Posted by Sundi Hayes in Disclaimer: There are as many definitions of what a group is as there are twitter users! I think my definition of a group is pretty clear here. I’m not talking about people attending a conference who might want to meet up for the first time and have drinks. I’m talking about people who already have some type of a relationship or connection developed and need to communicate about a common topic amongst themselves. That being said, roll with me…
I’m in a group of Virtual Assistants who met and found common ground in the desire to build our business by reading Get Clients Now. While working through the book we utilized Skype to talk real time and Twitter to send out reminders or mini-celebrations when we hit daily goals.
Skype worked great!
Twitter, not so much.
With a group of 6 any message I sent through Tweetdeck to all the members ate up 83 characters of my message. I thought it was hard to express my extroverted self in 140 characters. Fifty-seven characters was horrible! We switched to a hash tag but not everyone was using Tweetdeck and not all of us ran a column for it consistently. Messages were getting missed and some of the luster was fading.
Then I discovered how to set up groups on Twitter. If you open an account, lock the updates, follow all the members and they reciprocate, you have a group. The system seemed pretty slick initially.
To send a confirmation for the next call a member sends a direct message to the group account. The original message is reworked into a message from the sender and flows into the main Twitter stream to be viewed by only members of the group (since the updates are private).
Here is an example of the message I’d send from Tweetdeck:
d GCN0509 Can we move the call later by 1/2 hour tonight?
Private message appearing in the Twitter stream:
Sundi_MOZ: Can we move the call later by 1/2 hour tonight?
It works pretty sweet! In theory.
With about a thousand folks in my Twitter stream the probability that I’ll see any one message is pretty small – even if the message was intended for me. Almost like an @ message where the sender left off the intended recipient after the @. After a couple of weeks the members stopped using the group account entirely because the response rate was so low.
What we really need is for Twitter to fix the group thing! All over the net you’ll find conversations about what people think Twitter groups should be. Represented opinions are as diverse as the colors in the rainbow. People want geography built in. People want levels of privacy. People want no levels of privacy and for Twitter to “learn” what groups apply when. Seriously? Won’t this almost kill the reason why MOST people love Twitter? Here I thought simple was the rule and if you wanted to make it complicated, or even hyper-complicated, there was a Twitter app out there to help you do that.
How can Twitter fix groups as they are currently known? The most simple way possible!
When I send a message to my group I want to know that everyone is going to get an equal opportunity to see it and respond. That means the message needs to go out from the group account as an @ or a DM to every member. Simple.
Do you have a suggestion for how Twitter can fix groups?
Nibbling away -
Sundi
You hit that nail on the head Sundi. It sounded so simple and sweet when you set up our GCN group but then we realized it didn’t work the way we thought.
Agree totally with your definition and the fix. Will Twitter hear us? Let’s hope.
I think we will have to wait a long time for private Twitter groups. Twitter’s strength is in its fundamentally public nature. Is it sufficient for what you want to do to have public groups where only the members control who gets to be a new member?
Thanks for stopping by Adam!
I can see now how it might seem that the privacy level is important to me. It doesn’t matter to me that the Twitterverse knows we delay or call by a half hour of a day even!
The value I put into Twitter having groups is that it tells specific people my message. It just happens that the private setting is what makes the group feature function correctly in the current design.
I don’t even care about having control over who joins. If Joe in Phoenix wants to know that Lisa in Chicago hit her GCN goal for the day I’m sure it would be fine with all of us in the group! The only difference between Joe and the rest of the group is that we were holding her accountable (in a supportive way) and he might not get the full impact of the achievement.
Most social sites have some level of approval set up; however, I don’t see that as a requirement or a roadblock to the minor change I’m suggesting.
If Twitter’s strength is in its public nature then I’m curious why there are direct messages?
I think that having the ability to filter by user-defined groups would be a fantastic addition to Twitter’s web interface. I’ve got really no clue how they would do that, but it would be a good idea – because if it stemmed from Twitter directly, it would translate (theoretically) into whatever third-party software each person uses to access their Twitter account.
I’m interested to see where this goes.
Rachael´s last blog ..In Which I Learn To Delegate
Well said Sundi! I am one who sometimes missed the group messages because they got lost in my stream. Even though I use TweetDeck and could set up another column for these, I’ve got so many columns going already I have to scroll over to see them all. I’d still likely get messages late.
I never saw this as a privacy issue for our Get Clients Now group. For me it was a handy way to send a message to everyone in the groups without having to type it multiple times or use up the majority of characters on who it went to.
Let’s hope the good people at Twitter can help with this!
Gladys´s last blog ..Blog Tour – So You Want To Be A Work-At-Home Mom