I ended up speaking some with our senior director about a recent set of experiences I had with Charter Communications.  I recently upgraded my services with them, and have had several small nagging issues that I never thought to call them about.  Just little things that kept me from being delighted.

Somewhat recently, though, I had a problem where my Internet and phone access went out for an hour or so.  I ended up on the phone with customer service, and once my immediate problem was resolved, the technician on the phone asked a key question.  “Is everything else working as you’d expect?  Have you had any other problems?”

The conversation shifts here.  It’s no longer “did we solve your problem?” but becomes “are you happy with us overall?”.  So I told him about some intermittent problems I’ve had, and mentioned that though I was paying for 20 megabit speed I was only getting 8 (hey, 8 megabit is still blazing fast for this old school veteran of 300 baud modems, so I wasn’t complaining that loud).  So he explained that the only way to get 20 megabit speed was with a modem that supported something newer than DOCSIS 1, which was all my ancient modem could handle.  He respected my knowledge of the technical issues here, didn’t push me to lease (or even buy) a modem from them, just gave me some recommended models.  He also said that it might or might not address my intermittent issues, but it was the first step.

So I did some independent research and picked a modem, bought it online, and set it up myself (I’ll skip the part of the story where I have problems getting it set up due to neglecting to reset some DNS configuration when I switched back to DHCP…. ).  My speed improved drastically (I was getting up to 30 megabit speed — talk about a delighted customer!) but if anything my intermittent failures got worse.  Again, afraid of the customer service “phone tree” I just ignored it.  But a few weeks later I mentioned it in passing on twitter … and here things got interesting.

I immediately got a non-confrontational and polite inquiry from a Charter rep.  He told me he could check the logs on Charter’s side and determine if the intermittent failures were due to my own configuration or due to something on their side.  Wow.  Less than a minute later, he told me the signal levels looked bad, and that he’d send a tech.  Without me ever getting on the phone, he negotiated a time (within 24 hours!) and had a technician on the way.

The technician worked through the issues (my line had too many splits — blame the previous occupants of my home I guess) and got me up and running within an hour.

Am I posting this to say I’m delighted with Charter, no exceptions?  Not quite.  But I am saying that Charter has figured something out here — clearly the model I took advantage of here doesn’t scale to every single customer.  But it scales to the early adopters, the tech-savvy and vocal crowd on twitter.  They’ve recognized that while keeping every customer delighted is important, it’s worth spending extra money to hand-hold certain customers into that state.

There’s a lesson here for everyone who aspires to having delighted customers.  Sometimes you can’t rip the entire corporation apart to delight every customer.  Maybe instead you need to work on the exception cases, figure out how to minimize the damage.  And it all really does start with changing your question — “is your problem solved” versus “is there anything else we can help with”.  Change the tone of your interaction, and things will shift.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Delighting your customers – a Charter experience

So my first question was what I get out of Facebook.  Why do I use it?

• Stay in touch with extended family
• Stay in touch with geographically dispersed friends
• Reconnect with old friends
• Share photos with family, friends, and colleagues
• Deepen and personalize business relationships
• Information from businesses and product brands I have relationships with
• Information from local businesses

I can get a lot of those things in other ways, but none of them with the same ease of use that Facebook provides (especially with the awesome mobile interface).  It’s a unique collection of services and has a unique penetration into the market.  It is, in effect, something worth paying for, but which I am not paying for … in cash.

So what am I paying with?

Information.  Facebook derives value from my information.  From my network to my location to keywords in my status updates, I’m providing Facebook with a ton of information for them to consume and even repackage and sell.  And I’m fine with that.  That’s an informed compromise I’ve made and continue to make.

So what concerns me?  What’s the other half of the equation?

First, Facebook isn’t just a product, it’s a capital-V Vision.  Like Apple’s vision for the iPhone, Facebook has a vision for the social web.  And like Apple, they have the power to attract the market and enforce rules which bring that vision about.  Their vision is one of public-by-default in every way, of partner messages intermingled with social content, of people discovering the world around them in the context of Facebook.  And what they have shown, over the years, is that they are willing to make disruptive changes which bring previously-private data to public light, and ask forgiveness instead of permission.  It’s particularly bold of them to take something which used to have a toggle and remove that ability, burying the change deep in your agreement.

Second, while my consent to Facebook is well-informed, my friends’ may not be. Confused by numerous privacy options, most users accept the defaults.  I’ve seen people say they’d rather quit than try to understand the privacy options in Facebook.  And so while I may build a well-structured safe way to share my information on the site, my friends probably have not done so.  When your safety online is predicated on your friends’ understanding the rules, your risk is increased.

So what’s my plan, my strategy for Facebook?

I behave as if it’s public, but still lock it down appropriately.  I carefully groom the public aspects of my profile, and review what they look like to someone outside my network.  I post status updates to different audiences using friend groups; boring stuff goes to “friends of friends” and more personal stuff goes to a small group called “trusted” which I hand-pick.  I think about every piece of information I open up, and think about why I want it public, what value comes from it.  And I accept that tomorrow, Facebook may change it all, and I realize I have to be ready for that.  That means I pick and choose what I share, because some things which are personal and yet worth sharing to some people never get shared.  I’m intentionally getting less out of this service because of my concerns.

Let’s not beat around the bush — Facebook has done some nasty things, and has a vision for the future which many of us don’t like and don’t want to be a part of.  But their product is so compelling that I’m willing to accept that compromise.  Facebook is a private company and can do whatever the heck they want to in bringing their product to market.  Any of us can choose whether to use the service or try and build our own competitor.  I feel the same way about Apple and the iPlatform.  I, for one, am sticking around.

For now.

(For some other views on the subject, check out Scoble’s recent article and this great privacy visualization.)

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

The Facebook compromise

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

First impressions: Google Buzz

So here, as requested by Natalie, is my version of the web at 20…

How has the web changed my life?

It’s a bit of a cheat for me to answer this question, because what truly changed my life were the networks that predated what we think of as the Web.  The web made them easier to use and broadened their scope by orders of magnitude, but the damage was already done.

I would not be where I am in life without the Internet.  As a teenager, I hungrily sought out information from any source I could.  On a TRS-80 Color Computer hooked up to a tiny black&white TV, at 300 baud, I connected to (and eventually ran) bulletin boards, snuck into unprotected university dialins to play MUDs and read Usenet, and connected to individuals and information from a much bigger world.  I am still in contact with some of those people, still use the behaviors I learned back then every day.

But it wasn’t until college, in 1993, that I saw those things melded together into The Web.  It may have been technically 3 years old by then, but it was just getting its momentum.  It became my immediate and constant companion, and has been since.  Everything I cherished about the Internet was boiled down into one magical term: Home Page.  We didn’t have net connections in our dorms, so all that gweeping was done in the semi-dark basements of the CS building, in labs shared with giant line printers and dozens of black and white monitors.

I can still taste the Mountain Dew … and the freedom.

I created my first web page in those years, when the best web search engine was called WebCrawler and people still coded for users of Lynx.  The Internet Archive has a version of that page, from right before I graduated.  Most of the links are incredibly broken, but you can still see a snapshot of my personality in the text, personal branding way before the Millennials “discovered” it.

This was the brave new world.  And we thought we’d keep it to ourselves forever: nerds arguing over Star Trek and D&D, posting pictures of our cats, and researching new technologies.

And then some damn fool figured out how to make money off it all.

How has the web changed business and society?

I like to say the changes to society and business associated with the web have come (and are coming) in waves.  For a long time, businesses saw the web as nothing but a giant Yellow Pages, and society saw the web as a place to argue over Star Trek.  I remember a magical period in the Web’s history when business hadn’t caught on yet, but there were enough people for actual connections to be made.  You could find people who had been to far away places and talk to them about their experiences.  You could bump into groups who were dedicated to obscure programming languages and figure out how to solve bizarre software problems.

And then the marketers took over, clumsily but powerfully. When you tried to find real people, you found storefronts instead.  Search engines were new, and SEO technology outpaced the search algorithms.  You couldn’t trust the web any more.  Communities were buried, hard to find.  It was difficult to meet new people and form new interactions.

Eventually the old sense of community emerged from its hibernation.  Strong web forums with passionate moderators helped people with similar interests hook up, and some of them lasted long enough to become trusted sources of information.  Social media sites formed and helped us track trusted crowds.  Web page technology got decent, bandwidth got cheap, blogs became mainstream, and suddenly (if you knew where to look) the web was social again.  Now there were two webs, the social web and the static clumsy business web.

Then, most recently, businesses figured out how to leverage the new (old) online world.  Instead of trying to take over, they tried to engage.  And the business web became social.

And so we’re back where we started, but better.  We’re free to argue over Star Trek and post pictures of our cats … and route around government censorship … and collaborate on new technologies … and tallk directly to our government … and order pizza online … and monitor millions of conversations until you find an unhappy customer in Paraguay … and finally engage with that person following the same unwritten rules we geeks help put into place 20 years ago.

It’s a beautiful time to be an information professional.

(What I think is an important followup point here is that there are areas where the web hasn’t changed society.  Vast stretches of people are not connected, and the disconnect isn’t shrinking.  Let’s not forget this.)

What do I think the web will look like in twenty years?

To answer this I tried to think back on the past twenty years.  Many of the technologies existed when the “web” was born, but we found innovative ways of tying them together, made bandwidth cheaper, and exponentially extended its reach.  So what do we have the technology to do now, but aren’t doing yet?  What will change when (and if) the digital divide narrows?

The easiest answer is that dumb search will disappear.  All search will be contextual by default, whether that context is geographical, social, historical, or something else we haven’t thought of yet.  Our tools will serve us, help us filter the world automatically in contexts that make sense to us.  Based on aggregating data about ourselves, our histories, and our friends, the tools will be highly predictive and accurate.  They’ll work on objects other than text (we’re improving image search, but let’s imagine all of youtube indexed not by metadata but by the data itself!).

This will come at the cost of privacy, of course, and the mad scientists of the 2030s will be those who refuse to make that trade.  Like a person in today’s world who refuses to have a credit card or a bank account, most of us won’t be able to understand how they can reject all that convenience.

Another easy one is that we’ll take the cloud for granted.  If you have data somewhere, you’ll have that data everywhere.  The concept of remembering a URL or bookmarking it and losing that bookmark will seem archaic.  There’s some fascinating security and usability problems to be solved there, of course.  It’ll be fun to see that fall into place.

Fads will come and go faster than they do today.  With the ability to spin up a virtual data center and tear it down with no delay, a startup can flare up and disappear within hours.  Low-budget clones of such companies will appear worldwide, and the battles over who had an idea first will be epic.

Another trend I think will continue is the shrinking of content.  Real writers will be harder to find, as the majority of content providers end up doing nothing but sharing links and snippets.  Our attention spans will shrink further.  If we can’t read it or watch it in 30 seconds, we won’t care.  And the few of us who insist that things used to be better will be laughed at by our juniors.

One thing I can predict is that twenty years from now, my daughter will 21 years old, and she will laugh uproariously at how wrong we all are about where things are headed.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I’ll ask Jamie Pappas, a colleague at EMC, to continue the discussion next.  Jamie?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

The web at #20years old

Early this month, I ran in a charity road race along with some family members.  I wrote up the experience on my personal blog, and as in any writeup, I included both positive and negative aspects of the day.  My intended audience was small — this particular blog is not publicized.

In this particular case, though, a couple hours after my post went up, the director of the race had found it, read it, and posted a follow up.  She directly addressed my concerns and invited me to discuss it in more detail via email.  We did, and then I posted a final comment explaining how things had progressed.

What happened here?

• Within 12 hours of the race, I had written a report and posted it in a public place.
• Within 12 hours of that, the race director had found my post and directly engaged me.
• Within 12 hours of that, a two-way conversation had taken place and I had posted the results.

Within 36 hours of the event, one participant out of 4,000 had a personal conversation with the person directly responsible for the event about what went well and what didn’t. Do you think perhaps the race director had urgent matters to attend to, and that it might have been hard to find the time to scour the web for mentions of her race?  Probably.  Clearly this was a priority.

I’m a customer for life now, but honestly one participant more or less out of their race is not a huge deal.  What is huge is that the situation played out in a public place and for years to come the evidence of that interaction is preserved for every potential participant in the event.

Not only that, I went from being a participant to an advocate.  I’ve spent my personal time talking to others about how great an event it was, and how much the organizers obviously care about the race and the runners in it.  You can be sure when the race is run next year, I won’t just be signing up, I’ll be talking about it in public and drumming up more interest on their behalf.

I can’t beat this drum long enough.  You cannot measure the Return on Investment in social media using traditional means.  But it should be clear to anyone watching these kinds of events unfold that the Risk of Ignoring is huge.  Retell this story, but replace the race with a product launch, and my report with a simple installation report written by a low-level employee at a small customer.  And remember, in the professional world, we’re not talking about how good the end result feels for everyone involved, but about how you can differentiate the experience of working with your product as compared to your competitors’.

Are you listening?  Do the people who are listening have the knowledge and power to engage your customers?  Can they escalate and get the right people in conversation in Internet Time?  Can you picture a situation where the person directly responsible for your setting the direction of your product is in contact with a single customer within 36 hours of that customer unboxing it?

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

People are talking … are you listening?

Everything I am about to describe is achievable with today’s technology.  And yet it sounds like science fiction.  Here’s the world I want to live in.

Somewhere, an agent acting on my behalf understands my networks.  My networks overlap, are complex, and come from distinct sources, but I believe this is a solvable problem.  Ideally this requires my agent to access my RSS subscriptions, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and even my email on my behalf – which means I better have ironclad trust in this agent.  With this network aggregation built, it’s easy to locate content which is produced, recommended, or subscribed to by my network.  The aggregation of all this content should be the first tier for my search results, and should set the context for resolving any ambiguities in my searching.

This though is a specific instance of a more general problem.  The importance of a source in recommending content into my search results is not binary.  Within that network I defined earlier, you can imagine a ranking of sources based on frequency of contact, number of networks in which the individual appears, and number of times I follow recommendations from that individual.  And once you have that, there’s no reason you can’t extend it beyond my direct network.  Even if I don’t subscribe to a specific industry blog, if ten of my work contacts do and that blog has a relevant search result, I want to see that search result before some unknown source.

Suddenly my agent is doing a lot more than compiling my network.  You could for example implement this with a Google Page Rank which is unique to each user of the system.  Suddenly SEO gets a lot more (and less) interesting, and Google (or Facebook) needs a ton more storage.

Once I have this in place, there’s no reason my agent can’t tell me when my network is too small, or needs pruning.  It knows people I should be following, blogs I should be reading, and supposed friends who I probably don’t even really know (and who in fact might be poisoning my search results).  It can suggest ways to change all these things, and my responses and actions will help shape its behavior.

We started by talking about social search, but suddenly we’re talking about social management.  I don’t want to just search using this information, I want to browse and explore.  We’re leaving a ton of data on the table.  You have to imagine someone out there is just itching to figure out how to help us use it, and in the process learn some incredibly detailed things about us all (someone has to pay the bills, right?  May as well be laser-focused ads….).

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Meandering thoughts on social search

Never one to turn down a chance to play with tools, I’ve taken the latter approach (though in moderation; I still follow less than a thousand people).  My latest twitter client is the Mixero beta, and after talking about it with a friend I decided it was time to do a little writeup.  See, Mixero is almost great, but it’s the almost that is nagging at me week after week.  I’m hoping that when it goes GA, we’ll see the client I know it can be….

The biggest seller for Mixero off the bat was grouping.  I follow nearly 200 EMC accounts (group one), and another 150 or more of competitors, customers, and partners (group two).  I also follow people who talk about professional topics that interest me: management, leadership, engagement (a third group). I have other smaller groups — a group for close friends, a group for fitness bloggers, a group for gamers, and so on.  The groups overlap at times, and that’s fine.   Unlike Tweetdeck, Mixero makes creating and maintaining these groups simple (well, as simple as manually dragging/clicking hundreds of people into groups can be).

Just like Tweetdeck, Mixero lets me create searches and persist them as well.  So I can have a search on my name, a search on EMC, a search on Ionix, and so on.  They call these channels.

What immediately set Mixero apart was the concept of context.  You can combine groups and channels into a persistent context, and assign that context to a window.  So, for example, I have a “Work” context which contains the three groups I outlined above, plus some channels for searches relating to my day job.  This is the context I want to use to view my tweet stream during the working day.  I can set up other contexts for specialized needs, and switch between them.  At night, when volume is lower, I can switch my context back to “Everything” and just watch the data roll by.

In fact, if you look at Mixero’s screenshots, you can see how they set up UI layouts with multiple contexts at once.  This is the ideal that I’m trying to approach — a big section of the screen for my work context, a smaller section for replies and mentions, one for my hobbies, and a small place to just dip my toes into the overall tweet stream.

But like I said, I almost love Mixero.  So where does it fall short?

• UI polish.  Switching resolutions regularly can make handling complex layouts difficult.  I’ve had problems where I can’t see UI controls any more, or where popups from Mixero always pop under something else and are impossible to access.  The controls for minimize/maximize/restore are nonstandard and behave unpredictably.  Setting up complex layouts is very challenging.  Switching contexts is harder than it needs to be.  Overall I feel like the UI ease-of-use could be improved by an order of magnitude.  They solved the hard problems, but some easy stuff is just messy.
• Community.  I want a forum, or something, so I can know whether the things I dislike are being actively worked.  Their blog is updated far too infrequently for my taste.
• Performance.  Especially when I have a complex layout on the screen, and it’s been running for 8+ hours straight, things get a bit ugly.  Hover controls are delayed, right-click menus might not appear right away, drag-and-drop doesn’t work right, and so on.  I think this is a memory management issue but I can’t be sure.  A restart will fix the problem.
• Settings.  Your groups, channels, and contexts are saved at Mixero.  You can’t back them up locally, or export them for your own use and analysis.  I’d love to be able to share my groups for others to use.  I’d love to have some reassurance that if Mixero goes belly-up, I’ll have my groups for my own use in some other client.
• Nagging issues.  Some stuff is silly.  A tweet can appear in your context for a half-dozen different reasons, and when it does, you’ll see it a half-dozen times.  My primary context contains a couple groups and a few channels.  A tweet could in theory be from someone I’ve grouped (one), be a reply/mention (two), and contain a search string I care about (three) meaning that tweet shows up three times in my window.  It’s just one of these areas where I think a little polish would go a long way.

I want to keep using Mixero.  I’d be much more comfortable doing so if they would be a bit more open with what they were working on, so I could see whether the Mixero we’ll see in mid-2010 is closer or further away from the ideal.  In the meantime, I’ll keep my eyes on other clients.  You never know when the next game-changer is going to appear….

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Why I almost love Mixero

I was paging through my reader this evening and came across an article by the always-wise Jeremiah Owyang about handling your boss’s connecting with you on Facebook.  You probably know where I stand on this already, especially if you’ve read my post “Five reasons to ‘friend’ your co-workers (or boss!)“.  Basically, you are putting yourself at a disadvantage if you have the opportunity to do this, and don’t.

But one thing Owyang talks about that I failed to, is how to handle being the boss and entering this situation.  As a manager I’ve been in this situation a couple times, and chatted about it with co-workers over lunch.  The key to avoiding difficulty is knowing (and communicating) your social media norms.  For reference, here are mine, as relate to mixing work and online networking:

• I will never send a Facebook invite to an employee I currently manage.  It’s not fair to ask them to make that decision.
• I will send Facebook invites to other co-workers (including managers), and always include a disclaimer about how I don’t mind being rejected because not everyone uses these sites the same way.
• I accept any Facebook invite from anyone in my professional network, and count on using the filtering mechanisms if I need to.
• I will send LinkedIn invites to anyone in my professional network, and accept all of them as well.
• I will not write a LinkedIn recommendation for anyone I currently manage, nor for people in my immediate “family” at work.
• If you mention your employment at EMC, I will follow you on twitter, unless your update stream is embarrassingly bad and you clearly aren’t expecting anyone from EMC to have noticed your passing mention of your job.

I’m sure I have more, but these are the ones I rely on day-in and day-out.  What are yours?  If you don’t know, maybe it’s time you figured them out.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Know your (social media) norms

“We fear change.”
Garth, Wayne’s World, 1992.

You can’t announce a font change on Facebook without the townspeople gathering their torches and pitchforks. Everyone loves Facebook, and wants it to remain exactly as it is today. And that’s been the story for years now. Of course, if Facebook listened to those users, it would be a little website for Harvard students and nobody else would use it. Clearly Facebook needs to know when to ignore their users and press bravely on. They’re doing a good job so far, and they’re about to take another step forward.

If you’re into Facebook at all, you’ve probably seen the announcements of some upcoming changes in the visibility of published information from users. Very soon now, Facebook users will have the option of publishing their shared information to the entire world, not just their friends. This is an evolutionary step … photos and notes, for example, have long had the ability to be shared beyond your immediate friends. I have photo albums set up to allow “friends of friends” to view them. I’ve posted notes which I opened up to “my networks” so my co-workers and geographical neighbors could see them. Obviously you can select bits of your profile to be public as well – to clarify who you are when people are searching for you. And now status updates and shared items will join that list.

You’d think Facebook was tearing down the statue of liberty. In my news feed, I saw a comment from one angry user that this was the “final nail in the coffin,” and that he would delete his account if the change went through. He was worried about a career-limiting-move being documented on Facebook and seen by co-workers. Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d be much more concerned about someone else posting a picture of me that I didn’t approve of, as opposed to my own status update being read by the wrong person. Of course, if you’re a regular reader, you know my stance on co-workers and Facebook.

As always, I suggest looking for the opportunity here, not the danger. Facebook hasn’t taken anything from you, instead they are giving you some new tools. Taking advantage of new tools takes time and effort, but there is possible payoff. By showing one facet of your Facebook personality to the world at large, you will be giving people another avenue to learn about you. Instead of making them dig, give them something easily accessible. There you are, commenting on industry trends, hiking the Appalachian Trail, and sharing anecdotes from your latest tech conference.  What a great guy; we should hire him!

Nobody is forcing you to open up your entire life to the rest of the world. You can still talk smack to your friends about their fantasy football scores without your potential employer seeing it. It just takes a bit more work. And for those who are canceling their accounts over this, I echo that overused Internet meme: “You’re doing it wrong.”

(And yes, I know, some of the early furor was over a misunderstanding of what the default setting would be.)

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Fear and Loathing on Facebook

photo credit: freezelight

I saw a couple tweets this morning which brought back to the surface something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.  I won’t link the user but here is one line:

“I block most new followers”

Their next tweet was about Twitter’s “block” feature having trouble, and they had this long procedure for getting around the problem.  They put a lot of work into just blocking a couple people.  I felt bad for this person’s wasted energy.

Let’s go over what Twitter is and how it works, to understand what I’m talking about.  I apologize for simplifying things, but this is close enough:

Twitter is a microblogging platform. By default, everyone can see what everyone else writes. Twitter exports a global feed of all updates, as well as RSS feeds for each user.  Readers can search these with Twitter’s default search (which only goes back a limited number of days) or other search systems.

In addition, Twitter provides a filtered view of that feed based on a subscription (“follow”) method.  Wen you “follow” someone, Twitter notifies the microblogger of your interest in the content and puts all their data into your filtered view.  That view is the default way to “read” Twitter.

The notification is important: people look at the identity of followers in case their content is interesting enough to reciprocate the follow action.  This gives marketers, spammers, and malware distributors a new vector to your eye — by following you, they are getting you to read their message.  It’s much more effective than a blind email which will be deleted before the contents are seen.

The number of people who follow you, as well as their identities, is public information.  This count speaks roughly to your potential influence. And, since anybody can subscribe to your feed, having someone as a reader should never count against your reputation.

Of course, you can change these behaviors.  One way is by making your updates private, in which case Twitter does not include your updates in the global feed, nor does it export an individual RSS feed for you or publish them in searches.  The only way someone can read what you write is by asking for permission.

Twitter also has a feature called “Block.“  By blocking a user, you eliminate the publisher/subscriber relationship between your two Twitter accounts.  They do not see their updates in their filtered feed, and they do not contribute to your “follower” count.  Basically you undo the action of their following you, notifying them that you did this.  Your feed remains public, though.  Most people who engage in “Blocking” are doing it to the marketers, spammers, and malware distributors mentioned previously.

What does this accomplish?

• In terms of privacy, it accomplishes nothing.  The person you blocked still has access to your tweets via the global feed, RSS, and search.  It is less convenient, of course.
• In terms of your reputation, it has cosmetic impact.  Nobody sees that this person had ever followed you.
• In terms of communication, it sends a message to the follower and to Twitter.  To the follower, it’s a one-way message.  You suck, go away, I’m blocking my ears now. Twitter gets the information and stores it somewhere, and it’s possible (as they claim here) they will notice an account who is blocked many times and investigate it.

The next question is, is there sufficient rational reason to take this action? I argue no, there is not.

• The incremental privacy gain is actually illusory.
• The reputation gain is debatable, and if it is present at all its impact decreases as your net reputation increases (if you have 500 followers, nobody can expect you to be responsible for the actions of all of them).
• In terms of communication, the message is likely not even received.  Why not?

If you’re blocking a spammer or malware distributor, they aren’t monitoring the account. They created it expressly to deliver a message and a URL to their audience, and abandoned it afterward.

If you’re blocking a marketer, they are so busy trying to reach thousands of people that a couple blocked accounts is meaningless to them.  In fact, they probably don’t even read their blocked account notifications.

And while you’ve participated in telling Twitter about this person, they likely already know, because it’s easy to detect the activity profile used by these individuals even if nobody blocks them.

So, what does this leave?

The irrational remains.  You exercise some control when you press “Block.” Some people spend time arguing with telemarketers, others just hang up on them.  I find the two behaviors similar.

Another reason, I spotted almost immediately in asking about this behavior on Twitter.  The vast majority of people expressing concern over their follower lists were women.  One female Twitter user explained that women in general tend to be more concerned about feeling stalked, and so may take defensive measures.

Lastly, of course, the “it feels good” reaction shouldn’t be discounted just because I find it irrational.  We do “wasteful” things all the time because they make us feel better.  Who am I to tell you how to live your life?  Some people also like the feeling of sending a message to someone they disagree with, even if nobody reads it.

In any case, my advice would be to just try letting it ride for a few weeks.  Don’t block anybody. Don’t talk to telemarketers.  Don’t “report spam.”  Just hang up on them, ignore them, and move on.  It’ll free up some precious energy for dealing with problems you can actually solve.

This post is from: Dave Talks Shop

Don’t waste your time blocking in Twitter