Fine tuning the flow of Twitter data – like drinking beers and talking engines

by Jon Thompson on May 26, 2009

Given that we just launched our own in house Twitter tool  called CipCip which based on the Laconica platform I thought it might be interesting to post this TechCrunch article which was written by Yammer CEO David Sacks.  Yammer is the hosted version of Laconica.  While I think Yammer is a great idea the problem is still one of privacy – you run your data through their servers.  Not ideal, especially not for security sensitive humanitarian aid organizations.

What I think is most interesting is that these opinions come from someone running a corporate microblog so his lessons learned are going to be slightly different from those of your average Twitter user.  His ideas boil down to two basic suggestions:

  1. Let the message sell itself – you shouldn’t have to have to be part of the ReTweet process just facilitate the transfer.  You should be able to push the message without adding an ‘RT’ to the front and that way the sacred 140 wouldn’t be violated.  Not a bad idea but I think the clever ones (like @Mashable) always leave room at the end. Preserving the 140 would let the message be carried further down the line.
  2. Make the follow process easier – include a follow button beneath the image icon in the freshly minted and unmodified ReTweet.

Good ideas all around.  Interesting that we’re now down to fine tuning our Twitter experience as if we were a bunch of guys standing around on a Sunday afternoon with beers in our hands staring down at the Hemi in some badass ’68 ‘Cuda talking about how to tweak the headers.

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