Discovered via Blog Godown

I realize how difficult it is to explain what the Twitter phenomenon really is all about. Does “Twitter is a micro-blogging tool” associate it too much with “blogging”: “I publish, you read, and if all goes well, you might even comment”?

Maybe this is what Twitter was originally intended for, but how do you explain to anyone it is much more than just ‘publishing 140 character content’. How do you explain the dynamic and the power of a Twitter social community of “followers”?

Another challenge is to explain that apart from ”www.twitter.com”, the web interface for Twitter, there are hundreds of add-ons and tools that make Twitter work for you.

I use Twitter for:

• yep, publishing “content”: links I find interesting, updates about what I do (with text, pictures and video)
• build a social community with people who have similar interests by interacting with my followers
• get people interested in my blogs by tweeting links to new posts
• get help and feedback by asking questions, posting polls
• give help and feedback by answering questions and polls
• monitor news and trends
• reading up on what others are reading and find interesting
• monitor the latest updates from sites and subjects I am interested in, almost as an alternative to an RSS reader
• get inspiration
• live blogging from events, workshops
• have fun

But the person next door might use it for something completely different:

• fundraising
• announcing where you can get free Pizzahut coupons
• rallying up the masses to protest against the Iran violence
• bash CNN, just because they are such an easy target
• broadcasting what second hand items she has for sale
• stay in touch with friends
• …

Is Twitter worth the trouble?

Yes it is. Here are three cases which showed me the power of twitter:

1. Late one evening, someone in my Twitter users’ community tweeted me:

Are you guys expelled from Sudan? This article (link) says so!

The linked article indeed stated the organisation I work for was expelled from Sudan, around the time 13 NGOs were forced to leave the country. Which was incorrect. As this issue was very sensitive for us, I contacted our Public Information people, who called the publishers of the website. Half an hour later, the –potentially damaging- statement was corrected. Without Twitter, I would never have caught that article.

2. A few months ago, I tweeted:

Looking for a webguru to help us analysing a complicated portal development project

Sure enough someone from my community replied. He was available within two weeks. We started communicating via Email, and in the end, he actually found a grant from the Gates Foundation to fund his trip. I not only found a webguru, but got him fast and for free.

3. Last week, I tweeted:

Writing a post about blogplatforms. I know Blogger, WordPress and Tumblr but looking for a TypePad geek to help me out

Three people responded and assisted me in the article, filling in the blanks I left. Two were part of my followers’ community, the other one was just searching Twitter for the keyword “TypePad”.

Twitter for Dummies

In my series, “Twitter for Dummies”, or call it “A Twitter Primer”, I cover this social media phenomenom from the bottom up. What Twitter is, what the different components are, best practices, the tricks of the trade, and a list of the most useful add-ons. How to make Twitter work for your nonprofit purposes?
In the tradition of BlogTips, I illustrate these posts with my own experiences.

In the next post we tackle “How to explain Twitter as a social networking tool?”

Interesting links to wet your appetite:

An analysis of fundraising with Twitter
Using Twitter for nonprofit and advocacy
How to use Twitter as a Twool
7 uncommon uses for Twitter

Cartoon courtesy Boston Globe (Mike Luckovich)

In the previous post, I elaborated what I use Twitter for, both at work and for my personal sites.

So what is this “Twitter”-thingie then, hey? How can I explain Twitter as a social community tool rather than a blogging tool…? Well try these approaches:

How to explain Twitter? Think of Skype, but different!

You know instant messengers (IM) like Skype or MSN messenger? Then you know how with instant messengers, you can look for friends, add them to your address book and then type messages online.
At its best, you can add several friends into a conversation, type away and have some fun. All your “chats” remain private between those within that conversation.

Twitter is a similar tool, but all text messages are “broadcasted”: they are public messages with a maximum of 140 characters. I don’t have to be in a conversation with one or more people like in Skype. I broadcast. And millions of others are broadcasting just like me, resulting in a mega-stream of thousands public text messages per minute (currently about 10,000 to 15,000 per minute). Any of my “broadcasts” can be searched for, replied to, or rebroadcasted by any other Twitter user.

If people find the stuff I broadcast interesting, they tag me (or become a “follower” in Twitter-lingo). If people “follow me”, they will automatically filter my updates out of the mega stream of a zillion Twitter messages. They will do so for all their followers, effectively creating a message filter for stuff they like and people they are interested in.

In the following example, I “follow” Karim, Ann and John. Out of the millions of other broadcasts, I filter their messages, so will only see the Tweets they broadcast and no others.

Turning it around: I don’t only broadcast, I also listen (not enough, my wife would say, but that is another issue.. ). I look for friends, or broader, people who are interested in the same stuff I am, and “follow” them.

This interaction between ‘broadcasting’ and ‘listening’, results in each Twitter user building a social community of “followers”… People follow me, find my updates interesting, and stay tuned. Friends of friends (or “followers” of those who “follow me”) see interactions with me, check my broadcasts, and become my followers… Gradually, the group grows. The larger the group, the more effective Twitter becomes as a social community for me.

And Twitter communities grow organically. Using the same example, but showing a broader view of the communities around me:

Karim, Ann, John and me follow each other, this is my social community, as it is centered around “who follows me”. Likewise, Ann, Andy and me are the social community centered around Karim.

Twitter has made it easy to find out “who follows who”, and following new people is done “by a click”, so social communities grow very quickly and organically. Just like “friends of my friends” might become “my friends” in real life:

In the above example, do you see the chain of John-Roman-Suzy-Roanna-Mary? Roman follows both John and Suzy, but Suzy and John don’t follow each other.
Suzy will see Roman interact with John via Twitter, and as they have a common “friend” with John, I bet you Suzy will start following John, as there is a good chance they have common interests.

How do I explain Twitter to someone? Think of TV.

As you flip that dial on your satellite TV, you can find hundreds of stations. If you are interested in music, and news, you will put those stations you like in your pre-select channels: CNN, Al-Jazeera and MTV.

Twitter is the same. You scan for those users you like, and you put them in your pre-select channels by “following” them.

Except that you will watch to all your pre-selected channels at the same time, like some of those mosaic features some TVs have… “Listening on Twitter” is like watching that mosaic picture

How do I explain Twitter to someone? Think of CB radio.

Remember in the 70-ies, many of us had this little black box with a microphone, and a hidden antenna on the roof. Well at least I did! I would be one of those getting up in the morning, and shout out “Breaker, breaker, this is Rubberduck, gooooood morning to everyone!”…

In the beginning, nobody would ever come back to me, but as I started to interact with other CB-ers, we started to tune into each other’s channels, and I started to get replies to my “good morning” shouts. Later on, we picked one channel where we could always find each other, and interacted day and night…

A social community was built. How it was used, was up to the participants… Some of us, only used it to keep us company in lonely hours. Some used CB to have fun and joke around. Others used it to get traffic information, finding out where the “bears” were with their speed cameras. Other teens used it to work on projects for school, and there were people who organised fundraising parties for charity…

Twitter is the same. With one additional feature: I can record what others were talking about, and re-broadcast it on my CB channel.

Visualizing your social community

TwitNest, a cool Twitter network visualisation tool, shows exactly what I mean with ‘social networks’.

Here is a part of my Twitter network, centered around my @TheRoadTo, my personal Twitter username, showing a small icon for each of the people I follow, and a line connecting who is following who:

As you can see, this network, is centered around me:

Twitter user “@fighthunger” is part of my community. Here are the people within my community they follow, the followers we have in common:

And here are the users “@ithorpe”, one of my followers,… euh… follows..

Play with Twitnest, it is interesting as it also “groups” people, based on ‘who is following who’…
Sociologists would have a real go at trying to figure out how people are grouped, how social communities are formed and grow organically.

In my community for instance, I can clearly see different groups popping up, dependent on the common interest my followers have. Some of them are ‘aidworkers’. Other groups I recognize, are ‘IT people’, ‘those interested in social media’, ‘news stations’ and ‘nonprofit organisations’…

In the next post, we will go more in depth on “Twitter, the tool”.

Cartoon courtesy Geek and Poke

In part 1 of this series, I described what I use Twitter for. In part 2, I highlighted Twitter as a social networking tool.
In this post, we will go slightly more technical: looking at the parts in the engine that make Twitter really useful.

Twitter.com

The core of it all is the blue box, twitter.com. This is where all the Tweets and Twitter profiles are stored, and the engine with which everything connects.

The Twitter website

When you first sign up to Twitter, you connect via the web interface, Twitter’s main web page. It lets you modify your profile and settings, search for Tweets, add followers, browse through the updates or “Tweets” from all your followers, and send out Tweets yourself.
The usability of the webinterface is not the best, IMHO, e.g. the tweets from those you follow are not refeshed automatically, it is difficult to distinguish between “your Tweet updates” and “those of your social community”, etc.. But it lets you perform the basic functions: read what’s going on, and broadcast Tweets yourself.

Desktop tools

Most people use desktop tools (similar to what Skype has) such as Thwirl, Tweetdeck, or Seesmic. Each is a small Adobe Air application, which updates automatically the Tweets your community is broadcasting. They let you filter for “all tweets”, “replies only”, “direct messages”, and let you search for Twitterers or Tweets. I hardly ever use the webinterface, but always have a window open with Seesmic and Twhirl.

Input processors

There are additional ‘input’ tools, to ease posting stuff on Twitter. The most popular are:

• URL shorteners convert the links you want to use in your Tweets to a real short URL. Some, like bit.ly, which I use the most, also give you statistics for amount of clicks each of your links gets.
• TwitPic allows you to upload a picture and generates a link to the picture, which you can include in your Tweet. This is the tool Janis Krums used to post the famous picture of the plane in the Hudson river, by the way.
• twtpoll lets you post a small poll

There are hundreds of input tools. Twtbase is a great repository listing most of the add-on applications. You can post audio, include a link to longer updates if you feel too limited with Twitter’s 140 characters, schedule tweets, etc…

Using your mobile

Another way to interact with Twitter, is via your mobile phone. Many PDAs like the iPhone or Blackberry have a small application to read and write Tweets via an Internet link. You can also use your mobile’s SMS service to send or receive tweets via twitter.com directly. Or, if you prefer, use Email on your mobile to tweet, pictures and video as attachments, which get automatically converted into links via e.g. TwitPic.
This makes Twitter truly mobile.

Feeding content to Twitter

A more sophisticated way of using Twitter is to take the RSS feed from your blog (or website) and tweet the titles and links to new blogposts automatically. Twitterfeed and dlvr.it are the best known tool for this. Both will shorten your URLs automatically before posting them onto Twitter.

On the output site: search and query tools.

Between 10,000 to 15,000 Tweets are published per minutes, making Twitter a great data repository. You might not be interested in seeing how many people tweeted about the weather today, but searching for specific tags like #aid or #blogging or #michaeljackson would be more useful.
There are many query tools dependent on what exactly you search for, the depth of the search, and even more importantly, how it is presented to you.
Most of the search and query tools are also listed in Twtbase. My favourite query tools ar Twazzup and TwitterFall, which not only refresh queries automatically but also show pictures related to your query, the top users, related links, etc… Try also Twicsy to search for tweeted images.

Last but not least: reusing content from Twitter.

Dozens of tools let you take your (or anyone else’s) twitter updates, and republish them on an other website or blog automatically. You can also republish the Twitter content onto other social media services, such as Facebook, Friendfeed or Identi.ca…
If you are both a blogger and a twitterer, it is fashionable to include a widget to display your Twitter’s updates onto your blog or website. This interchanges readers from your blog with your Twitter account.

Interesting links:

- 17 Twitter Desktop applications
- Twtbase, the most extensive Twitter application database.
- 27 Twitter tools to help you find and manage followers
- Top 21 Twitter Applications
- 100 most popular Twitter applications
- An extensive list of Twitter tools for students

Stay tuned for Twitter for Dummies – part 4: The Geeky Art For Nerdy Tweets.

You have successfully created your Twitter account. You read part 1 of this series and have some pretty good idea what you will use Twitter for. You understand the importance of building social communities, and which tools can help you with those tasks…

And then… the blank Twitter prompt is staring in your face. What to do now?

Certain signs, abbreviations or keywords have a fixed meaning in the Tweet-o-sphere. Here is an overview of the Twitter syntax.

1. Handles:

Every user on Twitter has a unique user name (or call it “handle”). Within tweets, we refer to another user by prefixing his or her user name with the “@” sign.

“@JohnnyB” refers to the Twitter user handle “JohnnyB”.

Within a tweet, we use it like this:

Looking forward to meet @BloggerTip tonight

“@BloggerTip” refers to the Twitter username of this blog, BlogTips.

If you know someone’s user name, you can find their latest tweets with the URL http://twitter.com/username.

E.g. http://twitter.com/BloggerTip

By using uppercase and lowercase characters, users make their handle easier to read. For instance, “@ChangeThruInfo” is easier to grasp than “@changethruinfo”, no?

2. Replies:

when a Tweet starts with a handle name, it is a public message to that Twitter user:

@BloggerTip what u think about: “5 reasons Facebook is better than Twitter for your business” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC

3. Direct messages:

Tweets starting with “D” followed by a user name are private messages from one Twitter user to the other. Contrary to replies, these messages can not be seen by other users. Note that both Twitter users need to follow each other before “D” between them is allowed.

D @BloggerTip check out “Facebook better than Twitter for your business?” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC

4. Hash Tags:

Any word starting with the “#” hash sign, is a hash tag, indicating the subject of the tweet. More on the effective use of hash tags in the next post.

“Facebook better than Twitter for your business?” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC #socialmedia

The hash tag identifies the topic of this tweet as “#socialmedia”.

There are no fixed rules for hashtags, other than the need to start with the ‘hash’ sign. Popular hash tags come and go. Some like #earthhour (the day we switch off our lights for one hour, remember?) shot to the most popular hashtag on March 28, the day of the actual event, and then disappeared as fast as they came.

Other hash tags like #iranelection became a way to tag all Tweets about the Iran post-election protests. #CNNfail protested the lack of coverage of certain news events by mainstream media.

#nomaintenance originated around the same time and was a popular tag which pushed Twitter to cancel their plans for maintenance down time one particular night…

5. Retweets:

And last but not least: any tweet starting with “RT” indicates you are re-broadcasting someone else’s tweet.

For instance, when @BloggerTip tweets:

“Facebook better than Twitter for your business?” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC

I can rebroadcast it as follows:

RT @BloggerTip “Facebook better than Twitter for your business?” http://bit.ly/1suvPTC

Retweets are at the core of what makes Twitter more than just a micro-blogging tool. In the next part, we will detail how to retweet effectively and how to make it easy for others to retweet you…

So stay tuned for Twitter for Dummies – part 5: 10 tips for effective tweeting

Additional reading:

The Official Twitter Text Commands

Cartoon courtesy Geek and Poke

I found 10 excellent presentations about Social Media on econsultancy.com. Here is one which gives an excellent all-round introduction into the world of Social Media:

There are a number of ways you can subscribe to, or get automatic updates from any site. Mostly people use our RSS feed.

What is it, and what can it do for you, as a reader or as a blogger?

1. What is RSS?

RSS or “Really Simple Syndication” is a technology used by millions of web users around the world to keep track of their favorite websites. RSS is best described as a “news feed” one subscribes to. These days it is rare to find a website not offering RSS feeds.

In the “old days”, the only way to keep track of updates on a website, was to visit the site regularly. You had to “bookmark” your favourite websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.

The problem with bookmarking is that it can get cumbersome when you are trying to track many websites at once, you might miss information when you don’t check regularly and you do a lot of work in vain as the site might not have any new posts when you check it.

2. And then there was RSS

What if you could ask a website to let you know of any update? This is what RSS does for you: RSS gets you the most up to date information so you can read it in your own time. It saves time and helps you get the information you want quickly after it was published.

It’s like subscribing to a magazine delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box each month when the magazine is published, it is delivered to your “RSS Reader” every time your favorite website publishes updates.

3. How to Use RSS – Step 1: Get an RSS Reader

The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re getting into “reading sites via RSS” is to hook yourself up with an RSS Feed Reader.

There are many feed readers available. A couple are free, and are web based ones like Google Reader and Bloglines.

Both of these feed readers work a little like your email programme: As you subscribe to feeds you’ll see that unread entries from the sites you’re tracking will be marked. As you click on them you’ll see the latest updates which you can read right there in the feed reader. You are given the option to click through to the actual site or move onto the next unread RSS item – marking the last one as “read”.

If you are more adventurous, you can also use more customizable readers like MyYahoo, MyGoogle, MyMSN, Netvibes or Pageflakes.

4. How to Use RSS – Step 2: Find the RSS feed on your favourite sites

There are two places to look for a site’s feed: on the website and in your browser.

For On-Site subscription, you need to look for some of the small buttons and widgets published on your favorite sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, “counters” with how many “readers a blog has”, links or icons called “RSS”, “XML”, “ATOM” and many more. They come in all shapes and sizes. Here are a few you might have seen:

In most cases it’s as simple as either copying and pasting the link associated with the button into your RSS Reader or clicking the button and following the instructions to subscribe using the feed reader of your choice.

On my other site, The Road to the Horizon, I stored the most popular RSS newsfeed subscriptions all on one page.

But nowadays most browsers make it easy for you to subscribe. When you surf a site, you can see if it has an RSS feed by looking in the right hand side of your browser’s address bar (where you type in the site’s URL).

You see the RSS icon? To quickly and easily subscribe to a site, simply click on these icons to see the feed.

5. Don’t want to use an RSS Reader? Try updates via Email!

If the above explanation all just seems a little too complicated, or if you want to read your site’s updates offline, subscribe to RSS feeds via Email.
Here is a sample of an Email update for BlogTips.

6. RSS In Plain English

A video summarizing this post, from the famous series “In Plain English”:

7. If you are a blogger, what can RSS do for you?

Apart from allowing your readers to keep more easily up to date with your latest posts, you can also re-use feeds from other sites.

Integrating the latest headlines from related blogs, or relevant news sources, does spice up your blog.

On my other sites like The Other World News, AidNews or Humanitarian News, I use RSS feeds extensively to aggregate (or summarize) the newest posts from interesting sites. In this post, I explain the technical background of how I manipulate and tweak feeds before I import them into a blog.

This post was inspired by ProBlogger, an endless resource for the serious blogger.