" references can be confusing when the appear in another platform can be confusing. For example, if I posted something to BlueTwit and you decided to ReTweet it to Twitter, you would not be able to use the @bodu1291 as a link to my tweets, because my user ID on Twitter is @bodonovan.
  
• Unfortunately BlueTwitSidebar does not allow you to use multiple instances of the same type of service. For example, if I use it to manage my interaction on the IBM Internal deployment of Lotus Connections Profiles, I can't also use it with the BleedYellos service.
  
• The bottom line is that BlueTwitSidebar will be my tool of choice for now (but I am fickle and so this might change again if I can find anything better)
  

Comparing Connections glue to StatusUpdater and WildFire

Connections Glue is a popular tool for keeping up with your Lotus Connections and Twitter networks. Following my earlier post where I compared Status Updater and Wildfire tools for doing the same thing a few people asked me to do a comparison between these tools and Glue.

I had never used Connections Glue before and so I found this video demonstration gave me a very quick look through the features:

The main difference between Glue and the two other tools is that it is implemented as an Adobe AIR application rather than a Notes/Sametime plugin. If you (like me) keep Notes and/or Sametime running on your machine all day long, it is handy to use a plugin for your microblogging, but if you don't a tool like Glue would be a much more light weight.

The main limitation with Glue is that it only supports Lotus Connections and Twitter. In addition it can only support a single instance of the Lotus Connections service (like Status Updater, but unlike Wildfire). However, in common with most AIR applications I have seen, Glue has  a very slick UI. I said before that the Satus Updater UI is smoother than Wildfire, but Glue takes things to another level:

• When minimised Glue hides unobtrusively in the system tray
• When new Tweets or profile updates are received in your network you are notified by a subtle semi-transparent pop-up which will dismiss itself after several seconds.
• You can re-tweet the tweets you are reading with a single click.
  
• When browsing through updates from someone outside your network you see a + sign which you can click on to add them to your network if you like.
• Glue provides you with an interface to the files functionality in Lotus Connections as well as the profile updates.
  

In summary I think that Glue may be an interesting tool for users who don't normally keep Notes or Sametime running on their machines, but for anyone who does I think they would prefer either Wildfire (for non-IBMers) or Status Updater (for IBMers).

Comparing StatusUpdater and WildFire

I am sure there are many people like me who try to stay involved on several different micro-blogging sites. This can be difficult and so it is good to find tools which can help. Both WildFire and Status Updater are Notes/Sametime sideshelf plugins which allow users to read and write to several micro-blogging platforms at the same time. This blog post compares the two tools.

Just in case you think I have a conflict of interest, I should declare that I was involved with an IBM internal project to develop MicroBlogCentral (MBC) that was later released to OpenNTF under the name Status Updater. It seems that there was a totally independent effort carried out by a business partner in Australia to develop a similar tool which they called WildFire which seems at first glance to be very similar. Both tools offer you an option to configure several micro-blogging accounts on different services and then you can enter a status update into a text box and have that status update automatically posted to whichever micro-blogging services you choose.

However, there are a number of aspects where they differ:

• Widlfire supports significantly more services than Status Updater. Status Updater can only support Twitter, Sametime and Lotus Connections services, while Wildfire also supports Bebo, Facebook, GTalk, PingFM. Plurk, Tumblr and WordPress. Even I don't have accounts on all the services that Wildfire supports, so I wasn't able to test them all. It seemed to work fine for me on Lotus Connnections, Facebook, Sametime and Twitter, but I couldn't get it working on PingFM (this is probably a configuration error on my behalf).
• To be fair the IBM internal version of Status Updater does also support BlueTwit, Fringe and Beehive/SocialBlue, but this is hardly of interest to people outside of IBM.
  
• A really significant advantage of Wildfire is that it supports multiple instances of a service. This means that you can use it to post to two different Twitter accounts (e.g. if you have a personal Twitter account and you also post to your company's official Twitter Feed). It also means that you can participate on more than one implementation of Lotus Connections (e.g. you might interact with different communities on the Bleed Yellow and Lotus Live sites).
  
• A big limitation of Wildfire is that although you can use it to send updates to several sites, it only presents to you your friends updates from Twitter. In contrast Status Updater shows you updates from all of the services you have configured. There is a drop down menu which users can choose what exactly is presented in the windows (although I suspect many people don't realize that this menu exists so I show a picture of it below)
  
  
• In general the Status Updater UI is more smooth than that of Widlfire - this is probably due to the fact that the originator of the project works for IBM's UX team. For example
  
  • It provides a system tray icon for rapid access when Notes/Sametime is minimized.
  • When you click on a username, you will be navigated to a list of that person's status updates presented within the plugin UI rather than launching a separate browser window.
    
  • Status updates from each of the services appear with a different background colour so you can see at a glance which service a message was posted upon.
  • For the Lotus connections updates you see an indication of how many people have commented on the status update and with a click you can read these comments and add your own (again without leaving the plugin's UI).
    
• The following screenshots give you a quick idea of what the Status Updater UI looks like. The updates with a light blue background are from the IBM internal BlueTwit system, the updates with a Yellow background are from BeeHive/SocialBlue (another IBM internal system) and the updates with a dark blue background are from Twitter. I obscured some of the text to protect confidentiality, but I left in some text to give you a flavour of how the platform is used:
  
  
  
• The Wildfire UI uses icons which are not intuitive and hence I find very hard to remember what they do without hovering over them and getting the tool-tip to appear. Another problem I have with the Windfire UI is the way it presents whether or not an update has successfully been posted. After you click the submit bin you see a nifty icon beside each service you selected indicating that Wildfire is trying to post your update to the service. When the update is completed the icon changes to a tick if it was successful or a big red X when it fails for any reason - the trouble is that the X or tick goes away after about 2 seconds so if you are not keeping your eyes on the screen you can easily miss the status notification and hence might not realize that a status update failed to register. The sequence of screenshots below illustrate how it looks (which is great except for the fact that the status disappears so quickly).
  
  
• Wildfire was developed with windows support only in mind (a big minus for a Linux fan like me). However, it is actually just the configuration process which is Windows specific. It would not be hard to make the application work across all platforms (I posted a note to their forum telling them how to do this so hopefully they will pick up on this).
  
• Another difference at the code level is that Status Updater has a clean division between the code application and the plugins providing support for each of the services. This means that support for additional servcies can be developed independently of the core application. On the other hand, having the code split into several plugins does make it slightly more complex - not only for the developers, but also for the users who will need to install several plugins to get the same functionality.
  

Either of these tools could definitely be useful for someone who wants to be active on more than one micro-blogging platform. As you can see both tools have significant areas where they are stronger than the other. Therefore I can't reach a definitive conclusion about which tool to recommend and each user would need to decide based upon which requirements are more important to them. I would guess that many IBM internal people would prefer Status Updater because of its slightly smoother UI and its support for the IBM internal platforms. Most others would probably choose Wifdfire because its platform coverage is so much more extensive.

Personally I would love to see the two projects merging to produce a tool which combines the best of both. I have spoken with Jessica who is the main developer behind Status Updater and she is in favor of this idea. I will renew my efforts to contact the people involved in the WildFire project to see if I can insterest them in such a merger.