Using Twitter
My interview with the Des Moines Register about using Twitter:
How and when did you become acquainted with Twitter?
I heard about it last summer in the blog traffic that I follow, looked at the page and then promptly forgot about it. I couldn’t see the use of it. I came back to it in late January and signed up for it, still not sure what I’d use it for, but I started sending out “tweets” about what I was doing and where I was - that kind of stuff. By mid-February, it was starting to gain some traction. I went to some conferences and found friends there who were using it - we added each other… and then, with South by Southwest, the rest is history.
Why did you start using it?
At first, when no one whom I knew was using it, I would send notices about what I was doing without thinking about anyone actually being interested in them. I think, like a lot of the early users, I used it as the creators perhaps originally intended - as a tool to broadcast
one’s current status. “At home reading a book” or “at the cafe” etc
Are you using it now in the same manner you thought you would be?
Yes and no. In the two weeks after SXSW, users began “morphing” Twitter into something different - directly addressing online friends publicly - as though they were shouting across a crowded room to a friend. Twitter has a private message capability, but I think most people use it less often than simply typing @username and saying something that everyone can “hear.”
There’s still the status aspect of it - telling people what you’re doing right now. But more and more people are using it as a notification tool - “hey, I’ve posted a new entry to my blog”, “hey, here’s an interesting link I want to share”, etc.
News passes quickly on Twitter - not only through news organizations like NPR, the New York Times, the BBC and many others which use Twitter to transmit news headlines, but also through individuals. An example: my first notification that Boris Yeltsin died came from an individual on Twitter, before I saw it on the news sites. There have recently been a couple of minor earthquakes in California - both times, within a minute, someone said, “hey, we just had a quake.” A few minutes later, the official notice went up at the US Geological Survey. That makes it an interesting way to transmit news, since people can easily use SMS on their phones to send to Twitter. People are essentially blogging in real time about what’s happening to them - this is what makes it most interesting. Most of the time, it’s pretty mundane stuff, but when news breaks, it’s fascinating to look at the Twitter “stream” and see people reporting what they are seeing with their own eyes.
Another early example: the Mexico City earthquake.
Twitter has quickly become another kind of blogging - there’s the standard long-form blogging… there are Tumblelogs, which are blogs of shorter snippets and collections of photos, etc… and then there’s the third kind of blogging - the live blogging of Twitter - limited to 140 characters. Many people, including me, use all three forms.
An aside: Leisa Reichelt calls the phenomena Ambient Intimacy - “being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.”
As far as my friends who live elsewhere, I love that little extra connection to their daily lives. I still email them, talk to them on the phone, go visit them, but Twitter provides another dimension.
How’s the Twitter outreach going - have your friends/coworkers adopted it too? Have you tried to get them signed up for Twitter?
Almost none of my friends in Des Moines has adopted it. But a number of friends around the country have - from colleagues of mine at other stations, to the president of the NPR board. I’ve only suggested to one person that he join Twitter and he didn’t. I haven’t tried to get colleagues at work into it. Some of them don’t understand the web very well, and they find concepts like instant messaging baffling. I’ve followed the “If they don’t get it, don’t try to help them get it” policy.
I “follow” a number of people I don’t know personally, but whom I respect - technology industry thinkers, and the like. I also subscribe to a couple news feeds - BBC, NPR News, Global Voices.
