It’s just like the movie “Lost in Translation” by auteur Sofia Coppola. Just because you’re in Japan doesn’t make you a part of the community. Just because you can use a service like Michael Streko’s Knowem to landgrab your brand on every social marketing platform out there doesn’t make you a social marketing maven.

Consider the following failpoints in most marketing campaigns:

• Establishing a connection: Just because Facebook or Twitter allows you to either follow someone, or send an invite to become someone’s friend doesn’t mean I can mind read you and fathom your intentions. In his book “The Long Tail”, Chris Anderson talks about moving out of the information age (where facts and knowledge rule the roost), to the age of relevance (where filters and establishing context helps makes the millions of possible relationships and connections make sense). In a world of a million friends (on twitter) (or maybe 5,000 friends on Facebook), being able to establish the context for your relationship is a good starting point. I almost always insert a comment like “met at affiliate summit” or “wickedfire forum” or “we killed orcs together last night” as a social lubricant. On the receivers side, I use these contextual clues to filter friends into different lists/baskets on the social network. And no, “we have a lot of common friends and I thought we should be friends” is a pretty feeble excuse – it’s just like saying “oh well, everyone else is dancing, I’m here alone, so would you like to dance?”.
• Followup/Relationship build: So once you’ve established a connection, why do so many (I estimate 80%) of marketers do nothing – let the lead grow cold and die. It’s entirely a wasted effort in my view. There has to be some follow up, else why bother starting this in the first place. Whether you’re using a Google Docs spreadsheet or Excel, keep records of your interaction. Do you have some type of fixed or informal schedule for making contact? If someone mentions something interesting/relevant, are you taking copious notes – whether it’s the fact that they primarily use PPC as a traffic gen mechanism, or if they like double-chocolate cookie dough ice-cream? Information is an important form of social currency in my book, and if someone has taken time to share something useful with you and you’re not doing anything with it, you might as well throw it down the gutter.
• Social equity: Are you consciously making deposits into your social goodwill bank? More importantly, are you giving before you take? Besides the law of reciprocity (where people who receive feel an innate desire to give back), being labelled a “taker” doesn’t do you or your online rep any favors. That’s one reason why affiliate networks like Market Leverage, Convert2Media, TriFoxMedia, EagleWebAssets are a pleasure to work with – they’re giving – whether information, products or other forms of swag – to establish the relationship on a solid footing. This is in contrast to some other networks which will bug you over email, IM and the value they’re offering is not stated or an unknown. Given the choice between something which is totally random and something that’s relatively certain, it’ll take quite a bit of momentum to jump into the unknown.

Bottomline: If you don’t have a gameplan when it comes to the social media game, and if you’re not focused or invested in what you’re doing, there’s a high probability that your efforts are going to get lost in translation.

The tutorials titled “Link Building for Traffic and Profits” are intended to give new and experienced marketers a number of techniques to boost your site listings in the search engines.

In addition to the new monthly update, there’s a core of foundation materials which will help you optimize your online business for growth.

Check out the: Internet Marketing Cookbook

PS: The linkbuilding module will be available till 30th September and will be replaced with a new module on 1st October.

The new site, Twittorati, looks like a mashup of twitter updates from top Technorati users. The site looks like quite a mess, and with most Internet users looking at twitter updates via clients like TwitterFall, TweetDeck or the web interface, is going to a third-party site relevant to the process?

Affiliate marketers can benefit from some of the trend information the site offers, especially if they’re keen practitioners of demographic profiling.

Looking at some of the hot hashtags:

I’m a little surprised that #MichaelJackson isn’t on that list.

However, topics like #TourDeFrance and #LanceArmstrong could give research opportunities if you’re operating a health/nutrition/weight loss/fitness equipment affiliate site.

While #JayLeno has left the Tonight Show, he’s also involved with his Jay Leno’s Garage site, which could give you an opportunity to target car-related affiliate offers like auto insurance, purchasing new/used cars, auto accessories, etc.

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To make this approach work, however, you need to spend some time figuring out what type of users are tweeting about these topics and more importantly, what would be a good offer fit to that profile (Contrary to what some believe, a $0.50 email/zip offer for a free xBox360 does not appeal to everybody…).

In an episode of TheSpew, a business-related podcast on the GeekCast content network, I had the opportunity to discuss this issue with Missy Ward, Lisa Picarille, Connie Berg and Karen White.

While Missy and Shawn Collins are able to effectively inject personal opinions, together with the business content in their twitter streams and blog posts, some of us who’re focused towards corporate clients who are less familiar with the social media environment and operate on a more “rules-based” corporate culture, seeing someone tweet about how great “Lost” was last night or “Free Cone Day” at Ben and Jerry’s might be perplexed, confused and even get riled up because they can’t figure it out.

If you’re a consultant/trainer, there’s a split between presenting a professional image because that’s what’s expected, compared to having the free rein to say what you really think.

It was insightful hearing Lisa, Karen, Connie and Missy who are all engaged with consulting, share their experience in managing these expectations. And any social marketer can get some food for thought in handling this personal vs professional dichotomy on the social networks.

Check out TheSpew Episode #8 on GeekCast.

• Promotion by mass media: So suddenly, mainstream media like newspapers, TV news and talk shows are jumping on the twitter bandwagon, making it sound like the best thing since sliced bread. Just like they did with the internet back in the mid 1990s.
• Overemphasis on the technology: So there’s been an overemphasis about the tech aspects of twitter, how you can build a following of 100,000 in a few days/weeks, how you’re able to mass msg them updates.
• Celebrity buzz factor: Now everyone knows that the_real_shaq is well, the real shaq. And that other celebrities have their publicist, manager scraping old interviews and sending tweets out on their behalf, saying that the content is sent in the “spirit” of the celebrity. Authenticity/credibility fail.

But the bigger danger of social media, especially the new wave of twitter’s brand of new social media is that it could potentially be tethering you to your computer instead of freeing you.

Remember the crackberry, er, blackberry?

When blackberry addicts had it with them 24-7 and felt compelled to answer an email the moment it was received? Till now, I know of a number of affiliate managers who keep their blackberry at their bedside and wake up to answer emails the moment they come in.

Me, I’m in the process of cancelling my cellphone to be less accessible.

But here’s why I think twitter might be self-destructive – the design of the system is such that it’s like a 24-hour chatroom, with topics being constantly discussed and possibly buried in a matter of hours.

That means if you want to:

• tap the buzz
• be part of the flow
• be part of the conversation

It means you need to tether yourself to the medium, you need to essentially be watching the channel during the 8-12 hours that the service is at its peak.

So it’s like watching TV, except that instead of being constrained by the content being broadcast by the television network, you’re at times held hostage to the content being broadcast by other users.

If anything, that’s the dark side of user-generated content.

You could read twitter updates on a delayed basis, that is hours or days after they were first broadcast and use twitter as a proxy RSS reader, however, it’d limit the conversations you’re able to conduct, unless they’re highly targeted in nature.

If social media, especially with the vanguard led by Twitter is to evolve to its next stage, it’ll require:

• More flexible content management
• Higher quality filtering and relevant updates

for users.

What do you think?

Fact: You are naked on the internet, especially with social media.

The fact that most social networks are open systems and have low barriers to communication and sharing of information means that everything you do within the social matrix is transparent and wholly obvious.

A couple of days ago, I got a Twitter public message from: Jodi Joseph Asaiag with the message:

@andrewwee for IP resources, tools and discussions visit http://www.bpcouncil.com – suggestions welcome at editor@bpcouncil.com

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Sounds like a pleasant and helpful message.

I took a look at her twitter stream:

While it’s nice to receive direct message on twitter (perhaps they’d heard of you by reputation or were recommended by someone), it’s not as kosher to receive form messages, especially since I don’t specifically cover intellectual property or “brand protection”.

The feeling of “being special” wore off after I found that the same message had gone out to lots of other people.

Bottomline: it doesn’t hurt to get to know people before sending them a recommendation (reaction: I don’t know you… why should I care about you or your welcome – the classic WIIFM – “What’s In It for Me” question you’ll need to address to be relevant and build your standing in the community).

Participate in a conversation your intended prospect is having and you’re more likely to pique their interest and they’ll naturally want to follow you back, strike up a conversation, etc.

If all you’re doing is blatantly self-promoting on the social networks, you’ll come across as a fairly shallow person – more concerned with selling books, courses and DVDs than having conversations.

If you brought that attitude into the dating scene, you’d be pretty lonely on Friday night, so why bring that same karma into the social network.

On a positive note, it’s encouraging to see Jodi adapt her use of twitter in recent days to be more conversational in nature, with conversations and retweets populating her twitter stream.

Being naked does have its priviledges.

So in recent weeks, there’s been a spate of discussion about “Twitter Snobs” – twitter users who don’t follow many people back. Maybe following 200 people and have 20,000 follow them.

Todd Friesen AKA Oilman was analysing how he could get into SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin’s twitter cliche. Rand  follows 11 twitter uses and has about 5,200 followers.

Likewise, other bloggers have been pontificating why it’s bad to be a twitter snob and how you should fix it (follow more of them back, make friends, etc). See the references here, here and here.

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So where do I stand?

I follow 217 users and have 1,374 followers. Or about a 15% follower rate.

Which is closer to about 12-13%, since I have a number of fake twitter profiles among my followers.

Here is where I think it’s good to be a snob – I read every update each of the people I’m following

As my twitter profile page says “If I follow you, I read every update”

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It’s just like the traffic generation game, although quality (raw numbers) is good, I still focus on quality (lead generation/traffic quality) over quantity any day of the week (or month).

Assuming you’re in this business to do more than just generate eyeballs and plan to convert or monetize them, I’d say quality is darn important.

And there’s a difference between a snob (someone who’s selective and realistic about who they follow) versus someone who is just out to be a “faux twitter rockstar”, gathering a following of 100,000 and just seeing everyone as just another number.

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There’s a difference between being a participatory and non-participatory member of twitter.

You participate when you use DMs (direct messages), @user (to reply to a specific person, while everyone can read your twitter stream) and selectively RT (retweet) and broadcast/syndicate quality content.

As the folks at Bruce Clay note: you could go the Guy Kawasaki route and use twitter as a broadcast medium – funnelling traffic to your own site (in this case Alltop) and not responding to replies or messages, that’s your perogrative.

It shortchanges the social media channel in my opinion and relegates Twitter to being in the position of just a digital signboard in the middle of the virtual deserts, when it could be used as a channel of online conversation.

And ultimately, the best customers are the ones who feel they are appreciated.

So I’ll keep my twitter snob hat on my head, until it isn’t working for me anymore.

Oh yes, and you can join my followers at http://twitter.com/andrewwee.

[This is a follow up to: Blackhole SEO: Has Googleâ€s Hegemony Spilled into Twitter?]

So the sticking point in recent days (originating from discussions last year) was why Twitter nofollows links from your profile page and your tweets.

Is it because you could be potentially linking to “bad neighborhoods”? Or social spamming links like what some marketers have been doing on MySpace, Squidoo and HubPages and potentially Google Knol?

Here is the thing: the social space and social networks in particular will need some degree of human intervention/curation. That’s why Squidoo has a staff of moderators/volunteers to review lenses, article directories have human editors. The best content review algorithmn still has a couple of years to catch up with user-generated content.

So some human intervention is needed to review content.

And if users are spending 1-2 hours each day on sites like Digg, Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, shouldn’t they gain some outbound link benefit from their efforts? Your users are building a big ball of indexable content that appears in the SEs and brings customers to your social network.

Granted, there will be organic clickthrough on resource links, especially if you post great content, but I don’t understand why the nofollows are there.

Argument #1: Prevent links to bad neighborhood which could deteriorate the originating site’s authority status. -> evolving rules-based content filters + spidering destination sites + some manual review will address this.

Argument #2: Prevent PR leakage – so why aren’t you nofollowing links to Amazon Web Services? If you’re paying AWS and not users, shouldn’t you no-follow AWS and follow users?

Argument #3: Want to build up authority status and PR by keeping PR circulating with the network, using nofollows/redirects to other sites, instead of direct links and minimizing/eliminating leakage. Which is probably the worst un-social message that you’re sending out, especially in a social network context.

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Does anyone see the irony in writing a review about a new product or service then pointing to an internal page? Am I the only one who see an overall positive review being undermined by a “but I don’t trust you enough to link direct to you”.

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So it seems like there is some old school thinking when it comes to DoFollowing and NoFollowing.

And if Web 2’s big boys become the “Man” where the priority is on maxing out the analytics/stats to boost your branding/visibility/ad rates, it’s just a matter of time before users head over to another hub where users and content are a priority.

Have the forces of blackhole SEO spread beyond the reaches of Wikipedia and eBay to dig it’s claws into Twitter, as Sugarrae has asserted?

Though Rae mentioned the issue last September, SEO specialist Todd Malicoat AKA Stuntdubl tweeted about it yesterday, together with some choice thoughts:

i mean – do you really believe that twitter links are passing NO credibility, NO juice, NO nothing…?? just like wikipedia ….riiiiiiight.

maybe implement a sandbox for new users
certain threshhold until they are trusted enough to get into a non-robots.txt directory

why not utilize robots.txt solution…instead of nofollow?
i guess nofollow in general just gets me riled up and pissed off

What would happen if twitter got rid of the nofollow on all links? How would it affect the web?

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So why’re we revisiting this issue?

Blackhole SEO is where an inherently social site like eBay or Twitter decides to shut it’s doors and stick “nofollow” tags to outgoing links. So in SEO speak, you won’t get any “link juice” or benefit to your Google PageRank from the PR you’ve built at the site.

Taking a survey, Twitter profile pages (the page that is twitter.com/[your username]) does garner pagerank over time.

A rough survey with either the Google toolbar or the search status firefox plugin yields:

Google PageRank (PR) 4

• Ian Fernando
• Miles Baker

PR 5

• Zac Johnson
• Oilman
• Shawn Collins
• Joel Comm
• Wil Reynolds
• Andrew Wee (me)
• Todd Malicoat
• Reg Saddler AKA Zaibatsu

PR 6

• Darren Rowse AKA ProBlogger
• Michael Gray AKA Graywolf
• Sam Harrelson
• Guy Kawasaki
• Jim Kukral

PR 7

• Chris Brogan
• Barack Obama

PR 8

• Twitter Home page

How do these profile pages build up PR?

It’s unlikely that many twitter users would link build to their user profile, especially since Twitter resides on a public network (ie you don’t own this piece of virtual turf). So it’s likely that these could be links might have resulted from links pointing to your profile page from other twitter users’ profiles, or high authority blogs including blogroll or blog post links to your twitter profile, etc.

If the weight of inbound links is high enough, your twitter profile will earn pagerank. If that’s the case, labelling all outgoing links from your twitter page with the “nofollow” basically tells Google (whom “nofollow” most clearly influences) that the content you’re pointing at does not merit much weight/authority/value…

So given that a PR 5 backlink or 2-way link would be beneficial, the “nofollow” tag may put a downer on twitter users perception of their value to the community, especially since the “blackhole” structure favors twitters own efforts to increase its pagerank.

Granted, there may be some logic in preventing spammers from sqeezing twitter for link juice, but a blanket “nofollow” on links within tweets and on the user profile page (use “view source” to verify the nofollow flag), puts a dampener on things.

As Todd mentions, this blanket approach could be remedied by either a temporary sandbox/holding area for new accounts, or handled via a robots.txt file.

If sites like Squidoo can be effectively managed, and pass link juice to external sites, couldn’t twitter do the same with a little additional intelligence?

If users are spending 1-2 hours each day on your site, why this continued distrust of sites that users are linking to?

If users pointing to poor quality content is an issue, couldn’t the whiz kids at Twitter use some suitable metric to filter the social scammers out?

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Followup post: “DoFollow or NoFollow: The I Can Has Backlink Dilemma“

Here is the long answer:

Social media (I would consider this as “blogging and the other stuff that goes with it”) is more than just a tool in my business. Up till now, it is the foundation of my business.

If HTML websites are billboards filled with information waiting for people to stumble upon them and read them, then blogs are like aggressive ticket scalpers running up to you and shouting in-your-face, in a direct manner. (this is a good thing).

And if you’re new to the social traffic, social networking game, here are some pointers:

• Go out and try everything: The best and worst part of social marketing is that it’s usually free to sign up and participate in. (Although if you forget to factor in the value of your time invested, you could be losing out in a great deal of opportunity cost). Heard about LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, Plurk, FriendFeed, Friendster, Orkut, Plurk, Hi5, Flickr, Craigslist, YouTube, Twitter? Why not sign up for an account. If you’re concerned about it (and you probably should be), make sure you register your personal name, your business, your brand, and get your related domain or account name before someone else does. Sure, you can go after “social network domain/account name squatters” after the fact, but it’s going to take time and resources to do that, so why not spare yourself the trouble now.
• Learn to specialize: I don’t think it’s worth being a “jack-of-all-trades” and spread yourself across all the social networks and have merely superficial relationships with the people in those communities. Instead, I’d suggest focusing on specializing in one or two social networks and “embedding” yourself in them. Learn the social rituals, get to know the influencers, build YOUR own social influence within those circles. Some wannabe “gurus” would have you believe that your social influence is dictated by the number of followers or friends you have. In my opinion, that is utter nonsense and is at best a simpleton’s scare tactic. Just like wine, it’s quality than counts, not quantity.
• Stay away from the Dark Side: Yes, the medium is a free one, but does that mean you should keep taking away from it (see: How NOT to be a tool on Twitter and How NOT to be a tool on Twitter part 2)? Believe or not, there’s a better course of action, that’s to build your goodwill bank.

Being “successful” with your social marketing efforts has a lot to do with your social influence and ability to shape opinions and behavior. And that’s going to take more than just a simple follower count to resolve.

how not to be a tool on twitter

As a marketer, social networks or web 2.0 networks and services give you an opportunity to reach out to potential customers at significantly lower costs compared to search engine optimization or paid advertising.

In my opinion there’s greater finesse involved, because if there are another 100 marketers using the same channel to reach out the the person, you have to fight to gain the person’s attention, even as they are being courted by 100 other suitors.

So the $64,000 question is how do you get someone’s attention without becoming annoying.

Can you painlessly win the social media love dance, without getting your heart (and sales conversion) broken?

Here’s an example of what I mean:

My facebook “friend add” request queue currently numbers in the 450+ range.

How do I decide if I approve a friend request?

First step, I look to see if we’ve friends in common.

Second, who are those friend? Casual acquaintances, close friends? Business partners?

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If there’s a personal note, it could gain a couple more bonus points…or be a major deal killer.

A reason like “I saw you on the network and I want to grow my friends list. Please add me” works well if you’re building a friendship profile, or looking for strangers to chat up on an instant messengers or IRC. It doesn’t work as well otherwise.

Another poor reason “I see you’re in affiliate marketing. Let’s be friends”.

Erm, my blog is listed there. I have videos up. Would it be too much to take a look at what I do, and invest a minimal amount of time and effort to find out more about me. And then decide if you want to be my friend?

The analogy would be, if you wanted to expand your circle of friends, would you find out more about someone, or would you go out in the street and randomly start talking to strangers?

I can’t say that talking to strangers might not yield results, but I’m fairly sure the hit rate is going to be significantly lower.

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So you’ve made it past the velvet rope, now what?

The love dance doesn’t end once you get in the “inner circle”. If anything, that’s when the work begins.

My focus remains to bring value to the table.

What’s “value”? It’s anything useful that will help the other person – perhaps a relevant blog post, report, video that relates to the person’s interest (personal, business or otherwise).

That’s what search engines do their best to replicate, don’t they? Serve up appropriate results.

Any relationship will improve if “stuff” going in, improves the relationship.  If you focus on improving the relationship, you can expect good things to come out of it.

What’re some no-no’s when it comes to building a relationship?

Here are 3 top cardinal sins to avoid:

• Being Irrelevant:Being accepted into a “friends” group means that there is some commonality between you and me. Serving me irrelevant and unrelated information or offers (even if it’s a highly profitable affiliate offer) will kill the relationship some, especially if it’s way out of what I focus on.
• Pulling Favors Too Quickly: Whether physical or virtual, there’s a comfort zone related to what people are willing to do. If we just became friends yesterday, and you send me an email asking to mail all my lists with your offer, I would probably do it if it was compelling, and I believed in the product or service. Asking someone to do something for the sake of doing it (even for the “highest payouts” reason often cited) is a bad practice in my books.
• Following Up: UFO marketers are really irritating. And they really should get their email systems fixed. When they need something from you, they send emails leading off with “Hey buddy! How’s it going? Here’s an offer you want to look at”. And when you send them an email, you don’t get a timely reply (and sometimes don’t get a reply at all). I have a blacklist, it might be good to stay off it. If it’s a consolation, Donald Trump talks about being stood up in his book “How To Get Rich“. How do you deal with these people? Just ignore them and move on, says the Donald.

Being a successful social marketer is not a difficult task. What makes it difficult is when marketers forget some of the simple rules and get themselves into a world of unnecessary difficulty.

The unfortunate part is that these troubles were likely of their own making.

I am a little surprised and disappointed that several core Twitter features have been disabled in the interim.

The loss of private messaging I can live without (for the short term), but what happens when you are handicapped in your ability to follow conversations?

Witness the page for Jeremy Palmer’s Black Ink Project:

The pages show the twits originating from Jeremy, but the “With others” tab which you could click on and see the 2-way conversation is now missing.

If you want to track the conversation, you’d have to hit the “in reply to” hyperlink.

[At least that’s how I remember how I used to track conversations…]

So if you’d like to follow an active Twitter user, you’d be hitting the “in reply to” link pretty often and opening up a bunch of windows and study the timestamps and figure out the chronological sequences.

I may be wrong, but I thought the purpose of these technologies was to make things easier, rather than give me some weird sudoku-like puzzle to figure out what goes where?

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Having installed the latest version of the Flock social web browser (based on the Mozilla code, which Firefox is based from), I noticed that there’s an integrated Twitter module.

Take a look at the left column:

I can imagine the amount of resource load this is going to cause to Twitter’s servers via the API as updates are pulled up from all the people I’m following…

Together with other Twitter API intensive apps like Tweetscan, is it any wonder why Twitter is being continually brought to its knees?

Here’s an idea… why not restore full functionality to the Twitter’s web interface and block off or severely restrict API access to a couple of trusted sites, or impose quota on them?

Better yet, charge for CPU processing units or API calls like on an ASP model?

Content IS valuable, and Twitter parceling out data on a no-hold-barred basis is going to result in ridiculous quality of service, destroying its reputation in the interim.

Remember how ridiculous MySpace used to be when it was popular? It could take 2 minutes for profile to load (if I didn’t get timed out). I certainly hope we’re not going to see Twitter turn into MySpace 2.0!

If it’s any consolation, Facebook has been facing similar growing pains too, with the “white screen of death” being a familiar refrain among certain segments of FB users.

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So here’s an interesting idea.

Instead of continually looking at ways to scale your server farm, move onto a distributed/grid computing model, why not look at a viable model of operating the business? Charging for API access if needed?

Parkinson’s Law states that work expands to fill the time available, in the hard disk context – data expands to fill the available storage. Similarly in the social network context, resource demand will balloon up to eat all available resources alive.

If the overcapacity fix is a technology-based one, rather than a systematic, business-oriented decision, we’ll have to be content with seeing this fella around:

Courtesy of iJustine AKA Justine Ezarik (Tasty Blog Snack)

In the case of MySpace, it’s become the hotbed of unmoderated bulletin spam and private message spam for ringtones, free ipod/xbox360/nintendo WII email/zip submit offers. I bet it’s going to take some doing to clear all that muck.

With Facebook, they’re taken the opposite tack of placing a cap on the number of private messages you can send out, limiting the ability of popular group owners to communicate with their members – forcing some to set up off-site bulletin boards to send broadcast messages out.

With MyBlogLog, the platform has a built a good userbase with its blog widget (though guys like Shoemoney had showed that it was pretty easy to abuse the “recent visitors” feature of it). The major sticking point is that Yahoo! doesn’t seem to have a concrete social media strategy (or at least an integrated one in place). I’m still hoping to see some of its community features like it’s Yahoo! Groups, Yahoo! Shopping, Mash social platform and MyBlogLog properties come together. And in my book, come together means more than a single unified Yahoo! login to tie the pieces together.

Even a 1-2 page weekly or bi-weekly updates or “What’s Hawt!” newsletter would serve to bring some of the pieces together…

So what’s the deal with Twitter’s sputtering and throttling down the flow of data?

With Twitter, I suspect it’s the “Twitter gamers” – the guys who follow 5,000 others and have like 50 followers who are contributing to the overhead. Somewhere out there, someone had the genius idea that if you followed 10,000 people and 100 followed you back, you would have built up a community of 100 followers, the resource overhead resulting from the other 9,900 other members pinging you their updates be damned.

So assuming 10% of twitter users are using this social gaming tactic and 90% of their updates are coming from users who don’t follow them back, they could be contributing 50% of the resource load on Twitter’s server farm. In my book, no amount of distributed computing or load balancing is going to protect you from this.

The net effect is that Twitter has scaled down features like private messages and pagination (keeping logs of twitter conversations beyond the first page. How’s that for shutting down your social platform?

If platform developers were to create two parallel platforms – one dedicated to IM-like one-to-one communication, and another community-like BBS type infrastructure, perhaps some of the resource could be balanced.

But the issue is more systemic and a rule-based social fix is in order.

With most established community sites, there is the concept of ratios, or advancing through the hierarchy to earn your social due.

On a popular forum like ABestWeb, you need to log in 200 posts before you gain the ability to private message other members. With other forums like Digital Point, you need to clock in a number of quality posts before you earn the right to post a forum signature.

I’m not sure about the guys who follow 10,000 other twitter users, but I’m guessing that unless they’re chained to their computer 24-7, they’re not likely to be reading more than 10% of the updates from people they’re following. And if you’re not doing that, what’s the point?

The bedrock of community-based interaction (or if you prefer the buzzword social media) is the concept of conversations – you talk, they reply, you reply back. If the system breaks down, then “the internets iz broken”…

What if you were to introduce a basic rule like a 10:1 ratio of “followed twitter users” vs “followers” in your posse? That would significantly up the signal-to-noise ratio wouldn’t it?

…and I would actually be able to use twitter again…

Over the past weekend, the microblogging platform seems to have had a major bout of traffic/resource overload and indigestion and went offline for 48 hours or more.

When she came back, she came back sans direct messaging and pagination (I believe it refers to a backlog beyond your first page of tweets).

In addition to conserve resources, third party apps like Twhirl, can’t seem to do API calls more than once every 5 minutes.

This should take a number of steps to increase scalability and stability, although it will take quite a bit away from the “real time” nature of the hybrid IM/blogging type service.

Beyond being a juicy piece of M&A bait for one of the Google-Yahoo-Microsoft tirumvirate, I’m not sure if Twitter has a viable business model, beyond grabbing marketshare and mindshare for the microblogging space.

If you’ve thoughts on the issue, post your comments below: