Who cares if you have ten thousand followers on Twitter? How many of them do you think really read what you write? The whole ‘Social Media’ thing should be about real communication, not posturing.

When I read your blog, or follow you on Twitter, or subscribe to your RSS feed, I don’t want to read stuff that you think will impress me. I want to read about you: what you think, what you feel, what gets your attention. That’s what matters — that’s what makes my life more interesting and broadens my horizons. Everything else is just fluff.

Conservative #speaker elected by a parliament with a Labour majority. Good balance.

Until the next election, anyway!

Then this morning, in my ‘mentions’ list (from @erections, of all people):

Conservative #speaker elected by a parliament with a Labour majority. Good balance.

Until the next erection, anyway! (via @jameswilding)

One letter, big difference!

I’m not sure whether this bothers me or not. On the one hand, it’s funny in a laugh behind your hand, ten-year-old schoolboy sort of way. On the other hand, they’ve cited me as saying something I did not say.

Is it OK to intentionally misrepresent other people’s words for fun? If I was a BBC erection election reporter, this is something that could seriously damage my reputation :-)

[ruby]
require ‘magpie’

search = Magpie::Search.new(‘Hello World’)
tweet = search.results.first

# Get the contents of the tweet
tweet.body # => ‘Hello World!’

# Get the publication date + time as a DateTime object
tweet.published_at # => #<DateTime: 1060555/43200,0,2299161>

# Get the name of the tweet’s author
tweet.author.name # => "Mr Foo (mrfoo)"

# Get the author’s Twitter URI
tweet.author.uri # => "http://twitter.com/mrfoo"

# Get the URI for the author’s profile image
tweet.author.image_uri # => "http://example.com/url/for/img.jpg"

# search.results is just an array
authors = search.results.collect { |tweet| tweet.author }
[/ruby]

Extra Search Options

You can specify additional search parameters as a hash of options:

[ruby]
# Provides 100 results limited to tweets in English
Magpie::Search.new(‘Hello World’, :rpp => 100, :lang => ‘en’)
[/ruby]

There’s a list of valid search params on Twitter’s Search API page.

Installing Magpie

The source code for Magpie is available on GitHub, and you can install the gem thus:

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
gem install jameswilding-magpie

Magpie is very much a rough draft so feedback and suggestions for improvement are welcome. If you like it, pass it on!

Don’t tell me that Twitter is all about good karma, bliss and living happily ever after! Everybody knows that everyone is looking for more followers. Period.

Rubbish. The number of followers you have on Twitter doesn’t matter: what matters is the quality of your followers.

If I were a small blogger who wrote about Mac software, and posted links to my blog on Twitter, one of the best things that could happen to me would be to have John Gruber follow my updates and re-tweet them. Even if John Gruber were the only person to follow me, his re-tweets would massively raise my profile in the indie Mac community. Which would be great (if I were an indie Mac blogger).

I’d hazard a guess that a sizable proportion of the mass of people who follow people like Oprah or Stephen Fry (who have 1,342,000 and 542,000 followers respectively) just see the follower status as a badge of honour — “yeah, I love Oprah so I follow her on Twitter”. Whether these people actually pay careful attention to their tweets is another question entirely. The DailySEOBlog actually links to an article which makes the same point: there is probably no direct correlation between the number of followers you have, and the number of people who click links in your tweets.

The race for more followers is basically a popularity contest. When combined with a desire to drive traffic to an external website (blog, sales, viagra, whatever), it reminds me of bad SEO in that it puts too much emphasis on numbers and not enough emphasis on content and findability. What you say is as important as who you say it to, and quality Twitter followers will be the folk who read what you write and pass it on if they value what you have to say — you don’t need thousands of them, just enough to reach an audience. Twitter should be a network based on quality, not dominance of numbers.