Twitter, Diabetes and Groucho’s Duck

Back when game shows were as simple as three people, a spartan set and a couple of cameras, You Bet Your Life featured the witty Groucho Marx, announcer George Feneman, and a mustached prop duck that was flown on a pully up above the lights. At the start of the show a “secret word” was announced sotto voce by Feneman, but kept secret from the contestant.

If the contestant said the secret word, which was usually a common but random word that had little to do with the game or the contestant’s life, they got an extra $100.

A stagehand lowered the duck into view of the camera and contestant. The duck had a hundred dollar bill in its beak. (Big money gameshows–and in those days big money was $64,000–didn’t come along for a few years).

Today, I got followed on Twitter by @diabetesnews, whom I didn’t follow back. I don’t have any war with @diabetesnews (or diabetes either, at least yet) and if I were diabetic or involved as a caregiver to someone who was, I might have sought them out. Its good information, in a reasonable amount, well linked.

But what troubles me about this is that I probably got selected because of an offhand snarky comment I made back to @WillPao over his “What age does it become inappropriate to eat Lucky Charms.” It was my answer, I suspect, that got me the follow: “The day you’re diagnosed with Type II diabetes. ”

Maybe I’m just being tech paranoid, and since I made my tweets public, I can hardly be outraged that people follow me. There could me other reasons, and I DM’d @DiabetesNews to inquire. But what worries me is the possibility that it was a bot that made this choice on the basis of a random, offhand remark. I said the secret word, and the duck came down.

I’ve come to love Twitter, which has supplanted other services and software. Its become my tip service, which I tune by deciding whom I follow and hoping that the right people follow me back so that I can return the favor in interest areas I watch closely.

Therefore losing followers and dumping people I follow is probably a good thing. Others are deciding that my content isn’t tuned to their life, or somebody else out there is doing a better job, and gaining followers isn’t necessarily a good thing, because if they picked me because of what I say and what I think, there’s a high probably I’ll like them just as much and will follow back. The incoming stream is already bigger than I’d like.

As Twitter matures, there will be more and more refinement in the art of finding the right mix. Atherton Bartelby’s Mashable post on Follow Fail is an excellent example. We’ve already had the first great security breech, and those of us who didn’t think security was an overriding concern (I mean, its just little txt messages) have been taken to the virtual woodshed.

What we don’t need, is an environment where every tweet is processed by sea of algorithms run by a world-wide collection of special interest groups,  and each day your last few days of tweets are reflected in a wagon-load of tangential follows.

Twitter is at a critical juncture, between security issues, the right mix of commercialization vs. pure social interaction, and just plain too much success. I wish them nothing but luck. They’ve got some serious problems on the horizon, but they’ve also got a lot of users out here who think they’re cooler than a mustached duck with a hundred dollar bill in its beak.