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?
Jun
21
So here’s my brief:
Sutton Festival of Arts is happening next month, over a wide range of locations and with a tonne of shows, workshops and exhibitions. We’ve printed programmes, we’ve got a website, but I’m still worried about how people will navigate the day. So what we need is a new type of programme.
And here’s the solution:
I’m going to start using a twitter account for the festival. We can use this twitter account in the normal way, to put some news out there, generate some interest, and hook up with some interesting people. But we can also use it to keep people up to date on the day: “Shoot Panda?! are performing at the library”.
I know I’m going to be pretty busy that day, and I’m the only person on the committee or the volunteer crew that is bothered about this (geek? - probably). So I’ve hooked up Tweet Later to this account.
The software allows me to schedule up to 60 tweets per hour (a spam avoidance mechanism apparently). Set up of an account and linking it with twitter was simplicity itself. Total set up time of about 5 minutes, and that included sipping on coffee.
Does if work?
Hell yes. Better than I hoped. But with some odd quirks.
I set up a tweet later every minute for about 15-minutes. I expected each tweet to be a few minutes later than scheduled, and I’d have to build that into the programme tweets. SMS tweets came through on the dot every time.
The odd thing? My twitter feed on screen lagged behind the SMS by a minute or so. Not a problem with tweet later though, just a twitter quirk I’d never spotted (because I hadn’t been looking).
Of course just because this worked on a quiet Saturday morning, doesn’t mean it will definitely work when I need it to on July 12th. There are three possible bottlenecks which may reduce the usefulness of this service: twitter, tweet later, mobile phone networks. If either of the three are busy, the messages may not get through. Still, it’s got to be worth a shot.
Tweeting Later? Are you mad? Nope, it makes sense.
Tweet Later seems to be the antithesis of what twitter is about. It advertises itself as follows:
“Stuck on an aircraft? Back to back meetings? Taking vacation? Running errands? Playing with the kids? Keep your Twitter stream ticking over with new tweets even when you’re not in front of your computer.”
My understanding of twitter is that it’s about immediacy, not pre-determination. But I think I’ve found a place for Tweet Later: it’s killer app. The festival is largely pre-determined so I can use Tweet Later to build the backbone of the communication for the day. I can then use my mobile in the field to update and finesse that structure as we go. Sounds good to me. I’m off to schedule some tweets.