Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth

BPP has had a Twitter presence since just before the show launched on October 1 of last year - a feed of all of their blog posts and radio stories, for Twitter users who wish to be notified each time something new is posted, and a BPP staff account. My thinking behind the staff account would be that the show's producers, editors and hosts would use it to post quick updates about what was going on behind the scenes, as well as to develop a more personal rapport with the audience. They were already doing a great job interacting with the public over their blog, but those interactions always had to be on topic for each particular post. A Twitter-based conversation could be more free-form, spontaneous and immediate.

At first, not much happened. BPP online producer Laura Conaway jumped into the fray, posting notes via Twitter from the beginning. Over time, other BPP staff began posting over the Twitter account, too. But not many people were paying attention; it was tough getting other Twitter users aware of BPP. So I convinced Laura to add a Twitter feed directly to their blog, so users could see their notes right there, and hopefully be enticed to follow them.

Meanwhile, as Rob notes in his post, Laura began to find her voice. For a while, her posts were more like notifications - what was going on at the show and so on. But Rob and others began to reply to Laura's posts - and Laura started replying back. Rob likened it to visiting a diner. The first time you go, you may not interact much with the waitress behind the counter. But after a few visits, you develop a rapport, develop a routine. Next thing you know, it's an essential part of your community life.

I've struggled for a while trying to come up with the right metaphor for Twitter, but Rob's diner metaphor pretty much nails it. As people begin using Twitter, there's often hesitancy, a sense that it's just an absurd broadcasting of the banal. That's not surprising, for when you first join Twitter, you need to build up a list of friends and acquaintances, then begin to read their tweets to get to know them. Otherwise you're just talking to yourself. And it's only when you start opening up - soliciting their ideas and replying to their comments, that Twitter transforms itself from a simple microblogging medium to an ongoing conversation. For users of IRC and other chat media, this may seem obvious, but if you're new to these types of conversations, it takes a while to get a hang of it.

And that's what's happened with BPP. From October through December, Twitter was mostly a notification tool. Since the beginning of this year, you can really feel how it's evolved into an ongoing conversation between BPP staffers and its community of participants. (I'm trying hard to avoid using the cliché of "listeners" and "audience" since they really don't apply to BPP in the same way they do to traditional radio shows.) Now, the tweets fly back and forth between Laura and other Twitter users - and it's a marvel to watch.

Laura recently invited Rob on air to discuss the phenomenon, and in their conversation he suggested we find a way to make it easier for followers of the BPP Twitter account to communicate with each other as well, and not just with BPP staff. They spontaneously started collecting the account names of other Twitter users and encouraged each other to follow each other. Meanwhile, I decided to create yet another Twitter account - named BPPdiner, in honor of Rob's analogy - that would automatically aggregate every post within Twitter that mentioned the word BPP. That way, users could simply follow the BPPdiner account and include BPP in any tweet. This would allow them to keep up with each other's BPP-related tweets. Think of it as an email list, but over Twitter.

It's not a perfect system - I'm using the Twitter search tool Terraminds and the rss-to-Twitter tool TwitterFeed, which can only process a maximum of five posts per 30 minutes - but it's a start. Every time a new person joins the group, it's like another person climbing onto the stool at the diner. You may not know if and when they'll open up and have a conversation. Maybe they'll just sit their and talk to themselves while reading the paper. But you can be sure that the waitress, short-order cook and their fellow customers are ready to chat. -andy