Everybody gets busy, and once in a while we all get too busy for Twitter.

This is (or should be) a good thing. Hopefully, it means your business, family or friends are taking up too much of your time. Hopefully that’s a positive.

These past couple of weeks I’ve been completely swamped with a project at work. A social-media powered sale that I put together for a client has been successful beyond our wildest expectations, to a point where it’s actually generated a bunch of little headaches because it’s been so big. These are nice problems to have, but problems need solutions, and solutions quickly eat up a lot of your free time.

I’m happy to work 15-hour days when I’m seeing results, but other things have to take a back seat by necessity.
This has unfortunately included my personal account on Twitter. My daily post rate has dropped dramatically in recent weeks. It’s also impacted the number of updates on this blog. Fortunately, I’ve put in a lot of hours in the past in both of these areas, and have a pretty solid body of work to keep people interested. Amazingly, traffic to Twittercism is actually up this week. On Twitter, others have noticed that I’ve been absent and have reached out. This is always welcome.

Give people a reason to miss you, and to stay in touch. We all need downtime and we all get busy. Put in the work ahead of time and your breaks will take care of themselves. The last thing anybody wants is the realisation that nobody noticed. Or cared.

Twitter’s had a torrid few months and continues to have problems with error rates and API calls, but that’s simply scratching the absolute tip of the bugs and issues iceberg.

Here are five big holes that Twitter needs to fill.

Staff

Twitter is clearly understaffed. The company is actively hiring – there are 39 vacancies at the time of writing – and that’s a good sign, but they really need to step it up.

The company has documented their void in engineering, but of equal concern is the size of their support team. @Delbius et al do the best they can, but more often than not support enquiries still get little more than an auto-responded list of frequently asked questions and a rapidly-closed ticket.

I’m not sure exactly how many of their 241 current employees work in support, but I do know that only three of the 39 vacancies are in this area. In both cases, it isn’t enough – only 11% of my readers rate Twitter’s support as good to excellent. A whopping 79% rate it as below average to terrible.

Better Privacy Solutions

As I’ve documented on various occasions on this blog, Twitter’s block is not actually a block at all. The only way to get true security on your updates is to make them private. There needs to be a middle ground.

Read the rest of this entry

Last week I wrote about Earlybird (@earlybird), a concept Twitter has developed to promote the merchandise and services of carefully selected partners. In return, Twitter gets a share of revenue, and we get access to some incredible deals. It all sounded rather splended. Even wondrous clichés like ‘golden eggs’ were thrown around.

Well, this all went live yesterday, and the first amazing offer is now up! What is it? Can you wait? I hope you’re sitting down.

It’s, uh… tickets for a Disney movie you’ve never heard of.

Today, we’re excited to launch the first @earlybird Exclusive Offer, in partnership with The Walt Disney Studios. For a limited time, @earlybird followers in the U.S. can get a special deal on tickets for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” a new feature film from Walt Disney Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Films that opens in theaters today.

Form an orderly queue everybody… no pushing to the front… calm down… CALM DOWN…!

This is all hearsay and rumour at the moment, but then most of these kinds of things involving Twitter usually are. How far back was it that we started hearing about premium accounts?

Anyway, according to Peter Kafka (@pkafka) at AllThingsD, there’s a chance that Twitter could be planning to offer a variation on its Promoted Tweets feature to common or garden users such as you and I.

According to Kafka:

People familiar with the company’s plans say it has been discussing yet another revenue generator: Think of it as a “Promoted Tweeter” product, which highlights specific user accounts, designed to bump up follower counts.

My sources weren’t sure about the business model behind the product, which may be because Twitter itself doesn’t know yet. Some obvious possibilities: Twitter could charge users based on the number of followers they acquired, or simply based on the exposure their Twitter accounts received.

Twitter’s spokesman Sean Garrett (@SG) stated via email, somewhat vaguely:

“We will eventually have full suites of both promoted and commercial products. All the components of these two buckets of product have yet to be determined. Some are currently being tested publicly now. Some will be tested soon. Some are just ideas that we are broaching externally for feedback.”

It’s very debatable how much value something like this would bring. Of course, make this cheap enough and the spammers, mass-marketers and churners would likely be all over a product like this.

But for everybody else the very concept of paying for followers, even indirectly, goes against everything that makes Twitter work – being remarkable, engaging with others and ensuring your network remains optimised as much as possible.

Of course, Twitter’s suggested user list essentially gave this opportunity to lots of high-profile celebrities and brands for free, and many benefited from this with millions of followers, almost overnight. And while there has definitely been a value there for some, the quality of those followers is considered to be fairly low.

And this was when they didn’t cost a penny. Put a price on that – assuming you can – and that quality is likely to dip even further. It could work like Google Adwords, where you only pay Twitter for each person who clicks on your promotional tweet and/or becomes a follower, but that in no way guarantees any kind of quality.

More importantly, for many Twitter is still seen as a numbers game – the person with the most followers wins. By adding a business model to that the company is basically telling the world that that’s exactly what it is.

What is @earlybird?

Twitter @earlybird Exclusive Offers are special time-bound deals, sneak-peeks, and events that are promoted by the official Twitter @earlybird account. We partner with select advertisers and retweet offers that they have crafted only for the Twitter community. Our advertising partners determine the terms of the offer, including availability, amount, and price. As with other forms of advertising from Twitter, we are focused on bringing value to our users and will keep your interests in mind as we develop this program.

(Read more here.)

Twitter makes money from this through a revenue share with the selected advertisers. It all sounds a bit like @Woot, to be honest, and if the partners and offers are good and relevant enough could do very well indeed. (Woot, of course, was recently acquired by Amazon.)

No offers at the time of writing, but expect this to change very soon. Follow @earlybird now to be first in line for those golden eggs.