Has Twitter crossed the chasm?

Image by Matt Hamm via Flickr

When I came across Twitter about an year back, I was bewildered. So I can put 140 characters on a web site to tell the world what I am doing at the moment… Who cares? And why would I want to know what others happen to be doing at the exact moment they decide to share it with the world? However, there were quite a few people using Twitter so I decided to investigate Why we tweet and discovered it’s quite valuable both personally and for business. Ever since I have been an avid twitterer.

But something changed recently… all of sudden Twitter exploded in the mainstream, it even made it to the cover of TIME. Everyone from kids to businesses to politicians to governments are twittering. A few examples:

• Governator Arnold (@Schwarzenegger) twittered about an emergency plane landing. Not only did he tweet, but he took a photo of his plane and sent that out too
• Al Gore gets a million followers
• It played a big role in the overwhelming coverage of the #IranElection
• Dell took news confernence questions via Twitter
• The Israeli Consulate out of New York participated in a “citizen’s press conference” using Twitter

More often than not, Twitter is breaking the big story. Much like Youtube became the way to share video, Twitter is quickly becoming our open public wire service.

Twitter is beginning to change the way we communicate through crowd sourcing. By being connected and transparent we can get a sense of how humanity is feeling, thinking, and experiencing our world. It is only a matter of time before Tweeting is as well-known as Googling.

The trigger

I believe it started with Ashton Kutcher publicly challenging CNN to become the first to get a million followers on twitter. CNN of course obliged, thinking they’d use their media muscle to get viewers to follow them to victory. But Ashton had an ace up his sleeve, he went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to evangelise twitter, and as expected, got America’s moms to help him gallop across the finish line well before CNN. The drama during, and after these events, ensured wallpaper coverage in the US media and it wasn’t long before everyone in the US was hooked, with the rest of the world playing catch up.

Do you think Twitter has crossed the chasm?

New to twitter? Here’s a tip; answer “what’s important to me” instead of “what am i doing” – Jeremiah Owyang (@jowyang)

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And now ….. Nanoblogging!

Stumbled upon this post by Josh Lowensohn which talks about a new service in town….Adocu

It’s a Twitter clone. There’s no 140 character limit, but spaces are not allowed, you have to fit everything in one word like “whatingodsnameisthis”.

They call it Nanoblogging.

I’m a bit skeptical about this but then I was skeptical about Twitter as well and look how it turned out. I think I’ll wait around to see if a community builds and go from there.

Couple of voices from Twitterverse

bloggi no, nanoblogging seems to be stretching things a bit too far

lgr I understand what they are trying to do. Don’t know if I would use it, but I did not like Twitter at first

codyrobert I kinda agree with @lgr Didn’t like twitter to start. But really, one word? Would work in chamorro lang.

martinpolley no-it-does-not-people-will-just-use-hyphens-instead-of-spaces-wonder-if-theres-a-character-limit?

sachendra @martinpolly there’s no character limit. I am a bit skeptical but look at how twitter turned out. Its hard to say anything

martinpolley @sachendra Your last sentence is very appropriate -”It’s hard to say anything.” Exactly

What do you think?

Improve your Twitter Experience with these Tools

I had mentioned in a previous post about how Twitter’s popularity is spawning support systems around it. With the mind-boggling number of Tools out there and more being launched everyday, I decided to list some essential tools which would really help improve your Twitter experience.

Clients
Twhirl – The best, most ultimate PC client out there. An easy to use interface and nifty features like URL shortner and constant updates make it a must have. They recently added support for FriendFeed as well.

Slandr – If you want to tweet from your mobile browser, this is a must have. ReadWriteWeb calls it the Best (non iPhone) Mobile Twitter App Available and highlights the key features.

“Slandr takes full advantage of the Twitter API, as far as I can tell. You can view replies and direct messages with a link, though not in the timeline as some other clients allow. You can do a Twitter search using the fantastic service Summize, something that Hahlo lets you do on the iPhone as well. You can also edit your location field in Slandr”

TwitterBerry – If you own a Blackberry, this is a must have. Check out a well balanced review by Michael Armstrong

Conversations
Quotably – Best tool out there for tracking conversations. It reformats Twitter messages into threaded conversations by looking at the replies. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch calls it The Perfect Tool To Make Sense Of Twitter

Search
Summize – Performs real-time search on Twitter posts and it is FAST. I consider it the best Twitter search engine as of today. They recently added “local search”, say you want to see what’s in Hyderabad, in terms of Twitter activity, just open their advanced page and put Hyderabad in Places and get what people are twittering about over there.

Blog Assist
TwitterFeed – This one’s for the bloggers. Posts your blog updates to your Twitter account. It has a number of useful options like the ability to prefix RSS tweets with some text to identify them as Blog posts or auto-feeds. Great tool for keeping your followers up to date.

Sharing Links (Updated – 26th May)
Twitthat – It posts the link of the web-page you’re on to the Twitter. Very useful for sharing links. It also has a personal page that collects links you share. Just type http://twitthat.com/[your id here]，and wallah!

That’s all for now, but given the rate at which new and improved Twitter tools are being launched, I might need to revisit this list 2 months from now.

Happy Twiterring!

Twitter Ecosystem: Short URLs

Popularity of twitter is spawning support systems around it, latest in the line being short URLs.

We’re all familiar with TinyURL, but with only 140 character to work with there’s a need to shorten it as much as you can. Enter is.gd

BHC3 demonstrates via an example in his blog

Full URL: http://bhc3.wordpress.com/2008/04/05/friendfeed-rss-is-a-fantastic-discovery-tool/

• 82 characters

TinyURL: http://tinyurl.com/6qhk4n

• 25 characters

is.gd: http://is.gd/7oc

• 16 characters

So there’s a pick-up of 9 characters via is.gd. Can be quite valuable on Twitter, eh?

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• URL Shortners

Why We Tweet – What value does Twitter bring on personal and business front

When I first came across Twitter, I couldn’t understand it. So I can put 140 characters on a web site to tell the world what I am doing at the moment… Who cares? And why would I want to know what others happen to be doing at the exact moment they decide to share it with the world?

I was bewildered by the Twitter phenomenon sweeping the world. There are 100s of twitter apps in web, mobile, desktop. It’s everywhere. ReadWriteWeb recently wrote about which clients people use most to Tweet. Twitter addiction has moved to the physical world, people are going about wearing Twitter T-shirts.

I thought I may have judged Twitter to quickly and decided to dig a little deeper. Read research reports, added people and followed them, went over various blogs that talk about twitter, poured through the comments. Posted questions on various discussions forums and followed responses to questions posted by others. I’ve been doing this for past 2 months and I think I’ve come to some understanding on why we tweet.

Twitter’s power really comes from the feeling of intimacy with people as we get a glimpse into their lives. The beauty of Twitter is that it enables different types of conversations over a very simple medium without getting caught up in the technical intricacies of transports.

I believe twittering phenomenon is time/space agnostic. Twitter is just re-enabling needs that have not been satisfactorily met since humans moved out of the village town hall, pub etc. “where everyone knows your name”. As in a physical village, you’re more connected or more involved with some people than with others. Similarly in Twitter you’ll find that you talk or share with some people more often than others. To some degree, there is a behavioral difference, in that we have to consciously push updates at Twitter.

According to a research report, following are the main categories of users on Twitter:

• Information Source An information source is also a hub and has a large number of followers. This user may post updates on regular intervals or infrequently. Despite infrequent updates, certain users have a large number of followers due to the valuable nature of their updates. Some of the information sources were also found to be automated tools posting news and other useful information on Twitter.
• Friends Most relationships fall into this broad category. There are many sub-categories of friendships on Twitter. For example a user may have friends, family and co-workers on their friend or follower lists. Sometimes unfamiliar users may also add someone as a friend.
• Information Seeker An information seeker is a person who might post rarely, but follows other users regularly.

Reasons for Twittering
I’ve compiled various reasons for which people use Twitter which I came across while poring through comments/responses to blogs and questions

• Self-promotion – create personal brand awareness on some level
• Share and gather information that is pertinent to one’s interests
• Sharing useful resources
• Track on a much closer to realtime basis what people are thinking and doing. At the same time, one can then have a choice to participate in the thread.
• Stay in touch with your close ones
• See what’s happening with your friends
• As an educational and conversational tool
• Live event sharing– esp. for people who are not there, but even among attendees
• Closed groups such as a task-specific team or attendees of a conference
• Ideas — asking and sharing
• Learning about news before it spreads far and wide, for both industry and general news items. News spread faster on Twitter than on blogs
• Standard networking and communications with peers
• Creating much closer links with people despite not often physically meeting very often if at all
• Brainstorming
• Polling
• Discovering new interesting people and networking with them
• Using the search box to find others interested in similar issue
• Research – by subscribing to feeds of smart people in the field
• As a targeted communication platform – Send responses @ a person or D (Direct to a person)
• Keeping up with tech – All the big names on the internet use Twitter. Subscribe to them and see what’s new and exciting.
• Tracking topics – enter ‘track SOA’ and anyone that posts a twitter message about SOA gets sent to you. A great way to hear what people are saying about a topic. To remove it just ‘untrack SOA’
• Emergency – just see what happened with the wildfires. San Diego fire department broadcasted alerts on twitter
• Television – watch TV together and react on it through Twitter
• Stalking – Strange as it may sound, this post by Laurel unveils this trend

Twitter as a business tool

• Drawing attention to/promoting products/content. Sending out special offers
• Viral marketing, and for pre-release product announcements
• News websites deliver information and updates using it
• Spreading the word about stuff we’re working on (announcements, etc)
• Gathering feedback from the community (asking questions)
• Customer service (subscribing to mentions of our company, responding to people personally)
• Getting pitched and communicating with PR agencies
• For project updates – send a quick one-liner and you can see all in one place / timeline
• Ask the expert – fling your question from wherever you are -up to the twitter network / global water cooler and get an answer.
• reach out by cross-posting information from regular blog
• Business bloggers are finding that tools like Twitter help draw traffic to their blog posts and give them a way to stay connected without the commitment of writing lengthy blog posts.

Twitter is not for everyone
Twitter can be sensory overload due to a high degree of micro information the user will need to self-parse. A lot of Twitter skeptics are put off by the banal nature of some of the discussion. This is really a limitation of the current Twitter clients, though. Twitter will become even more valuable when clients are available that let you intelligently filter through tweets for content that you’re interested in.

Conclusion
Love it or hate it Twitter is a force to be reckoned with, and provides a great many opportunities beyond simply telling the world what you ate for breakfast. By making it easy for people to send out short (140 characters or less) messages to their personal webpage, friends and followers, and even the Twitter community at large, the service makes for a compelling way to get the word out fast.

Whereas blog posts and emails tend to be longer-winded affairs, Twitter posts are closer in form to the SMS messages you send from your mobile phone, and in fact it is possible to access Twitter in this very way, in addition to using the Twitter website, Instant Messaging or one of the growing number of desktop applications available.

You can follow me here twitter.com/sachendra

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