… Twitter is like a crowded room where everyone is yelling over each other …

This seems to be most people’s first impression unless they have someone to sit them down and show them how conversations flow.

For some reason we’ve come to believe that our relationships should spawn from real life introductions. Even after that there is the formality of managing acquaintances, friends and family. Twitter kind of breaks all the rules of traditional friendship. One could jump into any conversation at any time, in real time. We all share a single common bond, an interest in social media.

Once people can change their mindset from “sharing their lives with strangers” to “sharing their lives with new friends”, the barrier will be broken and we move on to our next obstacle.

What is the next obstacle? Complete transparency.

I think this will come in the form of video, geolocal microblog posts or a combination of the two. It’s easy to hide behind an avatar and 140 characters. You can take time to sculpt your tweet, spell check, rewrite, etc. Video brings a whole different level of honesty to the table that can only be described as near complete transparency. Facial expressions, tone and how you articulate yourself transcend static text.

It may be awhile before the masses can communicate at this level via the web …. but why should it be any different than real life?

- Photo by austrini

Here are 3 things you can add to your normal Twitter routine that can help deepen the experience and add more value to your conversations.

1) Reply to replies to let people know they’ve been heard (communicate)

In a perfect world, everyone would reply to everyone else’s tweets. When you think about how Twitter works and the number of followers that are actually online at any one point, you can see how this wouldn’t work.

Now imagine a real life scenario where you make a comment and someone responds however you don’t acknowledge their response. It can be demoralizing. If we can’t improve the quality of the conversation on Twitter overall, we can at least make an effort to make people feel included. At times this might not be possible due to the number of replies or simply that you are away from Twitter when a response is received but it’s the effort that counts.

2) Choose a follower and learn something about them (discover)

A lot of people join Twitter with selfish motives and secretly optimize their Twitter “strategy” to drive more traffic to their site. I have no problem with this as long as their strategy includes providing valuable content to the community.

Now what if we all took the time to learn something new about one of our followers every day. It’s the first step to creating real relationships beyond casual conversation. I think sometimes people forget that a big part of social media is it’s relationships.

3) See how your network interacts outside of twitter via Brightkite, Seesmic, FriendFeed, etc. (explore)

I’m becoming a big fan of video posts. There’s a certain level of honesty behind seeing someone’s facial expressions as they share their thoughts and ideas. I can’t guarantee that any one service is going to become big but I can say that all will have an affect on social media as we move forward. Seesmic has been making moves as well as sites like Brighkite and Tweetworks. So if the conversation on Twitter isn’t enough for you, why not enrich the conversation with some video, pictures or even a location.

- Photo by Poldavo (Alex)

Over time I became a regular in forums like Kirupa and Actionscript.org, all the while slowly getting hits to my blog. It was in one of these forums that I began to realize that the world had a bad interpretation of Flash’s potential in the future of the internet. This was largely due to a rising amount of “SEO gurus” putting flash down every chance they got. I decided to write a couple of blog posts addressing the Flash/SEO problems so many people thought they were having. That post is my second most popular post to date.

My most popular blog post is the source code to a cool flame effect I made awhile back. I started to see the benefit of giving things out for free to get attention. At the time I had no actual goals accept that it felt kind of good to get recognition for a lot of my hard work.

Then one day I was approached by a marketing company do to some flash work. The project went without a hitch and discussions of a full time job started coming up. With little to no previous experience in this type of work environment, my application was in jeopardy. However, I was able to land the job on a trial bases because of the portfolio I had created on my blog.

Six months later I had been reading about how social media could be used as another communication channel for businesses. I had always believed this was an obvious progression and eventually shared my excitement with the rest of my company. A couple months and several blog posts later we started my company’s blog and adopted a whole social media strategy. I’ve gone from Flash programmer to Internet Marketing Specialist in under one year.

Then I met the 20 Something Bloggers community, a whole different reason to blog with a whole new bunch of friends. Blogging was hard at first because none of my friends could understand it. Now I’ve got a community of people just like me, the job I always wanted and a roommate who can blog with the best of them.

I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon. I love showing people how blogging can change their life. I’m currently trying to bring my family with me. My father is catching on better than my mom and my sister is old school with her MySpace blogs. If they finally catch on I’ll have the perfect trifecta of communities on the web; family, friends and business.