I think one of the things holding back Twitter from going “mainstream” is the fact that it’s so open and public. I was browsing through some blogs the other day and found a comment that read:

… 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

You hear a lot about how to get new followers and become part of the conversation on Twitter. I want to focus a little on some ways you can go above and beyond your normal tweeting routine.

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)