Is It Time to Change Twitter Chats?

Steve Champeon (@schampeo), “first blogger I ever read” and long-time friend, dropped me a line in response to my tweets in Twitter. The gist: twitter isn’t meant for group chats (to distinguish it from standard tweetversations). He likened chatting in Twitter to sending large file attachments in email. “Twitter for reach, other medium (whatever it is) for comprehensive details,” he wrote.
He makes valid points that could’ve converted me. I wasn’t giving up chat because it let me participate in a group discussion without barriers (not counting Twitter’s funky problems). No more “What she say?” “Can you please repeat that?” “I missed it. What??” I believe many people think I’m obtuse when I say that stuff.
In fact, I enjoyed several meetings this week plus the recent conference I attended. I loved hearing what everyone had to say that it tore me to peep those phrases to my luckless friends sitting nearest to me. I wanted to know! But it meant coming across as dense in front of my friends and fellow board members.
I knew Twitter chats aggravated people. Even if you say, “About to chat. Put me on twittersnooze,” not everyone catches it, wants to bother or knows what it is. I’ve lost followers because of my continuous streams of contributions in chats (Believe me, I don’t want to be the only person in someone’s Twitter stream).
I learned my lesson and created a different ID for chats. This helps my followers, but it doesn’t help everyone else who follows the folks partaking in the chat.
Maybe it’s time we do things differently. My first option would to be to create a web-based application for Twitter chats where everyone’s chat IDs would work, but the chat would not appear in the public Twitter page. At least, we’d all have our IDs, bios and Twitter connection intact. Not happening with my help because (1) I know little about application program interface (API) programming, and (2) I don’t have time to manage a project of this sort.
However, two solutions have popped up. Panel chatting and alternative applications.
Panel Chatting with Platformchat
When Christina Katz (@thewritermama), author of Writer Mama and Get Known Before The Book Deal contacted me about doing #platformchat in Twitter after the first session, she wanted to begin with an interview format and then open the floor for questions for the latter part. I wrote her back saying that the successful chats I’ve participated in didn’t work that way. (Hey! It’s experience talking!) Instead, the moderator asked questions and anyone could chime in. In the case of a guest, the guest would answer all questions and everyone else could still tweet thoughts.
Shame on me. I used to work in process management. The whole point of process management is to capture the current process. It doesn’t stop there as continuous process improvement takes over because we know things change or we discover better and faster ways to do the process.
The first official interview-style chat amazed me thanks to Therese Walsh (@ThereseWalsh) and Jane Friedman (@JaneFriedman). People hold interviews in Twitter often, but I focused on “chat” rather than interview thinking that experienced chatters (we tend to show up in a few chats) would have trouble adjusting to the different style (in fact, one person stuck out in a recent #platformchat she used the “other way” of chatting.
The advantage of this one is that only the moderator asks the questions and the guests answer rather than the whole group. That eases the pressure on Twitter. The Q&A that happens has, again, only the guests doing the answering.
Happy to admit I was wrong. This chat works like a panel discussion as the moderator asks the questions for part of the panel and then opens it to the audience. Except this is better! Well, for me, anyway because I don’t miss one word.
Alternative Applications
A few of the chats I join have taken this route when Twitter decides it can’t handle its current load and our tweets appear five to ten minutes after the fact. My favorite solution, so far, is FriendFeed thanks to #editorchat with Tim Beyers (@milehighfool) and Lydia Dishman (@lydiabreakfast).
Yes, FriendFeed — the aggregator. It has a feature where the moderator can set up the chat / group and post the original question / topic. Then everyone can reply underneath that. So every new question or topic has all the responses right under it rather than all the replies getting scattered in Twitter. You’ll have people answering the latest questions while some remain on the earlier questions.
You don’t overwhelm anyone’s Twitter stream. The only overwhelming you do is if you feed your FriendFeed into other social networks. I had FriendFeed sending my tweets to Facebook, but stopped that. Few on Facebook know and understand Twitter. That’s overkill for them.
Furthermore, FriendFeed has all of our Twitter IDs keeping us connected that way. We can look up people and follow them back.
Tinychat is my least favorite. You can’t adjust the size of the tiny window and the text. Pausing the chat takes work to figure out. I take that back. Worse than Tinychat was the moderator appearing on a webcam. I couldn’t catch any of the questions and felt like I was in a face-to-face group discussion all over again and missing two-thirds of what people said.
Let’s Change!
If anyone would refuse to change Twitter chats, it’d be me. Remember — no barriers, connections, etc. The message is clear. Twitter chats clog the stream along with the current silly trends that some celebrity urges people to bring to the forefront. A solution is possible. One that connects us Twitter users while relieving Twitter and our followers of the downpour of streams.
Image from Design Reviver