A friends thoughts on Twitter

So today I went to my local Apple store with my friend Rosie because her iPhone had gotten the white screen of death and we needed to get it replaced. While hanging out we started talking about Twitter. I was very interested to hear about her experiences with twitter. She has had an account for a while but only started using it regularly this May. She said she started twittering during finals week because she just wanted to tell everyone everything and then she remembered that she could do that with twitter.

She told me that she felt like she didn’t think she was really using it correctly. I told her that there really isn’t a “correct” way to use twitter, but I was curious as to what made her think that.

She had some really interesting insights about how she uses twitter and ways she would like to see it be improved. These were things that I had not really heard from a lot of users or really from the general tech community so I thought I would share them with you all.

The first thing that she felt was missing was a facebook type of “wall-to-wall” view, for your conversations back and forth with one person. I know that there are some apps that do this but Rosie mainly uses the main twitter web page when she is at a computer and twitterific on her iPhone. She would like these features to be built into the main twitter site.
However you can use search.twitter.com/advanced to search for conversations between specific people.

Advanced Twitter Search

She also was really wishing that she could see her list of followers/following in alphabetical order. This was something I never felt the need for but I was really wondering if other people might find this helpful as well.

Rosie also became frustrated that she could not just DM anyone. She wants to be able to have a private conversation with anyone, no matter who is following who. She said that it was kind of strange that you might be able to have a one-way DM conversation if you were DM-ing one of your followers who then could not DM you back because you were not following them.

Her last insight was that she felt that the interface and general feel of twitter was a little childish. She couldn’t really explain why she felt that way, but I thought it was interesting none the less.

If you want to follow her she is @rosesness on twitter.

I would love to hear your thoughts on her thoughts.

why create a new account

So yesterday when I decided to start selling Avon as a part of a Social Media experiment my first thought was to create new accounts. I made a new twitter account, and I started this blog to document my online social life as an Avon representative.

But today I was thinking about creating new accounts, are you alienating your community who might want to know what you are doing, but might not know to follow that new account, or might not want to?

I have a personal twitter account @sarahcooley, and I use it for everything. My show has a separate twitter account, @whatsitallabout, but I think that makes sense. Should I just use @sarahcooley to talk about selling Avon, since I already have a community there? or would that upset my followers? After all, it is something that I am doing, and by following me, they are saying that they want to know about that.

Just some thoughts…I would love to hear yours.