Facebook itself is a conundrum for me. For creating a buzz and a quick community together - using the groups - it’s fantastic. But then actually getting something done within it it remarkably difficult, not least because of the walled garden approach it takes: it sucks information in, but getting it out again is tricky!

I’m both excited by the opportunities twitter present for connecting teams and groups in exactly the sort of space that allows us to “bounce suggestions and ideas off quickly without having to engage in deep conversation or email”, and at the same time frustrated because it doesn’t seem to offer enough of a level of control that could help engage the sceptics.

A big part of the value of twitter seems to be its simplicity. One message goes to many. There are no walled of groups to message as in a CC e-mail. Everyone following you receives your twitters. That brings unanticipated benefits as people you would not have addressed a question to reply or respond with suggestions. It breaks down the barriers between groups.

Yet at the same time - that simplicity creates problems if you work with multiple teams, and want to use twitter to keep in touch with those teams (particularly distributed teams, where mobile-phone twittering could be amazingly helpful to keep team members across the country in touch with each other). I’ve not got a way of broadcasting just to a limited group. All my twitters cross between different spaces I participate in - and that is likely to annoy those who might just want to use twitter to keep in touch with their colleagues and field.

But if I did have access to limited groups in twitter, I would probably end up sending too much just to the group I thought I was relevant to (the introvert in me wouldn’t want to bother other people with this or that message…) and so I would end up loosing a lot of the value of twittering.

So - it seems that if I am to get more people in the youth involvement field using Twitter (so that I can get useful synergies and twittering around non-techie subjects) - realistically twitter needs more controls - but with those controls - it ceases to be useful.

Not all is lost…
Ok - so, I’m still optimistic that this isn’t a fatal problem… but I think I need to explore the notification settings in twitter a little more, and see if a combination of some good guidance for potential sceptical twitter users, with some sort of ‘backchannel’ group messaging set-up can be made to work.

*Post experimentation I’ll try and write this and the results up into a blog post…