So many people seem confused about what Twitter really is and what it is good for. First, let’s clearly disabuse anyone of thinking Twitter is just like Facebook status updates. It is not that. Facebook status updates are more personal in nature and tend to answer the question “What are you doing now?” Tweets on the other hand answer the question,”What have you learned

Now let’s compare Twitter to an RSS feed. You can sit in your RSS reader (usually a browser or an email client) and the updates come to you,, which is great for blogs and news sites you are already aware of and trust.  

Then there are the sites that are full of information you never knew you were dying to know about.. So how can you possibly know about all the cool content you could know about? The answer:  find someone you trust, who spends their time discovering and reporting on things you want to learn about and follow their every move. They effectively become a human RSS feed for tons of information you would never find out about otherwise. Enter: Twitter.  

Eventually the vast majority of users will realize that Twitter is a personal promotional tool (I promote my content and I also promote what I find interesting elsewhere ), it will become more and more valuable,  providing you with the “Wisdom of Crowds” to get recommendations for what you should spend your time looking at. Once that happens, tools that aggregate the best Tweets from the best Tweeters on a specific subject will become the most important way to deal with not just Tweets, but entire conversations over multiple platforms including email, chats, texts and every other form of electronic communication. Twitter is another step in the process as we try to figure out how to deal with the complexity of so much input of information in our daily lives.

• 4 email accounts
• 2 calendars
• 4 instant messenger accounts
• 1 VoIP (Skype) account
• 2 phones for voice calls (land, mobile)
• 2 voicemail boxes
• 1 text message device (my phone)
• 3 social networking sites that have inboxes
• 2 blogs I write regularly and get comments on
• 2 blogs I read regularly and make comments on
  I also get faxes in my inbox a few times per month

That adds up to 23 different forms of communication using different clients or devices for almost every one. I know people who use more. Many Millennials use more because they are using Twitter and many more social networks than I do.

A lot of people are noticing that this is amping up the complexity and stress in our lives when electronic communication was supposed to ease the stress and improve our lives.

Dr. Thomas Jackson at Loughborough University in the UK studies this intently. He sees email becoming as addictive as slot machines with employees now spending up to half a day in their inboxes. That costs companies billions according to Jackson. Dr. Jackson has also found that its not just that email and how many messages we get that wastes a lot of our time everyday. But it is also this switching from what we were doing to one client and then to another and another just to communicate. After all, communicating is what we humans seem to live for as evidenced by the people who seem unable to drive without a phone pasted to their ears. He found that it takes on average 64 seconds for a human to stop what they were doing and set themselves on a new task using a new application (or client). It takes that same 64 seconds to switch back to what they were doing after checking email or instant messenger or a text message. That is a lot of time wasting especially if you have many clients all of which are ringing, dinging and buzzing as they have messages for you all day long. But there is more to it than that. There is also the added load on us of having to organize important messages in multiple places. Suppose you are in a good meaty email dialog with someone but it heats up more and you both switch to instant messenger to finish things off. Later, could you easily find all that communications? Maybe, but not in one place.

What about confidentiality? Do all those people using Gmail (and I have to admit this statement applies to me sadly) realize that the philosophy “there are so many billions of email messages going through those servers no one will notice my solitary little message” is just as silly as it sounds? Even I have sent very important and very confidential attachments completely in the open through those servers hoping no one stops to notice.  By the way, this is why to communicate with my doctor she requires me to log in to her site with a password and communicate securely using her server exclusively (oh that makes one more client to add to paragraph 1 above!). Why hasn’t encryption of messages taken off? Long topic we will also discuss here. But this has to apply not just to email but to chats, and most especially to your social networking content as well. So private / confidential communication and very tight control over your profile information is my hot button #2.

Now we get to control over how people communicate with you. Why should the caller decide what modality I must use to receive their communication? We as the callee have only the tinniest of control over this as in when we screen the caller on our phone’s Caller ID display and decide not to answer. But I’d rather have a lot more control than that. So this idea of callee control over communication modality will officially be my hot button #3.

My email system and I am sure yours too, is great about letting me sort my Inbox and other folders by any column heading I wish. So that lets me see all the messages From someone or To someone or by Subject and so forth. Some are pretty good with “threads” of communication and show me all the messages related to a certain subject. But none of the major email clients I know of realizes that when I am communicating it’s usually more important to know who than what (i.e. subject) and I need not just to see the messages from someone to me but I want to see *all* communication I have had with that person at the same time in the same place. I would call that relationship-centric which is what communication is all about isn’t it? When I communicate with someone it’s because I have a relationship of some sort with them. And by the way, what if I have had a good dialog with someone via email and then we have a particularly hot conclusion to this dialog via IM. How easy is it for me to see *all* the communication with that person in one place regardless of the modality we chose for each particular conversation? That goes back to hot button #1. There is a lot more to this idea of relationship-centric which we will get into in this blog over time. But suffice it to say relationship-centric communication is my hot button #4.

I have saved perhaps the most annoying thing for last: the sorry state of social networking today. Sure I was a very early user of LinkedIn back when it started in 2003 because it swept through the high tech professional demographic like a Santa Ana wind when it first came out. About the same time, to keep everyone informed of any changes to my contact info, I like everyone I knew also started using Plaxo (which was never thought of as a social networking site until very recently). During those early years, my kids were in high school and then college. First they were diehard IM users and would be on it for hours per day. They communicated directly with people as you would expect but they used their away messages as a broadcast medium. My son would put little dirty ditties up there and my daughter would say things like “in the shower, leave one”. Once in college they like all their friends just about dropped IM like a hot potato as Facebook came on strong when it was limited to only people with a .edu email address (had to be a college student). Now they were on Facebook constantly. IM worked in high school because they all had the same schedule so when one kid was free to IM they were pretty sure the person they wanted to talk to was too. In college this rule was broken and Facebook was a better medium especially because by now, digital photography had gotten mainstream and sharing photos (especially, it seemed, of them doing drinking stunts) was the thing. When Facebook opened up to the world, I got on to make sure I as someone starting companies for this demographic, knew what it was really like. My kids at first didn’t even want to friend me as I was an unwanted interloper to them. I was not the only unwanted interloper. It is amazing to me how they have turned against Facebook. They say it is getting creepy, too complicated, too chatty, and too commercial. They all know friends who had things up on their site that hurt them while applying for a job. Meanwhile, LinkedIn is a good on-line resume but I do not know any of my peers who have gotten more than that out of it. So what is my point? I think people want both more and less out of social networks. I think they want more value and less noise. They want more control over who sees what. They want more ability to build a powerful resource of contacts because everyone getting into the workforce or moving within the workforce realizes who you know really helps in those transitions. But that is not what these social networks are offering. So my hot button #5 is about how to get social networking back to its core value of helping people network.

Stay tuned and we will get to each of these hot buttons over time. I hope readers find this blog interesting.