So that you know: I myself believe that Twitter is a new medium because it comprises both mainstream and personal stories…

To be even clearer — Endeca is not and never has been a client of mine. And while I would welcome them as clients in the future, I feel a bit jerked around by past discussions on the subject and am taking no active steps to try to win them over.

http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/12/29/curt-monash-analyzes-the-text-analytics-market/

It would be great if analysts were strictly beholden to the consumers of their analysis didn’t depend on vendors to “pay the mortgage”, as Nick Naylor said in “Thank You for Smoking”. Lynda Moulton from the Gilbane Group recently wrote an interesting post on the subject:

http://gilbane.com/search_blog/2009/01/what_does_an_analyst_do_for_yo.html

In any case, while I am pretty cynical about the analyst space as a whole, Curt is one of the good guys. And I agree with him that “William Strunk” would be a more credible critic if he didn’t hide behind a mask of anonymity.

It is down to the individual to extract the benefit of products and services in the way that they deem fit.

Even though at first glance, I operate a more selective following behavior than Curt does, when one drills down, the explanation is less obvious than at first glance.

Curt is correct to say that the approach I use is more selective and I try to read as much of everyones stream as I can. However, I have a different issue with Tweetdeck, in that it does not retain tweets for a long enough period to read everything, when I get a decent block of time.

I have used Twitter for a shorter time and have invested less time in trying to find people who may have interesting things to say about the industry, interesting things to say, or are just interesting.

I do operate the politeness policy that if someone follows me, I will usually follow them back. This give them the ability to DM me if they so wish.

Over time, this will likely lead to following a large number of folks, but I will deal with that via filtering, or sporadic purges. Although for some reason I would find it difficult to unfollow people, unless they were truly annoying. Maybe it’s an artifact of British politeness.

It is great to be able to connect with people with whom I share something, even if that’s not what we’re discussing. I have no BI folks as neighbours, no BI coffee mornings in the area, in fact, most of them are in a different continent.

Even if there is absolutely no business benefit in interacting with your peers (which there often is, in some form or another) then the social interaction that is lacking in the physical world is bolstered here. With many BI folk working from home, there’s not much opportunity for corridor chat with colleagues and Twitter allows you to vector quickly to those who have their door open, metaphorically – even if it’s not talking shop.

Some might say that very few people would use twitter for this purpose, or I’m doing it wrong, but does it really matter?

The mention of winners and losers in the comments above is at odds with my way of thinking. I have already won, since I’ve had some amusing and enlightening exchanges with people. In order to lose, that simply means a cessation – everyone ignores me or people I like to interact with stop using twitter. The only winners and losers I can see are those that somehow rely on attention for a paycheck. I don’t have to worry about that and I contend that very few really do.

And if you didn’t use a pseudonym — even a cleverly chosen one — to attack my integrity, I might think your comment was legitimate.

Or maybe not. I post customer lists, after all. While not perfectly comprehensive, they put me way ahead in disclosure versus just about any other participant in the industry.

I am not surprised you disagree there should be a bright line. Your entire blog rests on the premise that most people won’t take the time to figure out that most of what you write about relates to the specific vendors that pay you. If you placed asterisks on your web site next to the vendors that pay you or you included an explicit re-statement at the end of each article that mentions a paying vendor then I would think your blog is legitimate. As it is now…I see a paid shill — and it is a shame that blogging has degenerated into that so quickly.

When you say that certain uses of social networking technologies completely defeat “their” purpose, what you (should) really mean is that they defeat certain purposes, or the best possible purposes, or some other modified characterization like that.

A great frustration in my consulting to vendors is that they’ve been intimidated into thinking that if they don’t follow all the rules and customs, they shouldn’t bother with blogs and other social media at all. And that’s just wrong.

CAM

I freely agree with a number of your points. If one “follows” somebody on Twitter it’s usually automatic that one gets their attention once (when they check out your profile after the follow notice). So it’s very tempting to follow people who one thinks or hopes will be interested in what they see of one’s tweetstream, just to get that attention. And of course this can be done in ways that are:

Elegant
Spammy
Egotistical
Nonsensical

and any combination or variant of the above.

There is irony in the way that some Web 2.0 experts are using Twitter like a 1970’s newspaper, or TV commercial. I am already starting to see the affects of their internalized feedback loop in the commonality of their “ideas”:

Chris Brogan: http://tinyurl.com/7p927e
Copyblogger: http://tinyurl.com/8mfzsl

I’m sure if I looked hard enough, I could find another expert purporting “37 ways to…”

Social media is still in its infancy and there will be many winners and losers. I believe the winners, though, will be the ones who use it as a communication tool, not a broadcast tool.