I used to think Twitter was stupid.
After one week of actual activity, I find it useful.
Twitter is a "micro-blogging" platform that allows you to quickly post short messages[tweets] of < 140 characters. One of my tweets is seen in the graphic above — @dweinberger is the username of another Tweeter. Their power lies not only in their brevity but in their ability to link to other tweets and any other internet content. Twitter's concept is based on the question of everyone answering, in 140 characters or less: "What are you doing?"
I see "What are you doing?" as the wrong question — it focuses too much on daily minutiae, and not on what others may find interesting about you. We still see many tweets of people answering that question faithfully... "I am at the corner of X and Y waiting to meet my friend Z" ... "I am backing up my hard drive"... "reading the morning paper with a perfect cup of coffee". This is info you may want to know from your intimate others, but not from everyone you are reading on Twitter.
I ignore the standard Twitter question and instead use: "What are you paying attention to?" or "What do you find interesting and useful?" Judging from many of the posts I have read, other Tweeters are also using these questions as a guide to post by.
In Twitter you can not read what everyone posts, nor would you want to. You have to select who you want "to follow" — whose posts you want to read. Before choosing who I want to follow, I read a page or two of their tweets and see if they are posting interesting items. Most people leave their posts open to all potential followers, but Twitter does allow you to restrict the reading of your posts to only the people you approve. This is useful for businesses and families and other intact groups that want to limit the conversations to "within the group only". Several consultants also limit their tweets to "clients only" — I do not — see the sidebar of this blog to see my 5 most recent tweets. Some people choose to follow only their friends or acquaintances. I choose to follow who is interesting and who is posting useful information whether I personally know them or not. As we have learned in social network analysis -- it is useful to have "weak ties" to people active in social circles and knowledge pools that are different/complementary to our own.
Twitter is also a great place to ask questions — especially if you have a diverse group following your tweets. Many consultants and analysts find Twitter a great place to get quick answers — anything from how to network Windows and Macintoshes to a citation of an old paper. Journalists often troll the Twitter-verse for story ideas and people to interview.
Twitter is amazing playground for people like me who are interested in social network analysis. Twitter provides all sorts of social network metrics — focus on prestige metrics — on each person's page!
- Following: who you chose to listen to/follow = outdegree
- Followers: who chose to listen/follow you = indegree
- Favorites: the "chosen few" of who you follow = strong ties
- Updated: how often you post a message = network activity
Twitter also provides an API for those who want to get access to more data or build an application to work with Twitter. Twitter just purchased a company who had built a nice search engine of the topics being talked about on Twitter, like who is discussing social networks? Or, who is talking about the always interesting Clay Shirky or Duncan Watts? One of Barry Wellman's students was twittering in class — as many students do.
You not need a computer to access the Twitter-verse. Many people send and receive tweets from their mobile phone using their texting service or a mobile web client like Twitteriffic, which works great on my iPod Touch or an iPhone. Mobile devices make it easy to report "news" happening in front of you.
And last, but not least, there is the art of re-tweeting — broadcasting to your Followers what you found interesting/useful from one of the people you follow. By doing this you play the role of Connector by bridging your Followers to another person [Maven] they may not be following. In the networked world, you want to have the reputation as a Connector!
Join me in the Twitter-verse. It is both fun and useful.
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4 comments:
Valdis, great to see you in Twitter-ville. And thanks for the simple metrics.
One other tool that I'm finding very useful is FriendFeed. It provides a stream of content from those I "subscribe" to, and from their links. Puts me in touch with more people and their thoughts than I would otherwise find. With desktop apps like Twhirl it's easy to keep this in the background.
-Bill A
Fun article - v. nicely done.
'Favorites' refers to posts that you have starred though, not people. I use it to mark posts that were particularly funny or that contained a particularly useful link.
The way I see it, Twitter is a great way to "manage" the information overflow. The fact is that there is a lot of "noise" on Twitter, so you have no choice but to give up trying to read everything, but at the same time it is perfect to give you a sense of what is in the air when you have time to look.
I also use Twitter for research: using search.twitter.com to find people/content related to my interests, and then their tweets give me a sense of the context, so that if I see that not only they were talking about something I am interested in, but also it was not just a one shot thought but rather a general focus in their tweets, then I will follow them.
While Twitter is one great way to get to people, regular blogs is the other one as the previous comment mentions. I do the same type of research on blogs, using eCairn to track blogs and follow conversations.
Meanwhile I saw on Twitter this morning something about Cuil (http://money.cnn.com/2008/07/28/technology/cuil.ap/index.htm?cnn=yes), and I find it interesting that it comes up just when regular search seems so obsolete. I find my content through people these days (Twitter, Blogs) rather than through an engine...
Valdis,
Did you ever get an answer to your question about software for Everything is Misc?
If I understand what you're asking, it was one of the things that I loved about Lotus Agenda, an old DOS application that let you put free-form information into it and then based on content could re-organize it into lots of different ad-hoc views.
The maker of Agenda, Mitch Kapor, has just released a new networked application which is supposed to do that for a new age - Chandler. I've just installed it, so I can't give you much of a review yet.
Also, Zoot is an amazingly complex tool which lets you flexibly handle "self-organizing" information.
Just some thoughts.
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