Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Twitter free source for business marketing
Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author's profile page and delivered to the author's subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications. While the service costs nothing to use, accessing it through SMS may incur phone service provider fees
Sign up for Twitter account
Twitter isn’t just a cute way for keeping in instant touch with friends on mobile phones anymore. It has ramped up quickly to be the search engine of choice for some with its human driven results.
Applications galore allow you to find friends all over the world with similar interests and keep up with them in real time.
Businesses can form instant direct relationships with their customer bases simply by signing up and using the service regularly, and according to the models Twitter is trying out, they will soon be able to advertise to the Twitter community as well. It has grown into a behemoth that is hard to get your hands around, which is why we’ve put this article together for you.
We’ve compiled an alphabetized glossary here for you so that you can just scan down the list and find the term that you are looking for, as well as a list of popular Twitter applications and instructions for incorporating Twitter into your website and blogs.
Applications galore allow you to find friends all over the world with similar interests and keep up with them in real time.
Businesses can form instant direct relationships with their customer bases simply by signing up and using the service regularly, and according to the models Twitter is trying out, they will soon be able to advertise to the Twitter community as well. It has grown into a behemoth that is hard to get your hands around, which is why we’ve put this article together for you.
We’ve compiled an alphabetized glossary here for you so that you can just scan down the list and find the term that you are looking for, as well as a list of popular Twitter applications and instructions for incorporating Twitter into your website and blogs.
Twitter Basics
If you had no idea what Twitter was walking into this article, we’re going to start you off at the very beginning. To sign up for Twitter, go to twitter.com and click on “Get Started – Join!”. Fill out the information and voila – you have your own Twitter account. I set up two accounts; one on my personal name, and one for my business. It’s important to grab your names before someone else does, even if you don’t plan on using the account for a while.
How to get more followers
The first quest of a new Twitter user is to add followers who are interested in the same topics as they are. Once you’ve exhausted your personal and professional contacts, where do you go from there? The way most people take is the one described above, where you search Twitter for your interests and add people based on those interests.
There has been a lot written about this topic and we’ve included links to some more high-profile articles by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger. Here are some tips from the pros:
There has been a lot written about this topic and we’ve included links to some more high-profile articles by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger. Here are some tips from the pros:
Give Your Followers Value
Answer questions that your followers have if you know the answer. Share helpful tips for your industry that don’t have to do with your followers buying your product. Tell a joke. Always give your followers something that they can take away from the conversation and use. They will recommend you to your friends and you will generate tweets that will encourage new people to follow you.
Tweet in Peak Times
Peak times are basically during the day throughout the work week. If you want to account for time differences in North America, aim for morning to early afternoon.
Tweet Regularly
Tweet often, but only if you have something of value to say. You should aim for a few tweets a day. Do not install a bot program to Tweet for you – your followers will figure it out and unfollow you. If you are taking off for a few days use a service like TweetLater to schedule your tweets.
Create a Custom Profile Page Background
This tells your potential followers that you care about your Twitter presence and will probably be a good person to follow.
Remember that Twitter is Public
The first rule of Twitter is that it is more permanent than the internet. When you post something, at least one person is going to read it and have a memory of that event. Unless you lock your profile, all of your tweets are public record and searchable, forever. While Twitter is all about honesty and just being yourself, you have to act like you are writing something that your parents will eventually read.
DON’T KNOCK IT TILL YOU’VE TRIED IT
Of course, this advice goes for anything in life. But listen: even my own masterful prose can’t capture what you’ll feel when you try Twitter. So try it.
If you don’t get any value from it, close the window and never come back; that’s fine. Despite all the press, Twitter is still largely a geek and early-adopter phenomenon at this point.
If you don’t get any value from it, close the window and never come back; that’s fine. Despite all the press, Twitter is still largely a geek and early-adopter phenomenon at this point.
Twitter? It’s What You Make It
riting can be solitary work, but not when you write a tech column. Feedback pours in so quickly — by e-mail, on blogs, in online comments — that it’s almost real-time performance art.
For the longest time, my readers kept nagging me to check out this thing called Twitter. I’d been avoiding it, because it sounded like yet another one of those trendy Internet time drains. E-mail, blogs, chat, RSS, Facebook. ... Who has time to tune in to yet another stream of Internet chatter?
True, there’s nothing quite like Twitter. It’s a Web site where you can broadcast very short messages — 140 characters, max — to anyone who’s signed up to receive them. It’s like a cross between a blog and a chat room. Your “followers” might include six friends from high school, or, if you’re Barack Obama, 254,484 of your most tech-savvy fans. (Incidentally, he hasn’t sent out a single Twitter message since taking office. Where are his priorities?)
Meanwhile, you sign up to receive the utterances of other people. Eventually, your screen fills with a scrolling display of their quips — jokes, recommended links, thoughts for the day, and a lot of “what I’m doing right now” stuff.
Even so, I was turned off by the whole ego thing. Your profile displays how many followers you have, as if it’s some kind of worthiness tally. (See also: Facebook friend counter.)
Then one day, I saw Twitter in action.
I was serving on a grant proposal committee, and I watched as a fellow judge asked his Twitter followers if a certain project had been tried before. In 15 seconds, his followers replied with Web links to the information he needed. No e-mail message, phone call or Web site could have achieved the same effect. (It’s only a matter of time before some “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” contestant uses Twitter as one of his lifelines.)
So I signed up for a free account name (pogue) and stepped in.
It’s not easy to figure out what’s going on. Most people are supportive and happy to help you out. There is, however, such a thing as Twitter snobbery.
One guy took me to task for asking “dopey questions.” Others criticized me for various infractions, like not following enough other people, writing too much about nontech topics or sending too many or too few messages.
Determined to get the hang of it, I searched Google for “Twitter for beginners.” There were 927,000 search results.
(Of course, you get a staggering number of results when you search for anything on Google, which is why it’s such a lame trick when journalists use Google tallies to prove their points. But I digress.)
Most of these articles are lists of rules. One says to use Twitter to market your business; another says never to use Twitter to market your business. One recommends writing about what you’re doing right now (after all, the typing box is labeled, “What are you doing?”); another says not to.
One of these rule sheets even says, “Add value. Build relationships. Think LONG term.” Are we talking about Twitter, or running for Congress?
My confusion continued until, at a conference, I met Evan Williams, chief executive and co-founder of Twitter. I told him about all the rules, all the advice, all the “you’re not doing it right” gripers. I told him that the technology was exciting, but that all the naysayers and rule-makers were dampening my enthusiasm.
He shook his head apologetically — clearly, he’s heard all this before — and told me the truth about Twitter: that they’re all wrong.
Or, put another way, that they’re all right.
Twitter, in other words, is precisely what you want it to be. It can be a business tool, a teenage time-killer, a research assistant, a news source — whatever. There are no rules, or at least none that apply equally well to everyone.
In fact, Mr. Williams said that a huge chunk of Twitter lore, etiquette and even terminology has sprouted up from Twitter users without any input from the company. For example, the people came up with the term “tweets” (what everyone calls the messages). The crowd began referring to fellow Twitterers by name like this: @pogue. Soon, that notation became a standard shorthand that the Twitter software now recognizes. The masses also came up with conventions like “RT,” meaning re-tweet — you’re passing along what someone else said on Twitter.
If you asked me to write my own “Rules for Twitter” document — No. 927,001 on Google — it would look something like this:
For the longest time, my readers kept nagging me to check out this thing called Twitter. I’d been avoiding it, because it sounded like yet another one of those trendy Internet time drains. E-mail, blogs, chat, RSS, Facebook. ... Who has time to tune in to yet another stream of Internet chatter?
True, there’s nothing quite like Twitter. It’s a Web site where you can broadcast very short messages — 140 characters, max — to anyone who’s signed up to receive them. It’s like a cross between a blog and a chat room. Your “followers” might include six friends from high school, or, if you’re Barack Obama, 254,484 of your most tech-savvy fans. (Incidentally, he hasn’t sent out a single Twitter message since taking office. Where are his priorities?)
Meanwhile, you sign up to receive the utterances of other people. Eventually, your screen fills with a scrolling display of their quips — jokes, recommended links, thoughts for the day, and a lot of “what I’m doing right now” stuff.
Even so, I was turned off by the whole ego thing. Your profile displays how many followers you have, as if it’s some kind of worthiness tally. (See also: Facebook friend counter.)
Then one day, I saw Twitter in action.
I was serving on a grant proposal committee, and I watched as a fellow judge asked his Twitter followers if a certain project had been tried before. In 15 seconds, his followers replied with Web links to the information he needed. No e-mail message, phone call or Web site could have achieved the same effect. (It’s only a matter of time before some “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” contestant uses Twitter as one of his lifelines.)
So I signed up for a free account name (pogue) and stepped in.
It’s not easy to figure out what’s going on. Most people are supportive and happy to help you out. There is, however, such a thing as Twitter snobbery.
One guy took me to task for asking “dopey questions.” Others criticized me for various infractions, like not following enough other people, writing too much about nontech topics or sending too many or too few messages.
Determined to get the hang of it, I searched Google for “Twitter for beginners.” There were 927,000 search results.
(Of course, you get a staggering number of results when you search for anything on Google, which is why it’s such a lame trick when journalists use Google tallies to prove their points. But I digress.)
Most of these articles are lists of rules. One says to use Twitter to market your business; another says never to use Twitter to market your business. One recommends writing about what you’re doing right now (after all, the typing box is labeled, “What are you doing?”); another says not to.
One of these rule sheets even says, “Add value. Build relationships. Think LONG term.” Are we talking about Twitter, or running for Congress?
My confusion continued until, at a conference, I met Evan Williams, chief executive and co-founder of Twitter. I told him about all the rules, all the advice, all the “you’re not doing it right” gripers. I told him that the technology was exciting, but that all the naysayers and rule-makers were dampening my enthusiasm.
He shook his head apologetically — clearly, he’s heard all this before — and told me the truth about Twitter: that they’re all wrong.
Or, put another way, that they’re all right.
Twitter, in other words, is precisely what you want it to be. It can be a business tool, a teenage time-killer, a research assistant, a news source — whatever. There are no rules, or at least none that apply equally well to everyone.
In fact, Mr. Williams said that a huge chunk of Twitter lore, etiquette and even terminology has sprouted up from Twitter users without any input from the company. For example, the people came up with the term “tweets” (what everyone calls the messages). The crowd began referring to fellow Twitterers by name like this: @pogue. Soon, that notation became a standard shorthand that the Twitter software now recognizes. The masses also came up with conventions like “RT,” meaning re-tweet — you’re passing along what someone else said on Twitter.
If you asked me to write my own “Rules for Twitter” document — No. 927,001 on Google — it would look something like this:
How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live
(Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter)
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.
The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.
In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.
The Open Conversation
Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)
But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.
At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.
When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you'll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.
Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.
The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal."
I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams was launching a communications platform that limited you to a couple of sentences at most. What was next? Software that let you send a single punctuation mark to describe your mood? (See the top 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)
And yet as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this "ambient awareness": by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don't think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.
The social warmth of all those stray details shouldn't be taken lightly. But I think there is something even more profound in what has happened to Twitter over the past two years, something that says more about the culture that has embraced and expanded Twitter at such extraordinary speed. Yes, the breakfast-status updates turned out to be more interesting than we thought. But the key development with Twitter is how we've jury-rigged the system to do things that its creators never dreamed of.
In short, the most fascinating thing about Twitter is not what it's doing to us. It's what we're doing to it.
The Open Conversation
Earlier this year I attended a daylong conference in Manhattan devoted to education reform. Called Hacking Education, it was a small, private affair: 40-odd educators, entrepreneurs, scholars, philanthropists and venture capitalists, all engaged in a sprawling six-hour conversation about the future of schools. Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact. (See the top 10 celebrity Twitter feeds.)
But this event was happening in 2009, so trailing behind the real-time, real-world conversation was an equally real-time conversation on Twitter. At the outset of the conference, our hosts announced that anyone who wanted to post live commentary about the event via Twitter should include the word #hackedu in his 140 characters. In the room, a large display screen showed a running feed of tweets. Then we all started talking, and as we did, a shadow conversation unfolded on the screen: summaries of someone's argument, the occasional joke, suggested links for further reading. At one point, a brief argument flared up between two participants in the room — a tense back-and-forth that transpired silently on the screen as the rest of us conversed in friendly tones.
At first, all these tweets came from inside the room and were created exclusively by conference participants tapping away on their laptops or BlackBerrys. But within half an hour or so, word began to seep out into the Twittersphere that an interesting conversation about the future of schools was happening at #hackedu. A few tweets appeared on the screen from strangers announcing that they were following the #hackedu thread. Then others joined the conversation, adding their observations or proposing topics for further exploration. A few experts grumbled publicly about how they hadn't been invited to the conference. Back in the room, we pulled interesting ideas and questions from the screen and integrated them into our face-to-face conversation.
When the conference wrapped up at the end of the day, there was a public record of hundreds of tweets documenting the conversation. And the conversation continued — if you search Twitter for #hackedu, you'll find dozens of new comments posted over the past few weeks, even though the conference happened in early March.
Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles.
Why Everyone's Talking about Twitter
you ever fancied yourself a blogger but didn't have the time or energy to post thoughtful or silly missives at regular intervals, a new service called Twitter could set your inner blogger free. While some people call it microblogging or moblogging, I like to think of Twitter simply as blogging for regular people.
Maybe you're really busy. Maybe you don't have much to say. Or maybe you're just lazy. Not a problem. This free service works by letting you broadcast a group text message to your friends' mobile phones from either your own phone, an instant message or an online form at twitter.com. All your notes are then stored and displayed on your personal profile page on the site, which includes links to your friends' Twitter pages, a thumbnail picture of your choice, and a short bio. You can even send text updates directly to your MySpace page. Just remember to keep it short: posts are limited to 140 characters, and the topic is, invariably, "what are you doing?"
More often than not, it turns out, Twitter's 100,000 members — twice as many as it had just a month ago, according to Twitter business development director Biz Stone — are simply killing time. Even Presidential hopeful John Edwards is on it, although he seems to be the only one thinking about more than lunch. As I type this, caroline is mulling over some Girl Scout cookies, ian_hocking is "Waiting for Jessica to arrive so we can eat!" and hlantz is "having a nice cup of Soft Starmint tea." Scintillating.
The chatter about Twitter escalated into a virtual roar two weeks ago during the South by Southwest multimedia festival in Austin, Tex., when the barebones service owned by Blogger founder Evan Williams, 34, was named the best blogging tool and attendees used it to meet up at parties. Since then, the fawning attention to the seven-month-old service has come full-circle as reviewers have begun to realize how boring most people's lives really are. (As if YouTube's gallery of puppy and kitten videos hadn't already driven that point home.) Nonetheless, Twitter has been the top term on blog search engine Technorati for the past two weeks.
Plenty of people would happily have Twitter muzzled, rather than endure the beeping alert for yet another new text message. But I'm betting that Twitter will get a lot noisier before netizens move on to the next new thing. Why? Because Twitter targets the same crowd that digs MySpace and, frankly, that site is getting stale. We cyberjunkies need a new thrill, and what better than a service that combines social networking, blogging and texting? Dozens of other companies are trying to do the same thing with services like VelvetPuffin and Google's Dodgeball. But only Twitter has figured out how to make it easy.
I know, it's totally silly and shallow, but that's precisely why Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app. And if you don't like it, well, in the words of one Twit from San Francisco, "I'm so sick to death of Twitter-haters. If you don't like it, why waste your time writing, reading, or talking about it? Sheesh."
Maybe you're really busy. Maybe you don't have much to say. Or maybe you're just lazy. Not a problem. This free service works by letting you broadcast a group text message to your friends' mobile phones from either your own phone, an instant message or an online form at twitter.com. All your notes are then stored and displayed on your personal profile page on the site, which includes links to your friends' Twitter pages, a thumbnail picture of your choice, and a short bio. You can even send text updates directly to your MySpace page. Just remember to keep it short: posts are limited to 140 characters, and the topic is, invariably, "what are you doing?"
More often than not, it turns out, Twitter's 100,000 members — twice as many as it had just a month ago, according to Twitter business development director Biz Stone — are simply killing time. Even Presidential hopeful John Edwards is on it, although he seems to be the only one thinking about more than lunch. As I type this, caroline is mulling over some Girl Scout cookies, ian_hocking is "Waiting for Jessica to arrive so we can eat!" and hlantz is "having a nice cup of Soft Starmint tea." Scintillating.
The chatter about Twitter escalated into a virtual roar two weeks ago during the South by Southwest multimedia festival in Austin, Tex., when the barebones service owned by Blogger founder Evan Williams, 34, was named the best blogging tool and attendees used it to meet up at parties. Since then, the fawning attention to the seven-month-old service has come full-circle as reviewers have begun to realize how boring most people's lives really are. (As if YouTube's gallery of puppy and kitten videos hadn't already driven that point home.) Nonetheless, Twitter has been the top term on blog search engine Technorati for the past two weeks.
Plenty of people would happily have Twitter muzzled, rather than endure the beeping alert for yet another new text message. But I'm betting that Twitter will get a lot noisier before netizens move on to the next new thing. Why? Because Twitter targets the same crowd that digs MySpace and, frankly, that site is getting stale. We cyberjunkies need a new thrill, and what better than a service that combines social networking, blogging and texting? Dozens of other companies are trying to do the same thing with services like VelvetPuffin and Google's Dodgeball. But only Twitter has figured out how to make it easy.
I know, it's totally silly and shallow, but that's precisely why Twitter is on its way to becoming the next killer app. And if you don't like it, well, in the words of one Twit from San Francisco, "I'm so sick to death of Twitter-haters. If you don't like it, why waste your time writing, reading, or talking about it? Sheesh."
Clive Thompson on How Twitter Creates a Social Sixth Sense
Twitter is the app that everyone loves to hate. Odds are you've noticed people — probably much younger than you — manically using Twitter, a tool that lets you post brief updates about your everyday thoughts and activities to the Web via browser, cell phone, or IM. The messages are limited to 140 characters, so they lean toward pithy, haiku-like utterances. When I dropped by the main Twitter page, people had posted notes like "Doing lunch and picking up father-in-law from senior center." Or "Checking out Ghost Whisperer" or simply "Thinking I'm old." (Most users are between 18 and 27.)
It might seem like blogging taken to a supremely banal extreme. Productivity guru Tim Ferriss calls Twitter "pointless email on steroids." One Silicon Valley businessman I met complained that his staff had become Twitter-obsessed. "You can't say anything in such a short message," he said, baffled. "So why do it at all?"
They're precisely right: Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter — and the similarly mundane Dodgeball, a tool for reporting your real-time location to friends — is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.
When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.
It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.
For example, when I meet Misha for lunch after not having seen her for a month, I already know the wireframe outline of her life: She was nervous about last week's big presentation, got stuck in a rare spring snowstorm, and became addicted to salt bagels. With Dodgeball, I never actually race out to meet a friend when they report their nearby location; I just note it as something to talk about the next time we meet.
It's almost like ESP, which can be incredibly useful when applied to your work life. You know who's overloaded — better not bug Amanda today — and who's on a roll. A buddy list isn't just a vehicle to chat with friends but a way to sense their presence. Are they available to talk? Have they been away? This awareness is crucial when colleagues are spread around the office, the country, or the world. Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees.
So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it's experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can't explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn't have the same addictive effect.) Critics sneer at Twitter and Dodgeball as hipster narcissism, but the real appeal of Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It's practically collectivist — you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.
Mind you, quick-ping media can be a massive time-suck. You also may not want more information pecking at your frayed attention span. And who knows? Twitter's rabid fans (their numbers are doubling every three weeks) may well abandon it for a shinier new toy. It happened to Friendster.
But here's my bet: The animating genius behind Twitter will live on in future apps. That tactile sense of your community is simply too much fun, too useful — and it makes the group more than the sum of its parts.
It might seem like blogging taken to a supremely banal extreme. Productivity guru Tim Ferriss calls Twitter "pointless email on steroids." One Silicon Valley businessman I met complained that his staff had become Twitter-obsessed. "You can't say anything in such a short message," he said, baffled. "So why do it at all?"
They're precisely right: Individually, most Twitter messages are stupefyingly trivial. But the true value of Twitter — and the similarly mundane Dodgeball, a tool for reporting your real-time location to friends — is cumulative. The power is in the surprising effects that come from receiving thousands of pings from your posse. And this, as it turns out, suggests where the Web is heading.
When I see that my friend Misha is "waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop," that's not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me.
It's like proprioception, your body's ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.
Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.
For example, when I meet Misha for lunch after not having seen her for a month, I already know the wireframe outline of her life: She was nervous about last week's big presentation, got stuck in a rare spring snowstorm, and became addicted to salt bagels. With Dodgeball, I never actually race out to meet a friend when they report their nearby location; I just note it as something to talk about the next time we meet.
It's almost like ESP, which can be incredibly useful when applied to your work life. You know who's overloaded — better not bug Amanda today — and who's on a roll. A buddy list isn't just a vehicle to chat with friends but a way to sense their presence. Are they available to talk? Have they been away? This awareness is crucial when colleagues are spread around the office, the country, or the world. Twitter substitutes for the glances and conversations we had before we became a nation of satellite employees.
So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it's experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can't explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn't have the same addictive effect.) Critics sneer at Twitter and Dodgeball as hipster narcissism, but the real appeal of Twitter is almost the inverse of narcissism. It's practically collectivist — you're creating a shared understanding larger than yourself.
Mind you, quick-ping media can be a massive time-suck. You also may not want more information pecking at your frayed attention span. And who knows? Twitter's rabid fans (their numbers are doubling every three weeks) may well abandon it for a shinier new toy. It happened to Friendster.
But here's my bet: The animating genius behind Twitter will live on in future apps. That tactile sense of your community is simply too much fun, too useful — and it makes the group more than the sum of its parts.
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