Recently in Microblogging Category

Google has announced that it is going to be indexing the web in real time:

Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before.

[...] You can also filter your results to see only "Updates" from micro-blogs like Twitter, FriendFeed, Jaiku and others.

[...] Our real-time search features are based on more than a dozen new search technologies that enable us to monitor more than a billion documents and process hundreds of millions of real-time changes each day. Of course, none of this would be possible without the support of our new partners that we're announcing today: Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca -- along with Twitter, which we announced a few weeks ago.

This announcement should make people with twitchy Twitter fingers pause. There was once a time when a mis-posted Tweet could be deleted in time to ensure it never made it into Google's cache (although never fast enough ensure no one saw it in their timeline). Google hasn't explained how they will now deal with deleted updates, but my own experiment this morning showed that deleted Tweets are not deleted from Google in a timely fashion (if at all).

This is good and bad news. On the one hand, Google Cache has allowed me to do a bit of forensic Twitter searching to piece together deleted conversations. There will be times when it will be an important tool for holding public figures accountable for what they say in public. On the other hand, everyone makes mistakes. Shouldn't we be able to delete and forget them?

However Google ultimately decides to deal with deleted content, it's a timely reminder not to update in haste.

What is it that makes our inbox such an enticing place that we spend hours there every day? It's a question that fascinates me, mainly because I have such an uncomfortable relationship with email. I get lots of it, am often slow to respond and frequently end up feeling guilty because my email has got the best of me.

Psychologist Susan Weinschenk puts the blame for our obsession on dopamine:

[T]he latest research shows that dopamine causes seeking behavior. Dopamine causes us to want, desire, seek out, and search.

[...]

It's not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information. The latest research shows that it is the opoid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.

Wanting vs. liking - According to Kent Berridge, these two systems, the "wanting" (dopamine) and the "liking" (opoid) are complementary. The wanting system propels us to action and the liking system makes us feel satisfied and therefore pause our seeking. If our seeking isn't turned off at least for a little while, then we start to run in an endless loop. The latest research shows that the dopamine system is stronger than the opoid system. We seek more than we are satisfied (back to evolution... seeking is more likely to keep us alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor).

A dopamine induced loop - With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop... dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text.

This sheds much needed light on why we spend so much time checking for new email only to then not deal with it when it has arrived, but there is more to the email problem than dopamine.

There are cultural problems around the use of email as a proxy for productivity; huge email loads being worn as a badge of honour by people who like to equate their inbox martyrdom with a commitment to work; and defensive emailing by people who feel so scared or insecure that they CC everyone. These issues around the sending of mail need to be tackled, probably before we try to tackle our dopamine-fueled inbox obsession.

But as Weinschenk points out, tools like Twitter are just as likely to "send our dopamine system raging".

So if social media is as addictive as email, isn't it pointless to try to replace one with the other? I don't think so, no, because there's more to it than trying to reduce inbox faffing, as important as that is. It's also about improving sharing, findability, archiving, collaboration, conversation, staff relationships, morale and efficiency. These benefits, in my opinion, outweigh the potential flaws in the new tools.

We do need to be aware that social media isn't without its problems, but understanding the fundamental biological and psychological processes that shape the way we interact with technology will help us to solve those problems. I look forward to watching and maybe even participating in the emerging field of technopsychology.

Searching for the perfect Twitter tool is a bit like searching for Shangri-La: You know it's out there somewhere and you can find it if you just search hard enough.

I was a Twhirl addict for a long time, but recently switched to Tweetie as Twhirl was hammering my Mac's processors a bit too much. Tweetie is more compact and has a better user interface, but there are things that it doesn't do that Twhirl did.

Such is the way of Twitter clients. If you pooled all the features of all Twitter clients, you'd have all you need to create a spec for the perfect client, but no single client fits that bill yet.

When it comes to managing Twitter accounts in a business context, Tweetdeck is many people's favourite, if only because it lets you save keyword searches. If you're monitoring Twitter for mentions of your company, that's invaluable functionality. But still has its drawbacks, including awful design and excessive demands on screen real estate.

CoTweet is a newcomer to the market, but already has an impressive feature set. Because it's a web app rather than a local client, multiple people can manage multiple accounts. It also allows you to assign Tweets to a colleagues for follow-up action, with automatic email assignment notifications, and to make notes on individual Tweeters. That should help companies monitoring Twitter for customer care purposes make sure Tweets don't fall between the cracks.

Other cute features include scheduled tweets and inline access to Bit.ly's shortened URL stats so you can see how many people have clicked on a any given Bit.ly link.

CoTweet does need a bit of love and attention where usability is concerned, though. The interface is a bit confusing and, just like every other Twitter client, there are things that it could be doing but isn't. I particularly like Tweetie's conversation view, where when you click on a Tweet it will show you all the previous Tweets in that exchange, and I can imagine that might be useful for CoTweet users too.

Overall, though, CoTweet shows promise and provides a very different view of Twitter than most other clients. Definitely one to watch.