I saw the percolating of Triberr.com at least a week or so before it a critical mass recently. (Does that make me an early adopter? Or just early spotter?)
Mitch Joel, and commentors, have a great discussion about Twitter automation going.
I really liked the idea- practice is another ball of wax.
Most folks are complaining that automatic retweets of unread blog posts suggests that you are recommending something that you might not recommend. I can see that side of the argument, very legit. Course, this operates with the assumption that EVERYONE assumes you are recommending something when you tweet or re-tweet it.
Are you? Should you be held liable if you were to send a link and it changes? The discussion of decorum and expectations about online practices such as this isn't going to end any time soon. The reality is: EVERYONE has their own set of best practices and SOP. I'd like to think that most of them mesh up.
I dare say, I get a little tired of experts telling everyone what Twitter *IS*. It's conversation, it's engagement, you should only Tweet certain times, yadda-yadda-yadda.
Perhaps it is a good sign that there are so many conflicting POV on how to use Twitter. Everyone has their preferences. What Triberr is illustrating, or what the discussion on automating Tweets is illustrating, is "different strokes for different folks."
My experience with Triberr: I was placed in a tribe with people I did not know. That's cool. I did not find the RT equitable because you could control what you RT. I was putting out stuff for people I literally never met before. I started two tribes with two separate bloggers I know and trust and did not have an issue putting out their posts.
I have started seeing examples like this in my stream:
I definitely did not need this circular recommendation in order to read the post. Does it mean that they "recommend" me reading it? NO- I pretty much take at facevalue now that tribr.it links are just automated retweets.
Is this good or bad? I originally leaned towards the "ok" side on this equation, but even with some of the tweaks they are making to the tool, I see it as little more than a reader. If you know who you are re-tweeting, then you probably have the mechanism in place. If you don't know them, then you are probably going to worry the whole time about the perception of your stream if you retweet something that you otherwise wouldn't have.
Course, you don't have to be using Triberr to have that problem.
