“Commandment Nine: Thou shalt not retweet compliments This phenomenon I really don’t understand, especially not when it’s my British friends doing it (Americans get their usual shamelessness pass). So someone complimented you or your business on Twitter? Great! I’m pleased for you, I really am. But RT’ing the compliment? You might as well stand in my garden and masturbate onto a photo of yourself. I’m sure it gets you off, but I don’t need to see it.”

Not safe for work: I’m like Moses, but for Twitter – Paul Carr lays down his 10 Commandments | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Local MP Sion Simon (finding his way on Twitter) ReTweeted a (vaguely amusing, but not ear-shatteringly funny) witicism:

“I’m not saying Susan Boyle caused swine flu. I’m just saying that nobody had swine flu, she sang on TV, people got swine flu.”

It’s about Now Show standard, topical, smirk-worthy rather than a belly-laugh — what it isn’t is offensive in any way.

Two unrelated comments to make:

• Firstly how desperate is the SEO’d headline there — pick the two most talked about things online over the last week and then add MP and Twitter — would the story have merited coverage if it didn’t give the opportunity to combine all those?

• And secondly, what do papers bother with this shite?

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Which obviously resonated with podnosh, who retweeted (taking out the bit about Morrissey — reasons of space, or reasons of musical taste, I dunno):

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But by the time it had made Twitter search:

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There was a subtle difference there, this tweeter had a problem with Nicky Campbell that I hadn’t articulated in my original, but it’s attributed to me there. There’s a subtle difference between “what cock” and “what a cock” — enough to cause libel-ish issues if I was famous enough for people to leap on to criticise. Had I thought “better” of my original statement and deleted it, only the retweets would have been on the web — how would I prove my innocence in “what-a-cock-gate”?

Most often practised in dwellings, the Tea Fu master will use psychological tricksterism as tea always tastes better when someone else has made it. The true master will also attempt workplace Tea Fu.

I’ve made a little twitterbot (using twitter search, yahoo pipes and twitterfeed) that searches for people who tweet “X has made me a cup of tea” or “X has made me a cuppa” and then tweets them back in the style:

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It has its own mini-site, where you can share your Tea Fu tips and tales.

Anyone working in advertising is welcome to pay me loads to either take the idea and build a TV campaign around it, or to build a viral site where people can record their office-based Tea Fu.

Twestival in Birmingham was so packed with fun that I don’t think anyone got time to do the quiz that I’d prepared. So, I present it here – no entry free but you can still donate to Charity:Water if you like.

It’s here as a PDF: twestival quiz

Why not have a collective ‘go’ in the comments? I’ll post the answers up sometime soon.

It’s something that I tried to define on the B’ham Post blog, about why online social networks fall apart after a certain stage – I posited that it was something to do with people reaching their Dunbar number and the social pressure that comes from ostentatiously limiting your network:

“There’s a number called Dunbar’s Number (it’s cited to be around 150, but isn’t strictly defined) and it reflects the limit of the number of people with which you can maintain social relationships. Online you might find this number slightly higher, you may just be good at “maintaining social relationships” or you may be able to “keep in touch” with more people if many of them don’t spend much time on that particular social network. But eventually your network size will strain at Dunbar’s Number and you’ll have to start making decisions:

“Do I accept that friend request? I don’t really know them well, but don’t like to offend them by ignoring it.” “Can I delete the contact that I don’t talk to as much any more? But they’ll know I have, I can’t just casually drift off.” “I don’t really like that bloke from work, but it’ll be awkward if I don’t accept him as a friend.”

And the easiest decision is not to use that social network, no more complicated bits of social etiquette to fall over. So people are off to BookFace or MyThing or whatever is next.”

But, while I think that’s true, and it’s certainly something I’ve considered when deciding whether or not to follow people on Twitter, it’s not the whole story.

I’d like to say at this point that I’m not one hundred percent sure that Twitter is what we call a Social Network, due to its asynchronous following/friend structure — it’s more some kind of “always on” ambient messaging network, a hybrid of online forums, email and text messaging. But, by the by, it does support networks, so we see network effects like those I described above.

It seems churlish to moan about adoption of a tool that we’ve all been heaping praise and overwrought social analysis on, but it does create problems. Problems that will have to be dealt with, if we’re to get over the hump:

• The “mainstream” explosion creates a great deal of noise, whether it’s your contacts talking about @stephenfry, to @stephenfry or sending messages that contain the word @stephenfry in the hope that he’ll notice (or just for fun). Filtering mechanisms just can’t filter this stuff reliably — what you’re in the mood for at any one time varies too much.
• Use by the “offline famous” (those bringing in existing, huge, one-way networks) can lead to the system being overloaded by “broadcasting” — people falling over themselves to re-tweet the messages of the famous. At this point I’d say that the “online famous” can be guilty of this too, but they usually understand the power of it more, and if they still “broadcast” then they’re not worth bothering with.
• Until this point I’ve managed to remove Chris Moyles from my life by not listening to radio one, and quickly making by distaste for him known whenever people mention him to me — they soon learn not to. But can you reasonably do that when the messaging system is built to be so ambient? Not really. I have no influence over people I’d otherwise love to follow.

But can’t you just “not follow” people? No, not really:

• You are driven to follow people to avoid gaps in conversations when you and your contacts aren’t following the same people (due to the way twitter handles @replies)  – explained in depth here.
• There’s also the need to stay “open”, as Pete talks about here - which isn’t easy when you like to be involved.
• The social pressure — I’m already hearding about people being asked in real life “why aren’t you following me on Twitter”.
• There are times when you positively crave the tweets of people, but do not share their views about bigoted DJs, filtering is just not intelligent enough to expunge that — and there exist no real methods for turning people “on and off”.

So stop telling me that I can just ignore changes I’m uncomfortable with to a tool that I’ve spent a lot of time using and building up knowledge with. I’m not suggesting that widespread adoption is a bad thing, just that the tool we’ve been using has no filters — filters that exist more naturally in the real world, and aren’t needed so much in the different messaging systems that “social networks” have provided.

Twitter is different because there isn’t any “other stuff”, no different places for different types of conversation. No interest grouping, no one-to-one spaces, no filters. That’s why, so far it’s worked so well, and why it may trancend “website” and become something more, but it’s also a problem.

Stephen Fry is stuck in a lift. Now will this cause Twitpic as much touble as the plane in a river?
TwitPic – Share photos on twitter

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This was to be the first definition in his “new” media dictionary — and he was asking for contributions. Except that he eventually got cold feet and decided he couldn’t use any in the finished article.

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Which is understandable, I guess, given the current “nowtrage” over anything from Twitter. But at least it’s a step up from people asking if it’s really him (if it wasn’t the skill of the tweeter would make it interesting anyway). But anyway, some of those definitions sent in to him deserve a wider audience — you can sieve through all tweets sent to Mr Brooker here — so here are a few of my favourites.

If you search “RSS to SMS” on Google you find Pingie – which seems to offer the ideal solution. It will send text updates from an RSS feed (and you can get a feed from twitter of @messages by using tweetscan, or your friends timeline from the bottom of your twitter home page).

Unfortunately, Pingie seems to be US texts only — but it also sends email updates if you put an address in,  and fast too.

So — if you can sort Email to SMS you’re laughing. Surfing around I found a page that might offer a solution.

Here goes nothing, here’s how to get your tweets on via text:

• The page on Mutape will work out your UK phone provider’s email to SMS gateway service email address and tell you how to activate it – either online or by a text. For O2, T- Mobile and Orange anyway — For O2 for example it’s your international phone number +447etc@mmail.co.uk.

I’m not sure this is free, but it seems to be – Mutape says :”Most networks provide this service completely free, but some do not. It is advisable to check with your own provider to check this out before using the service heavily. In most cases the cost of the message is covered by standard texting plans (e.g. free texts).” Use at your own risk etc.

• Get the RSS feed URL for the tweets you want – all from twitter.com/home at the bottom, @messages from a search at tweetscan for your twitter ID.
• Pop over to Pingie and set up an alert for the RSS feed and, here’s the cool bit – use the email address you’ve just worked out.

And Bob will perhaps be your uncle. I’ve had both bits of this working separately, I’m going to try both together now…

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