Vocino Labs

I’ve just returned from the Palm Beach County Tweetup. For those of you that don’t know, a Tweetup is basically a flashmob of Twitter users in a particular geographic area coming together to talk about… Twitter. Yes, also to drink.

The nice thing is the conversation usually evolves away from Twitter into other interesting topics. I met a lot of great, nice, intelligent people there and only one certified social media douchebag. Out of about 35-40 people, this is a pretty great ratio. However, the subject of social media douchebaggery was still on my mind since I had a few conversations about it and other Twitter noise or spam issues while there.

The best possible outcome for a social service like Twitter is for users to create their own environments and, even better, extend them to the real world in order to make lasting connections with like-minded people. That’s why I think the Tweetup trend is pretty great. The other part is spontaneous “Is anyone else here?” type meetings. Both of these require a certain threshold of userbase in order to function properly and to be viable. It also requires a critical mass in order to draw attention for other potential users to get involved which in-turn makes those functions more viable—somewhat of a chicken and egg scenario there.

When I first joined Twitter, these abilities just weren’t there. That’s simply because there weren’t enough people using the service in order to even consider asking the void “Is anyone also at this Starbucks right now?” That was unheard of.

Unfortunately, this delicate sweet spot of just-massive-enoughness is fleeting. There’s a bell curve with talking to a void on one end and talking to robots (or social media douchebags) on the other.

Twitter is on the other side.

Some might say it has jumped the shark. We already know it’s apparently not so popular with the kiddies. You can still operate Twitter in a valuable way if you choose to. If you don’t follow everyone. If you don’t just spam out shit all day long. If you use it to actually connect with valuable people or get quick customer service from great companies.

I’ll continue to do my best. Block the spammers and value my little Twitter stream until it dies.