Help the SharePoint Community out of the Twitter/Social bookmarking blur!

May 9, 2009

After reading @JoelOleson’s latest post on how the Community has evolved I thought I’d raise some ideas to save all of our time ;-) As we’re all very busy people!

The main reasons I use Twitter is:

to discover new people in the community talking about twitter…and discover their blog…and subscribe to their RSS feed
to try and answer peoples’ questions around SharePoint
to ask questions to the SharePoint community
to hear the SharePoint news before it even hits blog posts
to promote my own blog posts, @SPDevWiki, @SPAdmWiki and SPSource open source projects

Why is the issue?

I think Twitter and the SharePoint community has a few issues at the moment:

Too much noise with everyone RT’ing

It’s the same as the “SP2 is released” and “SPD is free” that you see in Blog articles and it’s only in early stages. But imagine if you follow 10 people and they all RT, you go to check Twitter every day and you have 50 tweets for 5 posts. Imagine in a year or so when the whole community takes it up…it’s going to be a minefield…just like the RSS feeds are!
I think it’s better that you microblog via Twitter that SP2 has been released than post a whole blog post on it…but in my opinion, most should be subscribed to the Microsoft SharePoint blog RSS’s and will know this already.

Content being lost in noise

Everyone is still discovering and learning how they should use Twitter, me included. But the biggest thing for me is that I desperately try not to miss a tweet for fear of some great content being in there. Unfortunately with it being lost in tweets unrelated to SharePoint it makes it hard to catch them all. The big question comes up on whether you bother following people OR just rely on Twitter Search.

Missing tweets

Some days you just don’t get time to catch up on Tweets and just “mark as read” in your Twitter client…and miss things. If you leave it a few days, I just don’t have time to read 1000 tweets, so you skip them! I tend not to as the same content is announced in the Blog RSS I follow (all 400 of them).

Suggestions for Community

Tag your Tweets with #SharePoint

More and more Twitter Power Users are leveraging Twitter clients like Seesmic and TweetDeck to do Twitter Searches. I’ve noticed that not everyone is using the HASH tag #SharePoint. The power of this is that if someone mentions SharePoint in a tweet and you have a watch on it…you’ll get lots and lots of noise. But searching on #SharePoint it narrows it down a lot to more quality content. So if you want to tweet quality content…use the HASH tag.

By using #SharePoint you lose all the job posts too ;-)

Add content to Social Bookmarking

I’ve raised this in a few posts before, but I suggest if you want to tweet links for the rest of the SharePoint community…it isn’t that much extra effort to add it to a social bookmarking tool. There are a lot of us already on Diigo (10463 bookmarks from 625 people tagged SharePoint) and delicious (189028 bookmarks tagged SharePoint).

The toolbars are great for Diigo and it even allows you to “Save Elsewhere” to delicious, ma.gnolia or simply. It also indicates if you’ve already bookmarked the post too which is great!

You will notice in my SharePoint Social Bookmarks I heavily tag my content so if you wanted to see all the SharePoint bookmarks on workflow you go to: http://delicious.com/jthake/sharepoint+workflow and see my 137 bookmarks…you can see the most popular by seeing who else has bookmarked them too!

Hook up social bookmark to Twitter

I use TwitterFeed to hook up my Diigo RSS feed to Twitter. I filter my RSS feed by the keyword SharePoint+Tweet which signifies that the content is worth tweeting about. Every 30mins TwitterFeed posts up to 5 from the feed to my Twitter. I also ensure that I put a #SharePoint Hash tag in there too.

This allows you to get the best of both worlds…Twitter and Social Bookmarking.

Hook up social bookmarks to Blog

To cater for those who like to see blog posts rather than read Twitter or read Social Bookmarking pages, you can hook up your bookmarks to your blog too. Either by having a widget on your blog OR by getting it to autopost your daily/weekly links to your blog. This is how Steve Pietrek works and his posts are often in trackbacks all over SharePoint blogs ;-) Essentially you could go to his Delicious page and see the same view here…and also subscribe to his RSS.

Add the PostRank widget to your blog

PostRank has slowly but surely appearing on all the blogs I visit these days. The PostRank SharePoint topic page does a great job of daily report on who’s blog is most popular out there. It’s not a great indication just yet as not everyone has it on their blog…but it does calculate these results by monitoring social networks as well as click throughs from their widget as well.

Why do these things?

By doing the above it will allow us to utilise the power of these tools.

Check out Popular Posts

Digg really never took off for the SharePoint community so finding Popular SharePoint posts can be done by leveraging the social bookmarking tools Popular Pages (delicious and Diigo) OR seeing the RT’s in Twitter Search.

The above screen shot shows that 19 people have bookmarked the SP2 announcment on delicious, the list of these people can be found by clicking the number 19.

In the workflow example you can see

In my opinion this is a lot easier to see what is trending than Twitter.

Hook up Twitter Search to #SharePoint

Add the #SharePoint Twitter search to your client of choice…I currently use Seesmic. This will allow you to just catch up on Twitter Search for #SharePoint if you’ve not read your Tweets for a few days and not worry about the main Twitter stream you follow.

PostRank RSS OPML

If you like reading your blog posts..you can grab the OPML from the PostRank SharePoint topic page and import it into your favourite reader…you can also import your own OPML into PostRank to make sure that everyone is aware of the RSS feeds you read and can discover new ones!

Conclusion

There are lots of ways to discover content around SharePoint on the web…but by following some of these things above you can help the community make it easier by supporting their approaches to discovering automatically!

Comments

Monday, 11 May 2009 04:22 by Alex Angas
Hi Jeremy, There are some great ideas here. The one thing I'm not sure of is the Twitterfeed connection. I have found that can make your Twitter feed pretty noisy at times. The resources you find are great but I prefer to use Twitter to read about people not web links. :) Thanks for all the good stuff you do for the community, Alex. BTW your blog layout is pretty screwed in Firefox :)

Friday, 15 May 2009 10:19 by Greg Osimowicz
Great article. The level of noise on Twitter is really making me question it's advantages. Would be great to see more people use it in a more structured and ordered way (e.g. the #Sharepoint hash you mentioned).