I will preface this whole segment by saying that I really like both Robert Scoble and Guy Kawasaki. One of the first "professional" books I ever read was Kawasaki's Rules for Revolutionaries. I read Robert Scoble every month in Fast Company.
My problem with how both of them operate their Twitter accounts is that they are about 20%-30% personal (meaning either observations, pearls of wisdom, or the comment about breakfast) and 70%-80% random reposting of links to various web articles or pages. Kawasaki, for example, has tweeted 54 times thus far today. About 40 of those tweets were just random articles such as Hubble's Greatest Hits and Crimes Most Stylish Crooks. When I add Scoble's 39 tweets, 20 of which were article/page reposts, you can imagine how difficult it gets to find anything else, especially when you follow dozens of people.
In my previous post I referred to Twitter as being like "listening to 100 collective streams of consciousness all at the same time, unfiltered." Now imagine that a few of the 100 are screaming. These users have what could be referred to as "twitter tourette's".
"Sitting down at lunch, but they are serving breakfast....... 30 Funniest cats! Fast electric cars! Who likes horses?........ lunch was good...... New Microsoft ad campaign! Twitter for Moms!...... shit.bitch.fart."
If I were Digg, I'd be taking notice. I'd be trying to sell "guy.digg.com" and "scoble.digg.com" right away. That would really make much more sense. At least there, we could follow an organized, structured list of the pages/sites/videos/images that our favorite "publishers" wish to share. Because that is what I see in Twitter. I see the full swing shift from 90% monotonous posts about cats and teeth brushing to 90% republishing of other materials, which is what Digg already does.
On Twitter, I'm much more interested in personal pieces of information. In Scoble's defense, he actually has a decent share of tweets today about more personal iPhone problems that he and others were having. Buy for Guy Kawasaki, I would much rather get less as long as it was things Guy wanted to say. That's why I'm actually in the middle of reading Reality Check right now.
Someone who really seems to have it nailed down is Tony Hsieh from Zappos. He tweeted twice today and both were messages very relevant to his tribe of followers. One was about a pizza making vending machine that he suggested might find its way into the Zappos offices and the other about a book he just finished reading that he was adding to the Zappos library. A couple of very relevant updates.
I know. I know. If I want to, I can just stop following people who basically spam my Twitter feed. I may have to do that. I did it with the feed from TechCrunch already. It's just tough when I know that some of the tweets will be really meaningful to me from these individuals that I have followed off of Twitter. Add to that the fact that I've seen other big names figure out a really great standard of messaging on Twitter, and I guess I just wish for the best of both worlds.
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