Jul
13
Best laid plans
Filed Under Tech(nique) | 5 Comments
Well I tried my twitter experiment, and it failed.
I planned about 30 tweets, but tweet later locked up and blurted them out multiple times - meaning my poor followers were inundated with repeated messages. Not something that happened on the test run!
Friends don’t let friends tweet later
Lucky for me most of my twitter followers are still there this morning, probably because I pre-warned them of what I was doing so they took it in the spirit of the exercise.
If I hadn’t then the long term prognosis would have been terminal.
I think some may be gone permanently, probably because they didn’t see / read the warnings. The experiment is something I mentioned frequently in tweets, but those with really active twitter accounts may have missed the messages.
Making new friends
An interesting aside - all that spammy activity attracted new spammy followers:
All young women with numbers in their names who want me to click on links: hmmmm, wonder what that could be about *block*.
Conclusions?
The downside is I can’t really say the experiment failed as the tools let me down.
Tweet Later may be a useful service when running correctly, but I wouldn’t trust it again. My problem was exacerbated by the fact that I couldn’t respond to the problem: the whole point of Tweet Later is to offer tweeting when you can’t get to use Twitter normally (like when your juggling a hundred things, running between stages and trying to diffuse disputes about noise between competing artists).
If it then creates a problem, as it did for me, then the user is unaware of what is going on.
I wrote earlier that I don’t really get the idea of Tweet Later, except for an automated reminder service.
It let me down at the one application I could find for it: so what is it for?
Be good to get some more feedback on this: what do people think?