The implications for Twitter’s security are not good. The best way to disable or remove this malware is, as I write this, not yet clear, but I hope to get clarity and update the post linked above accordingly.

• Twouble with Twitters is a hugely popular, slickly executed cartoon video.
• The Twitter Song is a funny song that happens to be better musically than most satirical songs.

But I’m still waiting for a Twitter-related takeoff on “The Trouble With Tribbles” …

• A Google acquisition of Twitter
• Some other kind of relationship built around real-time search

I have three initial thoughts on this:

1. Clearly, in Google’s mission to “organize all the world’s information,” there are several web areas it isn’t yet doing well in, and one of those is microblogs. What’s more, much as in the case of YouTube, it’s hard to see how Google would do that organizing any time soon unless it owned or otherwise was in bed with the leading platform for that kind of content — i.e., Twitter.

2. The YouTube example is apt in another way as well — it’s not clear where the monetization would come from. Google famously doesn’t make much advertising revenue from YouTube. And Twitter is even worse as an advertising platform; sticking ads into the tweetstream would quickly drive users elsewhere, and any other advertising scheme would likely fail because of the broad variety of interfaces — such as various mobile phones — Twitterers use to get at the service.

3. I’ve been suggesting all along that Twitter needs radical user experience enhancements. But when has Google ever made made user experience enhancements to a service? Its core search engine always looks pretty much the same. Ditto GMail. Ditto Blogger. Ditto YouTube.

*Care and feeding of celebrity tweeters. Celebrity tweeting is actually a subject I’ve written and even been interviewed about several times.

As of this writing, the full list is:

Job Title	Location	Department
Operations Engineer	Technical Operations
Operations Engineer – Search	Technical Operations
Product Manager	Product
Product Manager – Platform (Consumer Internet)	Product
Product Manager – Search	Product
UI Designer/Developer	Product
User Experience Designer	Product
Communications Associate (Contract to FTE)	G&A
Founder Associate	G&A
Software Engineer – Business Intelligence	Engineering
Software Engineer – Front-End	Engineering
Software Engineer – Ruby on Rails	Engineering
Software Engineer – Search	Engineering
Software Engineer – Systems	Engineering
Software Engineer – Systems Spam	Engineering
Director, Strategic Partnerships	Business Development
Japan Country Manager	Business Development

Related link

• Twitter’s analytics job opening

Except I couldn’t get the direct message through for a while, because I ran into the Fail Whale.  Nor is that my first recent encounter with same.

If Twitter goes back to being maddeningly unreliable, I will likely go back to living without it.

After multiple weeks with a malfunctioning computer, I am NOT in the mood for even petty problems like this.  Arggh …

Twitter is a communication platform, not a marketing platform, and there’s a subtle difference.

But I’d disagree that there’s a bright line separating the two.  In particular, I think most business blogs serve or should serve as both, in no small part because the areas of marketing and communication overlap heavily. And in my opinion Twitter (microblogging) and ordinary blogging aren’t that far apart.

Earlier this evening I posted praise of the BI expert Twitter community — of which Daniel is indeed a member — even while admitting that unlike other members, I “follow” too many Twitterers to actually keep up with their posts.  Daniel refers to following patterns like mine as an attention Ponzi scheme, on the theory that people are following so many others in the pretense of paying attention to them, hoping to get real attention in return.

The first problem with that clever phrase is that Daniel is misusing the term “Ponzi scheme” to refer to an unrelated type of fraud. More seriously, it seems to assume that the only legitimate use of Twitter — or more precisely of following people on Twitter — is for full community engagement.  I dispute that assumption.  While I don’t follow tweetstreams in real time very often, I do occasionally dip in when I’m in the mood. And when I do, I prune my followee list for my own purposes.

I really wish the Twitter experience could be better filtered, into more manageable groups of people, topics, etc. But I’m not aware of any adequate software that does the job.  (Tweetdeck is horrific, or at least was when I regrettably tried to use it, in that you can’t temporarily close a group without losing all the entries in it forever.) In the mean time, there is a multitude of worthwhile ways to use Twitter.

*In retrospect that was a silly comment, made soon after midnight while humans were generally either partying or asleep. But it’s the set-up for the rest of this post.

Sheer self-indulgence aside — “Happy Birthday To Me!!” — I see something blogworthy in that. Indeed, it reflects the emergence over the past 6 months or so of one particular Twitter community. Takeaways include:

1. The responders weren’t a randomly selected subset from among those of my 1304 Twitter followers online when I tweeted. Every person who responded is an industry analyst, a BI expert, or both.

Yes Virginia, there are some enterprise IT folks on Twitter.

2. Members of the community seem to follow each other’s tweetstreams in their entirety. Many of their tweets are in direct reply to or otherwise inspired by each other. Indeed, based on the timing, I suspect a lot more folks were inspired by Neil Raden’s message to me than by my original post.

3. Unlike me, these other folks seem to keep their followee lists small enough to engage with. 100ish numbers of people followed is not uncommon. By way of contrast, I follow 1682 people, which means that despite considerable care about who I follow, I wind up almost never actually checking what the tweetstream contains. (Instead, I usually just tweet something and react to the @replies.)

I no doubt like the charming Claudia Imhoff at least as well as she likes me. Even so, if there were a group of tweets about her birthday, I might well miss it — especially at first — just because I follow too many people to keep up.   More on that point in another post (coming soon).

4. Twitter is really just another venue for the evolution of an already-extant community. The independent BI analysts tend to travel as a pack anyway, to venues such as TDWI and Teradata Partners conferences, or to local gettogethers they hold in Colorado.

5. But Twitter does help that community evolve. I’ve really been brought into the club via Twitter. For example, the conversations that led to my teaching at the next TDWI Conference grew out of an email from Wayne Eckerson to the effect “Hi. I follow you on Twitter, and generally read your stuff. Can you help with a particular hardcore DBMS technology question I’ve run into?”

6. Twitter connections are useful. Twitter has made it easier for me to have offline conversations with Claudia, Wayne et al. My user-focused consulting services will be much richer for that.

Six months ago I felt that Twitter was dominated by the “new-age” tech folks — search engine optimizers, podcasters, social media consultants, Web 2.0 gurus and the like. But in one particular enterprise area — business intelligence — traditional IT folks are active as well. Perhaps similar ones will emerge in other areas of IT too.

Huh?

At least the whole line of reasoning isn’t as bad as another one I recently discovered on the subject of information overload.

• COMMON outages.
• Temporary disabling of the Replies feature.
• General lessening of the discussion, as other people stay away too.

Back from vacation, I just tried again. My experiences include:

• Continuing unreliability (e.g., visits from the “Fail Whale).
• New forms of unreliability. E.g., I just tried to Follow a new person for the first time in quite a while, and was told that I was “over my limit”. And Twitter seems to recently have banned some heavy, more or less core users.  (Edit:  Here’s another post that’s even clearer about the problem.)
• The same low level of response to my tweets, compared with what I would probably have had some months ago.
• A search function (thanks to the Summize acquisition) that returns the last 50 or so tweets which include the keywords of your choice. Because of the limited number of results, any kind of spam quickly clogs them up. Example — there’s some Twitter account that tweets links to blog posts about database-related topics, and so if you search on DATAllegro you already don’t see my original tweets on the Microsoft/DATAllegro deal. So while search is a nice feature, it’s not a magic potion that cures the other problems.

I don’t see the point of trying to use Twitter right now. Its big virtue is supposed to be ease of use, but with these problems use is actually anything but easy.

1. Reporting on your life. By the way, I had a great first week in Grand Cayman, but now it’s raining heavily, which is a big part of the reason why I’m blogging.  Broadband is slow and my laptop is old, so being online is a bit frustrating, so I’m cutting a few corners in thoroughness.
2. Expressing feelings. That’s pretty inseparable from #1.
3. Bashing those who you feel need bashing. It works, too.
4. Communicating news.
5. Expressing analytical opinions.
6. Promoting your services, opinions, and links.

*More precisely, Hodson was underrating the use cases for a version of Twitter that actually works, but I’ll try to refrain from posting at length again about that problem until I’ve looked into the changes at recent Twitter acquisition Summize.  That said, I think it will take Twitter quite a while, if it ever does, to recover from the terrible loss of momentum due to its lack of scalability.  Certainly my usage has dropped to near zero since the disastrous period in which they disabled the Replies search.