Two things happened as a result of this. One, the person whose joke it was followed me. I checked his profile, and as his interests seem relevant to me I now follow him too. That’s fine, that’s the kind of “organic growth” of networks that I like on Twitter. Neither of us has any particular agenda, other than sharing.

The other was an attempt at contrived growth, with an agenda. A woman who runs a business in the USA also followed me. Her business is “all about children’s parties”. She would have used an automated tool to search Twitter, and found me based on the words I used. To her credit, she actually read it herself and sent me a reply (an @ in Twitter language). She will probably pinch my joke, which isn’t mine anyway, but otherwise this won’t help her as I am not her target. I just thought the joke was funny, my kid is grown up now. I will not follow back, and will not be a customer. Anyway, she is using Twitter as a business tool, unmistakably. She is one of the better ones doing this, and she will no doubt prosper.

Anther message related to the new group which is documenting problems with Brisbane public transport, with the aim of improving it. I intend to write on the wall there later today or over the weekend.

Today I have spent almost no time social networking, and today will be one of those days where I miss a lot. I was out in the real world, or doing chores. I am the only person I know who uses Twitter but hasn’t set it up so it works from a mobile phone. Must do it – but a mobile phone would have made no difference today.

The main thing that caught my eye during a quick skim of Twitter this afternoon was new media lecturer Jason Wilson’s experiment using Twitter in combination with the extension Twitwall as a teaching and learning resource (I asked him about this last night on Twitter, and he blogged it today). His reasoning is simple: “it allows us to talk to each other during and between classes”. Talking in class is seen as a good thing now! (Makes me think of Steven Johnson’s book “Everything Bad is Good For You” – must get that.) There is more to it than that, though – Twitter facilitates sharing of information while retaining intellectual property rights, and Twitwall supports posting longer pieces, which makes it suitable for class discussion. In the student guide Jason says “as you become more integrated into the world of Twitter, you’ll be able to directly access information from debates between significant thinkers in our field of study as they happen. They offer a great way of bringing all of us into contact with a networked information environment.”

That reminds me to search the profile of someone I know in real life, to locate what he said recently about searching conversation threads. Apparently a conversation between two people can be displayed in a search, except for the first tweet that prompted it. That one needs to improve.

Other than that, all I did was comment on someone’s design on their profile page, and re-tweet a joke.

Then a few people were linking to a post about creating a google-like search for Twitter. I disagree with the notion that those with more followers are more trustworthy. One of teh biggest scammers on Twitter has a huge following. That guy has a scheme that generates fake followers. Numbers have nothing to do with trustworthiness and they never have had.

Some more talk about the dog who is getting a wheelchair, and a question to a lecturer who has begun using Twitter as a teaching and learning tool – I am very keen to know how that goes.

Meanwhile, I was also on Facebook where I randomly found my son online and chatted with him. It was a pleasant surprise. He is currently living overseas. On the invitation of a friend I know in real life joined a Facebook group aimed at improving Brisbane’s public transport.

Through the day I did lots of other things about the house and the garden,  and I did my university work. I did not spend all my time social networking. Signing off now though.

His post was about the social nature of software – even spreadsheets are collaborative. He demonstrates his point with quotes from some respected researchers, then observes

People are social protocol processing machines. They bring their own social protocols to software and they will break the ones you try to impose on them.

We are breaking the protocol at Twitter, too. In 140 characters, we are supposed to answer the question “what are you doing right now”. We don’t limit ourselves to that. Perhaps 5% of the tweets I see are like that. We communicate anything that will fit within 140 characters (that limit is so people can text from their mobile phones). If it won’t fit, we blog it and post a link to the blog. And of course, we point to all kinds of articles and media on the web.

Why bother to interact with a known fake? This was none other than Fake Stephen Conroy, Minister of the Department of Teh Internets. He provides comic relief during the lengthy online debate about ISP-level internet filtering in Australia. I chided him for out-of character remarks (i.e. he was making sense), and he replied by direct message that his Twitterings had been hijacked by radicals but he was now in control again.

Just as there are fictional characters in books, on TV and radio, there are fictional characters on the internet. With Twitter is you can talk back to them and sometimes enter a dialogue, as I did. Participatory comedy.

The issue here is real community vs ‘hollow follows’. I am not interested in having thousands of followers, and I am seldom interested in people who have that many. I certainly couldn’t follow more than a couple of hundred. The people who play the numbers game feed one of the genuine criticisms of Twitter – that this kind of communication is spammy and shallow. Twitter doesn’t have to be. It depends on how we use it.

I use Twitter three ways – to communicate with people I know locally or regionally, to get to know more people, and to receive broadcast messages from specific organisations of my choosing, as well as a few internet celebrities (who I would never expect to follow me).

Even though I intended this post to be just an announcement, it got a human response. This was from a person I met online – we study online at the same university – and it led to a brief conversation about his ailing dog who may not be long for this world. Anyway I am going to keep him on my list, even without the lolly wrapper he promised me.

That is why, for a limited time, I will be documenting my use of social media here. This sample does not apply to anyone else but me. I will explain more about it as time goes by.