Whereas Zappos‘ social media policy is “be real and use your judgement”.

Guess which company is renown for great customer care, and which one isn’t.

Tim Van Damme recommended the soundtrack on Twitter, and at $5 – yes $5 – it seemed a veritable bargain; quick preview confirmed that to be so.

It’s a dark suite of electronica, which having since seen the film doesn’t quite fit at times, but somehow that works for this film – possibly due to the quality of the music in its own right.

I particularly like the version of In The Hall Of The Mountain King which accompanies a tilt-shift view of Henley Regatta in the film.

Highly recommended – download now.

Amazing, even for NatWest.

How they choose to respond to this will be very telling. If they have a social media strategy does it include damage limitation plans? Only time will tell.

What I found in my few Twitter free days was that I didn’t miss it as much as expected. I didn’t have cravings or withdrawal symptoms despite going cold turkey. I found that I can take it or leave it and I’ve decided to take it.

Twitter has become a part of my day, a part of my way of doing things. It’s a source of news and review; a focussed, personalised mini RSS feed. If I have a question Twitter will often closely follow Google when I’m looking for an answer, and those answers have the added weight of peer review or authority.

So no more of this Twitter tooing and froing.

Now I just need to find a way of removing Gowalla and Foursquare tweets without un-following people.

Whilst this week is an experiment to see how I, a one time Twitter addict, get on; I don’t have any specific reasons for deciding to take a break and possibly turning my back on Twitter. It’s a combination of things that has led to a rising sense of “meh?”

I’ll report back in week about how it’s gone or is going.

Mike explains his need for a Twitter break:

I’ve sensed lately that I need to take a step back. I’ve caught myself constantly checking my Twitter mentions, working very hard to tweet something of value and scanning my live feed in Tweetie for something, anything interesting to read.

Mike goes on to say:

While that’s typical Twitter user behavior, I’ve felt this incessant attraction to scanning random tweets and replies at all times to be distracting my focus from more important things in my life right now.

I can identify with Mike’s feeling of compulsion to check Twitter often, perhaps too often, and for the desire for there to be something new and interesting to read. This reminds me of a talk about Technology and Psychology by Suw Charman-Anderson at FOWA two years ago. Suw described a series of common ‘symptoms’ connected with email which I think many of the audience could identify with; it transpired that there were the psychological symptoms of addiction.

Andrew’s reasons for leaving Twitter share a theme with Mike’s: that of ‘mental bandwidth’ and time. But Andrew also had issues with the content and perceived value of what he saw being Tweeted. In an email he explained:

For me, social media, and Twitter in particular, is becoming a billion banal internal monologues being broadcast to the world. I think there is a serious risk of us all becoming infantilised. We are not talking to others, just ourselves. With a few exceptions, there is no real “conversation” going on.

I was also not sure what I was contributing by talking about what I was “doing”. It started to feel childish and pointless.

I now see Twitter as a waste of valuable processing time in my already cluttered head . I’d rather spend time with real people – thinking, arguing, and just being with them and not worrying if I need more than 140 characters to make a point.

Interesting, and again there are some sentiments with which I can sympathise.

Why I find Mike and Andrew’s thoughts and actions so interesting is that I a phase of wondering about Twitter, and what it means for me. I’ve ditched all other social media sites and accounts. I took particular enjoyment in deleting my Facebook account; now that is a place devoid of conversation and full of banal, superficial rubbish. So that Just leaves Twitter.

I don’t have any problem with what people say on Twitter; if I don’t like it, don’t find it interesting or of value or if somebody tweets too much I’ll unfollow that person. I manage the signal to noise ratio with extreme prejudice.

I’ve just found that the Lists functionality on Twitter allows me to put people into lists without having to follow them. So I can keep my main Twitter feed clear of clutter, but still have easy, occassional access to people that are of interest. I’ve recently found a number of Formula 1 and motor sport journalists and teams that are highly interesting to a petrol head like me. I’ve been able to put them into a motor sport list so I can get my racing fix without having my main Twitter feed full of testing updates from Valencia for example. This facility is transforming how I use Twitter.

The compulsion to check Twitter and the associated time-suck is an issue I can completely identify with. I recently started a new job that is wonderfully busy, and now I really can’t afford the time during the day to check Twitter as much as I used to; my streamlined main Twitter feed and use of lists is going to help me quickly catch up at the beginning and end of the day.

I don’t see myself stopping using Twitter or even taking a break, but instead I’m controlling more carefully when and how I use it. Twitter should be a tool to use how you see fit: be it a news source, a place for conversation with friends, micro-publishing platform or a combination thereof and more.

Most of all I’ve been fortunate to meet and get to know some great people through Twitter. Some I’ve met in person, some our conversation has moved to email and IM, but for many it’s just a Twitterthang and I’d miss that too much to stop.

From The Guardian:

The existence of a previously secret injunction against the media by oil traders Trafigura can now be revealed.

Within the past hour Trafigura’s legal firm, Carter-Ruck, has withdrawn its opposition to the Guardian reporting proceedings in parliament that revealed its existence.

Labour MP Paul Farrelly put down a question yesterday to the justice secretary, Jack Straw. It asked about the injunction obtained by “Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton Report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura”.

The Guardian was due to appear at the High Court at 2pm to challenge Carter-Ruck’s behaviour, but the firm has dropped its claim that to report parliament would be in contempt of court.

Full Article

We saw last week that Twitter have secured another found of funding described as “significant”, and so we assume that at some point these investors are going to want to see a return.

Many ideas for how Twitter might monetise the service have been put forward: paid accounts, premium accounts for brands and companies, advertising on the page, advertising in Tweets etc. But I have another thought about how Twitter might be planning to integrate advertising or paid content.

In the sidebar of the of a Twitter user’s homepage is a trending topics panel which shows the topics, keywords or hashtags being tweeted about most at that point in time. Clicking on one of these takes you to a search for that term or keywords which can be updated as new tweets appear.

Clicking on the trending topic ‘iPhone’ this morning I went to the usual list of tweets but then noticed this new, at least to me, content at the top explaining why ‘iPhone’ was a trending topic:

I’d not really got why Twitter had added trending topics to the site as it just seemed to be a tool for spammers to piggy back upon, but once you see this explanatory content it starts to make a little more sense. I can see this easily becoming advertising (Google keywords anybody?) or paid for content: each use of the word iPhone could be a link to Apple.com for example. This would allow Twitter to start to generate revenue from the service and without a negative impact on the user experience. Interesting…

Of course this would make trending topics even more of a spam magnet and doesn’t address the large number of users accessing Twitter via other clients and applications, but it does point to a potential approach for Twitter to start making money.

What do you think?

But I have now found, what for me is, the perfect description; from Chris Hardwick in an interview with Lifehacker.com:

Twitter is a guy you can always elbow in the side and say, “Hey, look, a guy in a clown suit just threw up!”

I’m using that from now on – marvellous!