2009-03-10 Twitter explained
From Walkerpedia
This was originally sent to my email subscribers as part of my Tuesday emails series.
I know what you're thinking. I'm talking about Twitter. There are graphs, charts, reports and formulae that can predict your response to within one hair of your half-raised eyebrow. They are usually given sexy titles like The Cool Curve and The Innovation Gap, but they all basically say the same thing:
Geeks use stuff first, and the stuff they keep on using gets 'discovered' by the rest of the world.
Contents |
Mind the Innovation Gap
The reaction to this 'new' stuff always takes the same form. The cynics raise one eyebrow and smirk. The old people frown and say, "I don't think so. No. I won't be using that, thank you very much." The Daily Mail decides it's carcinogenic and/or useful to paedophiles. Young people shout "God, that's gay", throw a brick through a window then start using it as soon as they think it might be cool. Trendoids start using it straight away, buy the t-shirt, then stop using it a week later when they realise they have no idea what it is.
And the geeks sit back and watch their cat blogging about their spider plant's Twitter stream, knowing that the 'new' stuff is already old. And once everyone finds out about it, it becomes less good.
Twitter is simple
Twitter is just a way of saying stuff that people can read.
It doesn't make the stuff you say any more interesting. Or useful. Or valuable. This is why most of the celebrity Twitter feeds you may have heard about are fist-bitingly dull. Celebrities tend to be dull people.
And the same probably applies to most people on twitter. Because most people are dull, at least to you. You have nothing in common with most people. And that's why Twitter is good. You *choose* who to listen to. And if they are dull you stop listening.
Try this thought experiment
So before you write off Twitter as a Barley-esque fad, think of it this way: who is worthy of your attention?
Maybe it's nobody. Maybe you are happy to think about yourself 24/7. You're not alone, and there's no need to be ashamed. Goodbye.
Maybe it's your family. Imagine your siblings, parents or children are away travelling. They update Twitter a couple of times a day from their mobile phone (and maybe post a picture or two) and the whole family can see their holiday highlights as they happen. If they want to. And in their own time. Now imagine they aren't away travelling.
So you're following a couple of tech-savvy family members on Twitter, and as you're checking their updates you think of a friend or colleague who always has interesting things to say. Or funny. Or informative. So you look them up and follow them too. Pretty soon you're following a dozen or so people who really mean something to you *in real life*, and you're connecting. You're not cyberstalking. You're not rotting your brain. You're just using a convenient filter to listen to the most interesting people in your life.
Finding interesting people
Because Twitter lets you refer to other Twitter users with the "@" sign (I'm @ihatemornings, for example), you can respond to people's messages. Say you're following me and I post a message saying:
@asilentfilm Great gig last night, bro. Good luck with the kazoo session. ;)
...you might think, "Hey! @asilentfilm must be Ben's brother Spence. I know him!" and you could click on his name to see if you're right. You are, so you click follow. That sort of organic growth of the network means you're always controlling how much of your precious time and attention is being taken up by the interesting people.
Now you
Go and have a look. Seriously.
The reason most people are scared of getting involved is that they don't know where to start. They go to the Twitter home page and see millions of messages by weirdos on the screen.
You need to start with people. People you know. For the purposes of this educational experiment, why not start with me?
Here's what to do. Don't sign up yet. This link will show you all the messages that relate to me, with the newest first. You'll see messages from me, messages to me and messages about me (and occasionally people hating mornings). My username is ihatemornings, so that's what I search for:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=ihatemornings
Did you look? Isn't it cool? Why not sign up today, give yourself a name and a picture, and send me a message? Just go to http://twitter.com, and type something like:
@ihatemornings Thanks for the email - I'm on Twitter now!
I'm on there all the time. Come and talk to me. Ask me stuff. It's all about the conversation.
Keep in touch,
Ben
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PS. This has been Part 1 of an 8-part series of weekly emails I'm sending to help people get the most out of social media. Next week I'll tell you all about RSS. It's all leading up to Ben's Big Gig in May, but I'll tell you all about that next time. ;)
PPS. If you just joined the list, hi. I'm Ben, and I'm a songwriter. My website at http://ihatemornings.com explains what I do.
PPPS. Hi, Peter. Sorry if I freaked you out at the Jericho Café. Hope the email was useful. ;)
