Putting Twitter into Perspective

Brett Tabke was among the speakers on the 'Mega Panel' at SMX Advanced this year. This session essentially consists of a panel of established industry experts fielding questions from the crowd of conference attendees. It never takes long in these type of sessions to get a feel for what's on everybody's mind. This year, to the surprise of exactly no one, it was all things social media and Twitter that dominating the Q & A.

I caught Brett Tabke, founder of WebmasterWorld, shortly after the session to get his take on some of the high points of the discussion. It looks like this social media thing is doing nothing but growing and it's impact is being felt across the board in ways most of us never imagined.

More significantly, this information wasn't simply in the form of Tweets about the crash, there was new content being created and linked to in Tweets. This new content, created on the fly and accessed in real time, wasn't available through Google, Bing or Yahoo yet, but it was in Twitter.

The concept of content discovery in realtime hasn't really been done (at least not very well) to this point. This is why you've been reading weekly rumors of this company or that company being interested in purchasing Twitter.

Evolution of Twitter:
Now that Twitter has become too big to be ignored and (for many) too important not to use, what comes next? Just as with anything else new on the web, it hasn't taken spammers long to get into the mix. Spammers have hit Twitter like 7 year locusts. Anyone who has been using the service of a significant amount of time can tell you that the peddlers of porn, mortgage 'deals' and pharmaceuticals have arrived en force.

Twitter by nature is completely opt-in so you would think that the spammers would have a hard time with getting much done. Fortunately for the spammers however people are, by nature, just greedy. The currency of Twitter is (for the most part) your follower count. Whether it's to increase the effectiveness and reach of your tweets or just to stroke the ego, for many, the Twitter game is largely about growing the follower number.

This has given rise to countless "add 500 followers per day" schemes and mechanisms in order to game the system. The rationale being, if you find somebody with 3000 followers, you are apt to think, "hey, this guy must have something cool to say". It's logical enough but unfortunately not necessarily the case.

So, how can you tell if somebody is worth following? That's a question a lot of people are asking. What is authority? How can you tell if someone is an authority? How do you know the person you are following is even who they claim to be?

Twitter has started What if you want to find twitter people to follow within niche industries, or within your local area?