A snail climbs up the inside of a well at a pace of three inches a day, but when it sleeps at night it slides down two inches. How many days will it take to reach the top of a four-foot wall?
Listen to: Milestones and Slime Trails
Here I am, almost four years after joining Twitter, on the precipice of 6,000 followers…
…but it really doesn’t mean anything. Because of the heavy churn I see, I’ll gain 8 followers and lose 6, in a somewhat random order.
Also, Twitter will periodically clean out the “bots” that automate replies and spam the system.
I’ll cross over that 6,000 threshold maybe six or seven times before staying above that arbitrary line.
- Of those that remain, there are hundreds of accounts that are dormant.
- Of those that remain, there only a small percentage are active at the moment I post something.
- Of those remaining, only a few actually see what I post.
It’s become a very noisy place, where it takes only 46 days to log 3-billion Tweets — which is about the same amount of time it takes the snail to escape the well.
I wonder who made more progress…
twitter is all fine and dandy, you know I am not a fan, but it is not enough so you bet your right on the snail analogy except you might be left asking yourself some existential questions, about the climb and its ultimate goal…
community is the way, you have to concentrate on community creation ike; that is your weak link, you outshine many in “communication” and “cognition” – but community, you are lagging behind bad
You’re right, but I am still grappling with the question before that:
“What kind of community do I want?” and “What do I need a community for?”
I do think I’ve built communities of various sizes across several platforms — I have a group of communicators I talk with regularly on Twitter and moreso on Facebook… I have a local Birmingham-focused group… I have people I talk politics and sports with…
…but what is the community here at Occam?
What do you think?
You need a good old fashioned online forum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_internet_forums that can serve as the backbone of a better Occam community.
Twitter has its plusses and minuses, that’s for sure. But for the medium, however, I wouldn’t know you. I count that as a bonus. And you are, most definitely worth wading through all the crap to find. Happy New Year, my friend. Best wishes to you and yours and I look forward to a F2F meeting in the very near future. And there had better be beer.
Shelly
@shellykramer
There will be, for sure. Thank you!
(And as to the premise of the post — I am not so much sandbagging Twitter as a waste of time, as much as punking the idea that follower counts have much meaning in a static sense.)
Simply the best blog name ever (Sorry @ginidietrich – spinsucks is darn good too) occamsrazr.com #thatisall
Joe, what can I say? 😉