The 10 ways I learned to use Twitter in 2007… (aka Why and How I use Twitter)Disruptive Conversations
How have I learned to use Twitter in my online communication? Let me count the ways…
After Chris Brogan posted his “Twitter Revisited” piece last week and on the same day Jeremiah Owyang talked about popularity and Twitter, I put some thought into how Twitter has substantially changed the ways in which I communicate online. Some of that I talked about in my segment into Mitch Joel’s Yuletide podcast, and some of it listeners to For instant Release will build out in my report into today’s FIR.
In that post, I want to lay out in a longer anatomy (< 140 characters!) both why and how I use Twitter. Comments are definitely welcome - I’d love to take in your experience: how do you use Twitter? So here goes…
1. Twitter as a News Source
This (US Eastern time) former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. How did I find out? When I sat down at my laptop to start my day and did a quick scan of the recent “flow” of my Twitterstream, I saw tweets from Steve Rubel and Jim Long referencing something going on in Pakistan and next there was a tweet from Nik Butler with a URL. Ta da. Subsequently I watched other URLs being passed around and watched the tweets from Jim indicating that he was enroute to get video of President Bush’s statement (Jim distant, aka newmediajim, is a cameraman for NBC and is currently in the press pool covering the President in Crawford, Texas.) I additionally learned of the existence of “BreakingNewsOn“, which aims to be “your most credible Twitter news source”.
Most days are certainly not (thankfully!) so dramatic, but yet that is a very valuable role Twitter plays for me. I learn of new events going on, new services, new sites. How? I follow a wide range of citizens… many of them are citizens I do actually know and trust. Others are citizens I’ve stumbled upon, often by way of those citizens I trust. Many of them are leaders in their specific fields and are generous suitable to share data and urls.
In fact, there are many days when I don’t read RSS feeds at all, but instead find myself relying on knowledge passed along through the Twitterstream. Where do these society I follow think I should spend some of that extremely rare thing: attention? Mitch Joel just yesterday referred to Twitter as “the Social Pulse” and it is indeed that.
[TANGENT: by at ZDNet, Dennis Howlett has an interesting piece about Twitter and the coverage of the Bhutto assassination: “What I have seen today is the convergence of new media forms like Twitter and its add-ons, Seesmic, blogs and traditional TV media providing a effective example of how urgent events are going to be reported, dissected, analyzed and ultimately acted upon from here on. Not some instance in the future - but now.”]
2. Twitter as a Knowledge Network
Another huge use I have found for Twitter is as a “knowledge network”. A “network” of public to whom I can pose questions and - usually extremely rapidly - get back responses. Sometimes the questions have been a bit dramatic, such as “Uh oh, left my boots at home. Where can I get cowboy boots in Ottawa?“, which, interestingly, took place entirely through using Twitter (and Facebook) while mobile on my Blackberry. Most times it is something more mundane like “what’s a good basic graphic editor for the Mac?” In nearly all cases I have had a relatively rapid reply. that works in part considering I follow a good number of folks (150+ right now), some percentage of whom are checking their twitterfeed at any given moment. It additionally works considering society are willing to reply questions - something I do as well in return.
3. Twitter as a Virtual Water Cooler
If you work in an office environment, both #1 and #2 above happen just as a matter of course. I’m certain that that in offices across the globe, the word was being passed among the cubicles and offices “Hey, did you invent out that Benazir Bhutto was just assassinated?” Perhaps some folks stood up and shouted it out. Odds are that whether you are a cube/office-dweller you have more than once gone by to someone in a nearby cube/office and asked something like “Hey, what graphic editor do you use on a Mac?” At least when I worked in a cube world, that was very common.
Beyond news and questions, though, there is all the other knowledge you learn just from being in the physical presence of others. When you leave your cube/office to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom… when you walk through the corridors to a meeting… when you go down to the cafeteria for lunch, or out to the smoking area whether you are a smoker (I’m not)… when you have all those random encounters with society you learn about other parts of their lives. I learned a bit about building treehouses from a cube neighbor who was building one. I learned about trips to new locations… new foods… new restaurants… new websites or services. I learned about wives and husbands and sons and daughters and family. I learned about sports and hockey (I was in Canada at the time) and politics and religion and all those other things. (And yes, on the negative side these conversations additionally included “gossip”, which was not always helpful.)
From that minutiae of daily life we learn the fabric that binds together the stories of our colleague’s/friend’s lives. We learn their “backstory”. We learn what is crucial to them. Their passion. Their starvation. We are exposed to new topics and new ideas that we might never have discovered on our own. We develop a richer and fuller understanding of who they are as individual citizens (which isn’t always a good thing, mind you).
If you are a cube/office-dweller, perhaps you never thought about all those trivial conversations in that way, but unless you are unfriendly these conversations are part and parcel of your daily life.
On the other hand, I work in a home office. Alone. For much of the day it is me and these four walls. Two cats are off somewhere in the house but they don’t come into my office. There are many aspects to working in a home office that I absolutely love, such as the fact that nearly every day I get to have lunch with my wife and 5-year-old daughter. Or that I can take a break and go chase the ice-cream truck down the street with my daughter… or see her latest creation. I can “timeshift” my work day around to go to events or appointments. I get to participate at a richer and deeper level in her life and that is a wonderful thing to me.
But a downside of working in a home office, to me, at least, is that you don’t get that random social interaction with other society. Certainly IM and video have made it very easy to work remotely. I’ve done a ton of video conferencing (largely because I have a built-in webcam) and it’s all great. But you don’t get the “Hey, did you invent out about… ” kind of “hallway conversations” that are, for better or worse, part of office life.
Twitter, for me, has wound up providing that role to a degree. From date to duration I can take a look at the flow of Twitter messages and see what citizens are saying. I learn about things. I learn about people. Even from the proverbial “Just had ____ for lunch” you learn about the folks and what their story is. I actually don’t mind those mundane posts (well, as faraway as they are not all I see!) considering they do give a sense of the society behind them. I wind up hearing “hallway conversations” with citizens all by the world. (And yes, the negative “gossip” unfortunately propagates as well… at the rapid lightspeed of Twitter.) Overall, it is to me a valuable role that it fills.
[TANGENT: It would be an interesting research exercise to look and see how many of the top “twitterers” work out of home offices (or work alone in office). Is there any correlation?]
4. Twitter as a way to stay up-to-date with friends
Among the humans I follow are certainly some that I have been “friends” with (in the traditional sense before the word became overloaded by social networks) for some moment and Twitter has provided a way to stay up-to-date with what they are doing. Yes, I could equally read their blog or website, but Twitter provides an easy - and convenient - way to do that.
5. Twitter as a Travelogue
I travel typically 1-2 weeks each month. Speaking at various conferences. Attending different events. My schedule has been that way for several years. In the past, when I was traveling to places, I would often update my dyork.livejournal.com blog with info about my travels. Where I was going. What flights I was on. whether flights were delayed, etc. While I am definitely aware that there is a dark side to doing this, overall it’s been extremely useful by the years.
Today I do that with Twitter. In large part considering it’s so incredibly simple to do. Just use the web browser on my Blackberry… or use SMS whether the notes side isn’t working. Simple. Easy.
The effect of doing that has been quite interesting and useful. I’ve wound up discovering that other humans are in the same city I am or attending the same conference (something I’m additionally using Dopplr for these days). I’ve had
6. Twitter to Track Conferences
I’ve found Twitter to be immensely valuable to stay up on what is going on at some of the various conferences out there. whether I can’t attend one that I thought sounded very interesting, odds are that someone (or several people) may be tweeting about it, often “live blogging” the conference and providing companion URLs. It’s been a great way to stay up… pseudo real-time… on what is going on. It’s additionally something that I can disregard whether I have other events and next just check in on sometime later in the day or at night.
7. Twitter as a PR/marketing Tool
Yes, I admittedly use Twitter as a tool to drive traffic to blog entries I write or web sites with which I am involved. I don’t tweet about every blog post I write. I tweet about the ones that I think might be of interest to those who follow me on Twitter. I’ll obviously tweet about that post (which is way more than 140 characters!). I tweet about the posts where I’m looking for comments. I tweet about those I think might help humans.
I know that it has certainly worked, as I’ve seen the traffic come in that way. As I’ve thought about why it works, I refer back to my point #1 above. For those who dive deep into Twitter usage, it can become even more of a news source than RSS feeds and other mechanisms.
8. Twitter as a Learning Tool
Perhaps that really an offshoot of the others, but a distinct use I have found for Twitter is to learn about new topics or new areas to think about. From random tweets from folks, I’ve wound up learning about whole new areas of knowledge that I had no previous exposure to. I separate that out in part considering it is something of value that Twitter brings to me. Expansion of knowledge for the pure sake of knowledge. A large part of what I do in my work now is to analyze emerging technology… to look at technology from a holistic point-of-view. Being exposed to other areas of knowledge help greatly in that assimilation and evaluation and analysis.
9. Twitter as Fun
Sometimes, you just want to have a little bit of fun. Telling jokes around the water cooler. Sharing that incredibly silly thing you just did. (”Oops… didn’t mean to do XXXX and wipe out all my work!”) Twitter can be that. (Of course, you have to keep in mind that everything you write is (unless you choose for it NOT to be) globally readable and archived by the mammoth Google disk caches… so you do have to be careful what you say.)
10. Twitter as a Daily Lesson in Humility (and Brevity)
As that post should show, when they had the class on “brevity”, I must have been out sick that day. I am a writer who loves to write. And I tend to write long. Part of that is my training background. I have that innate desire to ensure that readers completely understand what I am trying to say. So in typical training style (”Tell ‘em once, tell ‘em again, and soon after tell ‘em a third time”), I may go on too lengthy at times.
This, however, doesn’t translate well into the contemporary world of the Blackberry. distant, explanatory e mail messages are out. Short, bullet items are in. whether you can’t get your points onto the first screen in a Blackberry, your reader may or may not choose to scroll down. Brief. Concise. To the point. Another day I’ll write my lament about what that is doing to our language… but the net of it is that that is the reality of the corporate world today. We are going too fast with too many messages being thrown at us. We must distill all those complex thoughts into sound bites… bullet items. Distill them down to their very “essence”.
Twitter, with its enforced 140-character limit (115-ish whether you are going to include a tinyurl!) forces you to think that way. To distill your notice down into something short and sweet. Or, admittedly, to cheat and spew out several tweets (or write a blog post and link to it).
Twitter becomes my daily exercise in practicing… brevity.
Uses I did NOT list
You’ll note that I did NOT list “Twitter as a Conversation”. Unlike Jeremiah Owyang (see “Some Conversations have shifted to Twitter“) or Chris Brogan or Jeff Pulver, I find that I do not really use Twitter as a conversation tool. I don’t expect that I’ll ever be listed highly on Tweeterboard. Yes, I do participate in some “conversations”. Yes, I do think of Twitter as a “global conversation”. There are, however, a good number of Twitter users who do use Twitter as a kind of giant, asynchronous IRC chat room. In fact, Chris Brogan and Clarence just wrote about that - and the challenges - yesterday in their excellent piece: “Keys to the Gates (of Social Media)“. I can see the value in that… and do participate directly in that conversation from time-to-time, but I just don’t find myself doing it all that often. (which, I know, does seem a bit in contrast with some of the uses I listed above)
Another use I did not list that I think is rather cool, but not one I do, is “Twitter as Fiction”. Scott Sigler did that wonderfully with his “iPhone War” series of tweets. Eric Rice has done something similar a duration or two, whether I recall correctly. I think it’s a fascinating use of the medium and I look forward to seeing more humans trying such things.
A final note - HOW I *technically* interact with Twitter
If you have actually read that far along (thank you, whether you have! ;-), you might have come to the conclusion that I spend a lot of instance using Twitter. The truth is that I really don’t, but I have found a way that works very well for me to fit occasional glances at the twitterstream into my regular daily workflow. The secret of what works for me? Simple… I read and post to Twitter using IM programs. My primary way of interacting with Twitter is through the Twitter4Skype program which connects my Twitter stream to a Skype chat window. So all the posts in my Twitter stream simply wind up as yet another Skype chat window. Posting to Twitter is as simple as flipping to that chat window, typing in a info as you would any other IM letter. that has several distinct advantages:
- It is searchable. In the Skype chat window I can search on a person or term and find related tweets.
- You can easily scroll through the history. You don’t have to go back a page at a date… you just keep scrolling back through it.
- The length of the history is open-ended. Skype’s chat windows will preserve all the messages that are received in the window (they are stored locally on your computer) so you can always go back and find messages.
- When you post, URLs are automagically turned into tinyurls. The window on the Twitter home page used to do that, but now does not seem to do so. Posting via Twitter4Skype does that.
Now, Twitter4Skype does have its issues. Sometimes the server goes offline for a while or seems to need a kick to start sending you messages again, but it works great for me considering I use Skype on a daily basis.
As a backup, I plus have a Jabber IM window running that provides the similar functionality. (I just added “twitter@twitter.com” as a contact.) Again, it’s searchable, maintains a longer history and auto-shortens URLs.
That is how I am personally able to integrate Twitter into my daily workflow without it becoming a major time-suck. When I am traveling, I generally use the mobile interface, m.twitter.com, on my Blackberry. Very seldom do I find a need to actually use SMS, although I am set up to do so. that works for me. Obviously, it may or may not work for you.
Wrapping that Up
So there you have my list of how I have learned to use Twitter in 2007. I think there is another topic to discuss at some point about how Twitter and the whole “microblogging” movement, including Jaiku, Pownce and even Facebook status messages, have changed the way in which we write online.
For the moment, though, I’ll end that here. I’ve gone way past 140 characters, 140 words… and probably past 140 lines!
What do you think? Do you use Twitter in similar ways to the ways that I do? Do you use it as a virtual water cooler? How do you interact with Twitter? Do you use the IM interface? web? mobile? Did you, too, miss the class on brevity when it was being given?
Orginal post by Dan York
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