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The 140 Character Void Twitter Fills

Twitter’s rapid growth is phenomenal and doesn’t appear to be slowing. There are articles daily on Twitter’s growth, and more and more people (celebrities, companies, and regular folk) keep joining and tweeting. 

I’ve been using Twitter for about 8 months. I am not a Facebook person, or particularly social in general. But I do like Twitter. It isn’t intuitive. In fact, Twitter makes no sense. For example, when you go to twitter.com, the box asks “What are you Doing?”, but tweets about what you are doing are not what people on Twitter want to hear. Use Facebook for that. 

 

The box on Twitter should read “What do you find Interesting?”Because, that is what drives Twitter. The idea is you follow interesting people and learn interesting things. How you find Interesting people varies – that is a different subject.  But the search command is a good start. If you are interested in Cheerios cerial, search for Cheerios and see who is talking about them. (Yes, there are plenty of people out there talking about Cheerios, I checked).

 

But the interesting void Twitter fills has to do with real time updates and conversations. It is amazing what a void the Internet has when it comes to real time updates. A few months ago, there was a major fire not far from my home. I could see the flames and smoke (about 30 miles away). I went to the local paper’s website, but they tend to publish stories based on their printing deadlines. No news there. The Boulder radio station had some updates, but they were too busy playing music. Current news is very hard to find on the web; particularly local events.

 

Fortunately, I follow a bunch of local folks on Twitter. Mostly people I don’t even know. But there I found the information I wanted. Which neighborhoods were being evacuated, what evacuated residents are being told and where they are being sent. Updates from the fire chief (not formal, but what the crowd nearby was hearing) , how the weather is impacting the fire and what the near term weather forecast means for the fight. It streamed across my screen, 140 characters at a time.

 

That was my personal experience, but there are countless others that surface on national news. Everything from an Amazon policy on gay books  to airplane crashes.

 

Twitter fills a currency void, a major void that the Internet simply ignored. I get my primary news online; largely in two flavors. I subscribe via RSS to various sites totaling about 200 posts a day. This varies from newspapers which post many items a day to my favorite blogs which post 1-2 times per week. I check my RSS reader about as religiously as I check my Email. But my other source of news is Twitter. I use Tweetdeck to sort the folks I follow into various categories and I scan the columns looking for interesting things. The signal to noise ratio is about the same on Twitter as RSS – that is I find about 2-3 really interesting things per 20 or so items. And just like RSS, I find that themes emerge very quickly – Susan Boyle, the New Kindle, A Microsoft announcement. RSS and Twitter are very complementary.

 

Twitter is a tool (twool), It is useless “out of the box” (as is an RSS reader). It takes time to find the right people. Certain celebrities I was excited to discover tweet, turned out to be quite boring. Start with Search, find some folks with some common interests, check out who they are conversing with and who they follow, and so on.

 

 

Dave posts regularly about Telecom at his Pin Drop Soup Blog.