Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2009 > November > 23 > Entry
Twitter Mystery List madness!
For several weeks, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with Twitter’s new “Lists” feature, where you can create a directory of Twitter accounts for other to view, even including people you don’t follow.
It’s a handy way to keep track of people and to group them into common interests or careers (I’m on several for “tech” and “journalists”). But until now, I haven’t figured out a single good way to use Lists. Some people I follow have already created lists for Statesman staffers, for tech journalists and other good groupings, but I haven’t felt it was worth the effort for me to curate a list that seems redundant with other ones out there.
I also thought about creating lists for bloggers or for Austin friends or for social media experts, but again, those lists would be so large they’d be next to pointless.
I started to notice people putting me on lists with vague names, or even incorrect lists. One Twitter account that follows media people keeps putting me on lists like, “USA Today.” I began to wonder if I should just put a list together and not tell people what it was for.
Thus began Omar’s Twitter Mystery List. I decided to turn it into a giant guessing game. I started picking out people for the list and over the next day kept adding more names that applied to the mystery theme.
Last night, I posted about it and got a very small number or responses, but today I offered a $25 iTunes gift card (which I will be purchasing out of my own pocket; it’s not a Statesman contest) and suddenly, I was flooded with guesses on Twitter and on Facebook.
I tried to reply to each guess, offering more clues and information.
The answer, it turned out, was “People who attended SXSW 2009.” Even early on, I had a few guesses that it was SXSW speakers or people on the lineup for 2010, both very close guesses, but not quite there. I kept adding more people to the list, relying on the SXSW festival guide, my news stories from the fest and some careful Google/Twitter searches to make sure the list was correct.
In each case, when someone guessed incorrectly, I was able to point out examples of people on the list who didn’t meet their criteria.
The guesses got more frantic and I struggled to keep up with @replies. There were several good guesses that took me a while to shoot down. One person guessed that the people on the list were all Twitter users with more followers than people they followed and I hunted frantically through the list for at least one or two examples of names that didn’t apply. I finally found two, but for one scary moment I thought I was going to have to award a bonus winner simply because I couldn’t prove them wrong on what was a very good guess.
Several people mentioned SXSW, specifically on a Facebook wall post, and I had to decide whether they were close enough.
In the end, Caroling Lee made several SXSW guesses before she finally won with, “People who attended SXSW last year that you think might attend in 2010.” I deemed it very close, especially since she’s already had previous guesses about SXSW that were almost a win.
It was a lot of fun, but much harder to manage once it picked up steam and guesses and responses were flying back and forth. I began to worry that all my @replies were going to annoy people who weren’t interested in the contest but did follow me and other Austinites who were participating.
I also made one big error: I included Texas State professor Dara Quackenbush on the list even though she did not attend Interactive. I thought I remembered her and Cindy Royal (who did attend) going, along with many of their students, and it was a huge mistake on my part. I took her off the list as soon as I realized the mistake, but it was after the contest was over, unfortunately.
Nevertheless, I think it worked out well — in my responses to guesses, I was able to use lots of Twitter handles of people on the list, which I think spread interest in the contest and made more people aware it was happening. (In fact, one person I’ve never met before replied after they were name-checked and now I’m following them on Twitter.) Several people direct-messaged me asking me to spill the beans before the contest was over, but I rebuffed them, figuring it would be over soon enough.
Once the contest really got going, it took only about two hours for it to conclude. A diverting activity on a slow Monday afternoon and, I hope, fun for those involved.
It proved to me again that Twitter is what you make of it. It’s a platform, nothing more, and you can choose to have as much fun or to express yourself as much as you like. People who find Twitter boring or useless, I’ve found, simply haven’t figured out a good way to make it work for them or haven’t devoted the imagination to try to do something new with it or to make it an extension of their own interests and talents.
It seems like maybe a talent of mine is getting people excited about a $25 gift card and frustrating participants with a Twitter-based mystery.
I’m going to think on how to make the contest more streamlined, less chaotic and without the glaring misstep I made at the end, but I think there will definitely be a Twitter Mystery List #2 sometime soon.
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