In February of 2009 I blogged about the fact that Twitter was becoming more and more a crowdsourced news editoral application for me. In the post I reviewed how I was using Twitter more as a way to source content and less about conversation.

Let me break it down:

Since that post I believe that I have tweeted about 10,000 or so times. I guess I was a little off on the conversation part. Now for an update on how this has progressed over the last 1.5 years. There is no question that in recent weeks my outbound and conversational habits on Twitter have dropped substantially.

This is due in part for a few reasons. The first is that the agency has gotten very, very busy and there really is less time to converse with others in social networks. Second was the discovery of a very cool, but simplistic, Twitter app called Twittertim.es. Twitter Times is then linked to your Twitter account via  it's oath and then spiders all of the people that you are following. The application crawls your list and then pulls all of the great content, pictures and all, that is being posted in your stream. The page looks nothing like a Twitter stream and resembles an online news or magazine site. The app then weighs the importance of the tweeted links by the frequency that it is posted and re-tweeted by those that you follow. This is the crowdsourced editorial staff that I referred to in the past. Only this time around their commentary is diminished and the posted content is made more important. Sure the "postees" are listed at the bottom of each story but their conversational tweets are removed. As your day fills up with important activities it's nice to be able to get the hyper relevant content, from those you follow, without being sucked in to the conversation.

Now let's step that up even further with the announcement of the new iPad app called Flipboard. The application looks very much like a magazine but all of the content, like Twitter Times, is from your social networks. This time they have included all of the links in your Facebook, Flickr and other social feeds. In fact the crowdsourcing is upped in power but the fact that you can subscribe to user generated Twitter lists to create categories.

If you look at the preview video below you can get a pretty good sense of how it works and how gorgeous it really is. I must admit that I was holding out for the second generation iPad until I saw this app. I consume a ton of social contributed media from the people I follow and would love to be able to take it with me and to view it in a much better UI.

Flipboard is not the first iPad app that is based on this concept and I suspect won't be the last. The talented folks over at Teehan + Lax have a very cool looking iPad app called TweetMag that is soon to be released as well. There is now a race on and this is where I think social is really going in the next few years. I think this is bigger than geo-location apps to be honest. People really do want to know what your reading more than they want to know where you are reading.

Over the last few days I have noticed a sudden and strange behavior on Toyota's Twitter account. There was a huge influx of uber positive re-tweets from other Toyota fans on Twitter. There is nothing wrong with re-tweets (RT's) per say but like most tools in your toolbox understanding how and when to use them is key and from what I could see Toyota did not understand the tool at all.

The subject matter was regarding the quality of Toyota vehicles from point of view of Toyota owners. That in its self is not an issue but the shear volume of RT's on the subject was quite large and it made more of an impression of a "See we are ok and so and so even says we are..." kind of approach. Tweets like this from @Benne420 "@Toyota as a teen driver, I still get amazing gas mileage out of my 02 Camry LE. I love my car!", from @OmarHenry "@Toyota is still the best cars around! a guy at my gym still drives a 1980's toyota with the original engine! dont believe the hype...." and from @FireCat_7 "@Toyota my first car is a 1998 Toyota Camry LE. I LOVE IT and I love Toyota. Much love guys. Keep the good work up :)" were the norm in yesterday's tweets. That is really a very guttural and unsophisticated old fashioned PR approach. Like talking really loud with your hands over your ears "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU".

Anyone that knows me knows that I simply can't stand over use of passive self flatulence on social media sites and this was clearly one of those instances. The tactic of re-tweeting praise from other users is really no different than making the statement yourself. Who are we trying to kid here? I don't care what any social media guru tells you or your company. Be careful on that tactic because as the public become acclimatized to the vernacular of social media marketing so will they see through the thin veneer of that type prolific of re-tweeting. It's lazy social media to flood your stream with.

The tweets felt somewhat desperate and like the usual person responsible for the Twitter account had suddenly been yanked from their duties and a desperate Sr. manager with orders in hand to "DO SOMETHING' was now at the helm. The strategy veered off coarse and felt like there was a sticky accelerator on the RT button.

What should Toyota be doing? They should stay the course of the original strategy by helping the thousands of Toyota drivers out of this mess, through helpful links on how to get there cars fixed quickly, and demonstrating what the company is doing to rectify the matter and to restore confidence in the brand.

When someone is stuck at the bottom of a well that you pushed them down, get a rope and help them out. Don't stand there and tell them that everyone else you pushed was able to avoide the well all together. The whole feed in recent days is nothing but bogus PR fluff. Between the massive recalls and the congressional hearings that begin today it would be better use of social media to take this head on as apposed to head in the sand as they are continuing to do today.

Photo credit emrank