To get to the next level in my thesis I need to use this blog to ask myself more (detailed) questions, about what experiences of me and other users mean, what could be said about connectivity between users and what are the changes in their communication? What dilemmas are there in following and what does this mean? Why do some users refuse to follow other users and what happens to their connection in real life?

An example of problems with privacy is a user who says on one medium that he or she is busy or has made arrangements with someone, while on another medium (like Twitter) the same user says something different. It is difficult to know who reads a certain tweet and how this will be interpreted. It means that users have to be careful about what they write online and should take other media in consideration. It also means that privacy matters. Some users have a private account and deliberately deny access to certain users, although the users who are being denied access could consider this as an offence because both users have friends in common. The use of Twitter looks so easy as an account is made within a minute but once a user realizes he or she has to be careful what to say. The main question of Twitter ‘what are you doing?’ gets another meaning this way and is not about a certain activity forces the user to think, what can they do online and what should they not do? Friendships can be made on Twitter but also be destroyed because of mis-interpreted words. This is one of the Twitter implications when a user thinks somebody else implies something.

Just to be clear, the stories above are not my own experiences but bits and pieces of stories of people I follow and hear about. Even though an account is set to private, @replies to a private user can still be read through the use of Twitter search or Google. Stories can be verified this way and could add to the image of that private user. Although twitter accounts can be set to private, Twitter is still not a Walled Garden, in the sense that outsiders can still read @replies from other users. Social network sites which are a Walled Garden are more difficult to read without being logged in than Twitter. [...]

Last weekend it was raining and I though it was a great day to put together some Ikea boxes and wondered if any other Twitter user came up with the same idea at exact the same moment. When I looked for only the word ‘Ikea’ I only got tweets from the last minutes, so Ikea surely was a hot topic that sunday! When I look for ‘dozen’ (Dutch for boxes) I get tweets with the English word dozen so I had to look for ‘boxes’ and found someone who wrote about Ikea boxes too;

@themurmish Ah, the smell of freshly opened IKEA boxes… 1:43 AM Jun 7th from web

Then I asked if he was cynical about this and he replied he could not wait for the smell to be out of his apartment. Not much later he replied a friend and him were writing a twesis too so we should stay in touch. This information was not on Twitter and I only found him because of Ikea boxes, funny how things go on Twitter.

One of the trending topics on Twitter is #followfriday and if you do not know what it is it is not easy to find out. The same goes for more than just this hashtag. The idea behind #followfriday is to promote users you follow and like so your followers can check them out and follow them too. Today I was suggested twice, just like last week;

Not too long after that I got a new follower, although I do not know if my latest follower follows me because of #followfriday I can ask him. I could however consider #followfriday as spam if many users I follow just post lists of usernames, some are really enthousiastic about it. On the other hand, users atart to unfollow people on monday, using #unfollow monday as an excuse.

Some questions I need to ask myself in order to structure my thesis chapter about my experience with Twitter. I have read the research of Edward Mischaud and consider the questions he asked some selected users in a questionaire. I will ask myself the same questions or similar questions;

How many users I follow do I know in real life?

At this moment I know 59 out of the 99 friends I follow today (June 4th). Four are virtual people (@buurvrouw, @TheMime, @NichtjeChelsey and @juffrouwjannie), two are cats (@stickiepoes and @timmedepim) and one is myself (@twesis). By knowing I mean I have met them in real lige at least once, like a Twitter meeting. Most of them are friends and classmates. The users I do not know are interesting or inspiring  people or organisations or they have something to do with my research subjects like @hashtags, @applications, @adium, @teamtwalala, @spezify or @virtueelp. I also follow people who tweet information for a project only, like @leprafeed.

Would I shout in a crowded room what I tweet?

Probably not, but this comparison is very difficult as I think Twitter cannot easyly be compared with the real world. I already think Twitter is not really a remediation of anything I know in daily life. On Twitter I do not make a sharp difference between public and private, or research and personal, although many tweets can be categorized as such. When I reply to a tweet of a friend I keep in mind that all my followers and other people can read my reply, but I do not pay too much attention to that. Every user can reply back and take part in a conversation or discussion and I can even get to know new users this way. However, when people in real life confront me with my tweets I can get annoyed because I think what is part of the Twitter sphere should stay inside the Twitter sphere.

Why did I decided not to do any interviews? What were my reasons?

During my research period I was asked several times if I was going to do any interviews with Twitter users and I refused to do them. I feel the need to explain why. I wanted to experience Twitter and experience multiple applications. I was fascinated by following and be followed. I feel that if I interview other users about their experiences I am writing a book instead of a thesis as I already have a lot of material to work with. I participated on Twitter and joined multiple discussions and followed trends. I blogged about my journey and appreciated the input from others on my blog and on Twitter through @replies and direct messages.

How can I classify my postings/tweets or to what extent was I answering ‘what are you doing?’

Just like Mischaud found out early in his research, my postings also did not reply to the main question of Twitter “what are you doing?” but were instead more “random personal statements”.[1] Sometimes I was really stating what I was doing but I also chatted a lot about anything. At this moment (June 4th) I have written and posted more than 1700 tweets and I have back-ups and will try to classify them through keywords. I made my own questions which I answered on twitter, like ‘what am I thinking?’, ‘how do I feel today?’ or I wrote about what I did, answering the question ‘what did I do today?’.

Do I feel Twitter is more part of a high culture or more common culture, more about politics or chat?

To answer a question like this I have hundreds of tweets that I have read over the last couple of months and most are related to personal topics. This is also due to the people I follow. Some users follow politicians so what they read is less personal and more professional. But I feel most users chat with friends about their lives, about basic information. My classmates and I write about New media events. Friends and I write about coffee or if Twitter is offline. According to TwitterFriends 60% of my tweets are @replies, although I do not know if they take all my tweets in consideration.

Last week I finally had an appointment with @ikbendAF who calls herself the (Dutch) Twitter ambassador. Because I call myself a (Dutch) Twitter specialist we had to schedule a meeting one on one for coffee. We first met on the Twestival where a friend of hers got a message that I logged in on Brightkite and then they started looking for me. Not too long after we met again in a bar in the Jordaan and she started talking about the photo book she is writing about Twitter. Here we agreed to meet for coffee and talked about twitter and following and tweet-ups and her book and my thesis. Because of mutual friends we also met at two parties the other week whit other tweeple. Some parties can inadvertently turn into a tweet-up. It is great to meet someone who actually knows a lot about Twitter and excange useful links.

Another tweet-up I planned on January 14th was a special coffee meeting for a few friends for which I used twtvite.com. I just bought a lattemento online, a device that makes devine frothed milk foam. Only two tweeple showed up but is was a nice social experiment. In a few days I will have another coffee meeting about croissants, because lately a lot of users I follow are mentioning them. For this meet-up I didn’t invite friends only so I wait and see who will turn up. I probably have to put more effort in tweet-ups, because I do not get much response so far. Maybe I should just spam my followers more.

In this blog entry I will try to combine some of my major subjects in my thesis, because it reflects what I experience on Twitter, it is about to follow or being followed and it is about what can be written on Twitter and what cannot be written, so language is important too. And I need to mention some applications that play a role in this context too. I do have some experience with following people and at the moment I follow more than a hundred users, but most of them do not tweet that much. I am being followed by more than 170 users but this number changes every day, some users join me and others stop following me. There is not much growth in this number of followers.

Every friday a lot of users start following other users and use the hastag #followfriday but then on monday some users like @avmaster delete those users from their friendslist with the help of friendsorfollow.com. This website shows users who are being followed but do not care to follow back. On Twitter there is a lot of one-way traffic going on, and in contrast to blogs it can be made visible who reads who. The tweet from @avmaster that triggered my attention is;

@artgrrl I follow everybody who follows me…..And who don’t follow back, I trash on monday….. 6:59 PM May 25th from web in reply to artgrrl

When I check my username @artgrrl on this website I discovered 32 users who I follow who do not follow me back, and some of them I though they did follow me back;

I was surprised how easily I can be deceived. I was in doubt wether to unfollow them or try to make them follow me, I have not decided what to do. Then agaian, 102 users follow me and I do not follow them back. When I checked @twesis I found 410 users which I deleted using a script through Greasemonkey, a Firefox plug-in. Lucky for me I did not have to remove more than 400 users by hand and some users I kept following anyway. Most of these users are from the period I had an auto-follow installed which did not automatically unfollow users.

Besided the freedom of who you can follow there is a freedom of speech, the freedom to tweet what you want. Although not all users will like what you have to say and might stop following or even block you. Some tweets can be discriminating while others are just annoying. One user I follow (@JacoKoster) does not like it when users use words that start with tw;

JacoKoster@artgrrl Gaat heen met je twoissants 10:42 AM May 26th from web in reply to artgrrl

On one hand I think it is pretty funny when users start words with tw, especially meetings, but after a while it can be really annoying. But this is an innocent example. What if I become too personal, like I sometimes did. In an article in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant @2525 argues that you have to be careful what to tweet considering the example of Cisco, and that you cannot tweet everything that comes up in your mind, like in real life, but I strongly disagree.[1] There is athing called freedom of speech. Back in the nineties I was a proud member of the Blue Ribbon Campain and thought people should be able to expres themselves online, as in regular life they could not always do so, in some countries people can not even blog what they want, let alone say things out loud in the streets.

In order to change my ranking on the Dutch Twittergids I changed the bio of @twesis and @artgrrl back in February and got great rankings, althoug they are not up to date anymore. In my bio of @artgrrl I wrote that I did not have any tweets since April 3rd, but this month I started tweeting again and by now I am back at full speed. Today I got some inspiration through a new follower who wrote in his bio he is single, why would a user write this in his or her bio? Does it say something about the user or are they looking for a partner on Twitter? As I am single too and I like Twitter experiments I changed my bio of @artgrrl to;

artist, blogger, 1974, coffee addict, single, doing a masters in new media, writing my thesis on Twitter Implications (twesis)

Also this morning I found another site that lists tweeple and is called Tweepguide, this site also has pages full of ranking but as this is an international site I don’t nearly have enough followers to get on any list. Tomorrow I should check the Twittergids Single Top 100 to see what my ranking is (based on my present followers @twesis should get the 3rd place and @artgrrl 13th). But what is the experiment? Over the next few days I should watch if other single people start following me or if I get any messages, or ask people about their bio.

In September 2008 I started to use Twitter and tried to figure out what I could do with it, my first sixteen tweets were about my New Media Theories class and all students used the hashtag #MofM, therefore seven out of these sixteen tweets had this hashtag in them. Also in these first tweets I talked to a friend through @replies about her iphone which continued to be a hot topic ever since. Too bad though that I cannot retrieve my old userpic and background of September 2008 (I tried to use the Wayback machine already). Now about six months later I quit using Twitter. My average lies between three and twenty tweets a day, according to Tweetrush my average used to be seven, but a bit over eight according to tweetstats.

In January I tweeted the most, basically I used twitter to get through the winter, as some kind of hibernation. Maybe it’s locical to tweet more when it’s colder. After getting to know the habits of some user groups on Twitter and discovering that I tweeted things I don’t remember afterwards I became more careful what to tweet and finally quit. A lot of users check the place out and leave, or they get addicted and never leave. I checked the place out and got addicted and quit cold turkey, well, I stopped on March 25 (when I still had nine tweets of which one was in Arabic), I had two other tweets on March 30 and on April 3rd. These last two tweets were not visible in my timeline for some time and then two weeks later showed up.

Not only a Twestival is a great way to meet new tweeple, also tweeting with followers of followers can help to make new connections. I tweet a lot about coffee and had a twitfight last year with a friend about coffee and senseo. I also searched on Twitter for keywords like Nespresso and found the following tweet from @moriesbel;

mm, die Variations van Nespresso zijn echt goed. Geen cheap smaakje, maar echt puur, subliem! Geconfijte gember, mandarijn of caramel. :P :P 4:19 PM Dec 5th, 2008 from web

I replied that I though it’s not done, drinking coffee that came out of a cup, it reminded me of melted cheese in a cup. Then Maurice replied that he thought so too at first but this coffee was really good and he asked me to come and try. Then we tweeted some more about coffee and haiku’s in Dutch and English. It feels a bit weird that we tried to plan a meeting through tweets as all our followers could read them, and lurkers too. But on 10:40 AM Jan 9th Maurice wrote that he would sent his phone number and address through a direct message (one that only I can read). Already on the way I tweeted about the meeting;

about to leave for an IRL Twitter meet & greet for 2 with @moriesbel (yes, we only met on Twitter) 11:27 AM Jan 11th from web

On the actual meeting itself we pokened and drank coffee and tweeted about it, it was a real tweet-up. We also tried the mandarin coffee Maurice tweeted about a month earlier. Then we forgot about the croissants, “we were so busy that we burnt the croissants that @artgrrl brought with her. so then we took the ‘kaiser brötchen’ rolls (a german name that is) and treated ourselves on (or is it ‘to’?) hazelnut spread (Nutella’s), which was mmm”. I also fell in love with his Latte mento, a machine that makes milk foam for a perfect cappuccino, a few days later I bought one online and so did another friend of mine. We also discussed the kitchen and later I got a reply on Twitter with a link to pictures that the kitchen had been modified. On this tweet-up we had discussions about social aspects on Twitter and escaping the limitations of Twitter like customizing your background to add more information, very inspiring like Maurice tweeted;

Twoffeessants-meet with @artgrrl was not only gezellig, but really inspiring and productive as well. 5:05 PM Jan 11th from TwitterFon

On our next tweet-up we had coffee and croissants again and discussions about lurking on Twitter and if this is ok or not. When are people just following, when is it lurking and when is it annoying? Is lurking just reading without ever writing a comment or reply, but then what about readers of a blog? Is the purpose of a (micro)blog writing to be read or to receive comments too? We definitely need new descriptions for words like microblogging and lurking, in my opinion a blog cannot be compared with a newspaper because the function to reply is hard to ignore and easy to use. But a reader is not required to reply.