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Dan Martin on the Twifficiency affair
Our colleague Dan Martin is known within the firm as the person with his finger on the Twitter pulse. On Tuesday morning, he started monitoring more and more traffic concerning Twifficiency, a new service that rates your Twitter efficiency - the sort of thing social media geeks love finding out.
This extract from his BusinessZone blog tracks how stories can take off in the blink of an eye in the connected world.
10am - It started on Tuesday morning with streams of Tweets detailing users' Twifficiency rates, but soon drove users to distraction with the volume of updates being posted. This frustration escalated as people realised the results were being tweeted without most people's knowledge.
Because it was automatically posting statistics without asking permission, Twifficiency quickly attracted warnings that it was a scam. A closer look revealed that the service was the brainchild of 17-year-old Dundee-based IT developer James Cunningham, who created Twifficiency as a bit of fun.
1pm - By lunchtime, the service was “trending” as one of the most talked about items on Twitter. James responded to angry users and promisted to look into correcting the problem:
The episode demonstrates how important it is to test your service and test again before launching it into the fast moving world of social media – and to be prepared for positive and negative feedback. The young entrepreneur's Twifficiency experience should serve as a lesson to all that new business news doesn't travel fast in the 21st century; it travels very fast.
2:45pm – There may be a happy ending after all. James’s admirable entrepreneurial spirit looks like it may be rewarded with the offer of a job:
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Interesting accountancy link?
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Thu, 19/08/2010 - 14:43 |
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Interesting co-incidence that this is being discussed on AccountingWEB as the Google sponsored ad on the Twifficiency home page is currently "Looking for a bookkeeper?" It was for accountancy training the other day.
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This is getting silly
I first heard of Twifficency when my partner tweeted about Dan's blog post yesterday afternoon - one of 500 or so Twitter users to do so.
This morning Dan tweeted, "16,000 reads of my #Twifficiency post in less than 24 hours! Crazy times!" By 1pm on Wednesday, the hit count was up to 18,330.
Talking about it at home, it struck us how the phenomenon has mushroomed in such a short space of time, but was entirely to do with Twitter and its workings, and was of negligible interest to the wider public. We both love using Twitter and what it can do for us, but have we got to the point where millions of people are wasting their time staring at their digital navels?
As @kenjonnard put it, "Is this an example of modern life once again celebrating the mediocre?"