Tell Me About Twitter
It has generated a lot of buzz in the past year, but for many, what Twitter does is still a mystery.
Why do we need to log in somewhere just to type in a sentence worth of text?
Isn’t that what Instant Messaging is for?
I heard it is just like Dodgeball.
I have a few friends who LOVE Twitter.. but they can’t really explain why!
None of my friends use it.. why should I sign up?
With an understated web site and easy registration, Twitter almost is too welcoming. Personally, I signed up several months before I even started using the service. My knee-jerk reaction to any service that wants to email all my friends is to click the “no, thanks!” button. The few friends I had that were already on Twitter didn’t use it, or used it sporadically.
That all changed when I went to South by Southwest Interactive this year. I had set up Twitter to send a SMS to my phone if one of my friends sent a tweet. Suddenly, I was getting tweets every few hours! As I met people at SXSWi I found them on Twitter as well, and started ‘following’ them. Soon I was getting tweets every half hour, then every 10 minutes. Some of the people I followed used twitter a lot. Take for example, Andrew Hyde, serial entrepreneur. He tends to tweet every 15 – 20 minutes, and sometimes sends a giant batch of tweets at once. Even though I don’t reply to any of these tweets, I found that I was enjoying reading them as they appeared. It was like Howard Cosell giving me the blow-by-blow on somebody’s daily life.
The real power of Twitter is to get people together with very short notice — you could say spontaneously. If all of your twitter friends live in the same city (say for example San Francisco), this has an almost drug-like addictiveness. You have your network, you send a tweet from your cell phone or IM client (or the Twitter web site) that there is a gathering happening or you are going to dinner, and suddenly your friends appear. In this respect, Twitter is very much like Dodgeball, it is all about getting people together, or telling your friends where you are. Dodgeball has a drawback though — not everyone goes out to a bar or a restaurant or a park every day.. so you have no incentive to use it when you are at home playing Mario Party or watching a DVD.
Twitter isn’t so focused, though, and this lends it to a few more (and just as powerful, in their way) uses. First is as a means to break some news without having to go through the trouble of finding a computer, logging in somewhere, and writing it up. Since you can tweet from your phone, let’s say you bump in to Andrew Hyde on the street and he tells you about a web site that you think your friends will find totally awesome. You type in the concept or the web site URL as a tweet on your cell phone and send it off. All of the people following you are in the loop and you have it in your tweet log to look at later. Or say you just finished writing up a big article and you know some of your friends have been waiting to read it. Shoot of a tweet, and they instantly get the link.
The second way is as an ‘undercurrent’ channel during a big gathering. A really good example of this happened at SXSWi during one of the keynote lectures with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. A good write-up of the incident can be found on The Underwire along with a follow-up article. In this instance Twitter was used by a disgruntled audience to broadcast their feelings to their followers while the lecture was still going on. This led to some, in retrospect, somewhat embarrassing bleeding-edge reporting, but still proves Twitter as a novel medium that other services can’t, or won’t, match any time soon.
Ok, so we have covered Twitter’s accessibility — you can tweet from their web page, from your phone or IM client.. you can also have your tweets sent back to these services as well. You can also reply to any tweet by prefixing your message with @username, where username is the other Twitter user. These replies are also copied out to your followers, so they can get in on the conversation. If you want to message someone directly, send your message with the letter d as the prefix. These ‘direct’ messages get stored in their own special tab on the web site, separate from the main channel. There are additional privacy options in regards to tweets though, you can set who’s tweets you see where and who gets to view your tweets.
Because of the popularity of Twitter over the past year, and the availability of an Application Programming Interface (API), there has been a lot of growth in Twitter-aware web applications and sites. Facebook has several Twitter apps, there are plugins and extensions for browsers, IM clients and blogs like WordPress and Blogger, and full web sites that help you search and trend tweets. You can find a fairly comprehensive list of these in the Twitter fan wiki.
Twitter is a service that only gets better when more people with cell phones and web access start using it. So go sign up, it’s free. Get your friends to join. You might find that it will start you out on some really interesting journeys.