Mile High Pixel

I’ve been hearing a lot about Twitter lately, and while I do use it I don’t always enjoy it (which speaks to a certain level of sadism, but that’s another story altogether).  I do, however, appreciate how aptly named the service is, because when used in a manner which some people seem to call “effectively” it really does end up like a flock of birds all trying to be heard over each other at once, and your real friends get lost in the chatter.

It used to be that people belonged to groups with distinct interests, had a distinct socio-econimic status, and maintained their presence within a distince geographical location.  That geographical distinction was shattered with the advent of the internet, allowing people to broaden their social circles regardless of their place on this earth. The next one to go was the socio-economic distinctions as the cost and accessibility of the internet was scaled down to poorer and more rural areas.

Keeping things sustainable: We’re now at a point where even ones interests are thrown to the wayside in the pursuit of connections and broadening our social circles.  If you could follow over 100k people (and I know some of you already do this) there is an extremely large logistic hurdle to overcome, that being how in the hell do you keep track of that many people?

Photo by SteveGarfield

And even if you do manage to keep up, at what point does it simply become too much? As the flood of tweets reaches an all time high, we begin to worry about the sustainability of knowledge.  According to a guest post on Twitip by Chris Allison, Twitter is slowly losing it’s memory. This is a bad thing for marketers and crowd sourcing specialists as you begin to loose reaction information about product launches and valuable market research data. As of right now Twitter search only goes back 10 days, yet 3 months ago the search went back 28 days. That’s a staggering amount of data loss, especially when you consider that the volume of information that Twitter handles continues to increase.

QualiTweep vs. QuantiTweep: There’s a corporate mindset on the internet that’s hard to avoid, and while I don’t claim to understand the driving forces behind the internet as a demographic, it’s not hard to see the parallels between personal branding and the corporate takeover of civilization as a whole. Personal branding has taken the leap from the local mom & pop shops of the forums and mailing lists to the international corporations of Facebook and Twitter.

For some people Twitter is a popularity contest; trying to get the word out is really all they are interested in and they will follow you back whether you’re a celebrity or a spambot.  For others, however, it’s more of a personal thing; keeping up with a select hundred or so hand picked people whose opinions and tweets they truly value.  These people are the purists.

I used to have an account on an art and photography website, and while I wasn’t exactly the best photographer on the site, I still managed to make a name for myself despite my lack of technical merit. Now that the social media revolution is in full swing the market is bigger than ever and the win-em-all strategy just won’t work any more. Personal branding is now more about striking a fine balance between quantity and quality…