Twitter experiment day 4

I joined Twitter a couple days ago (@aggiemudphud). I had heard that much of the value of Twitter related to the ability to connect and share ideas with people you don’t know. At least that was my goal since it seemed redundant and a waste of time to replicate my real world/Facebook network on another platform. Since I want them to serve different purposes I have not linked my twitter posts to my Facebook status updates.

[Aside] I still can’t bring myself to call them “tweets” although the terminology makes more sense now with the bird icon. To convey a similar idea, but with a more congruous link between the name of the service and the name of the posts I would call it “Chirpy” and “Chirps”. No, actually Chirpy is still dumb. I would call the service “Cricket” and the updates “Chirps”. Then you also incorporate the idea of swarms/mobs by using an insect as the underlying theme. [End aside]

I did not set up Twitter to work with my phone because I can’t fathom how it would be manageable unless you were only following a handful of close friends. And they can text you anyway. I mean, do some people really get the equivalent of their Facebook newsfeed showing up as constant stream of text messages? The interruptions would be incomprehensible! But maybe I don’t fully understand how this works. I think the mobile aspect would be pretty useful once I get an iPhone as long as it doesn’t alert me to each incoming message. Right now I just use it from the website or via TwitterGadget on my iGoogle homepage.

In any case, I’ve been trying to read up on Twitter ettiqutte and how people use it. As a passive information aggregator it seems to overlap with how RSS readers work (although I haven’t actually used RSS feeds). It has an adaptable architecture that lets it mold to a variety of uses, but I’m not sure how well it can adapt to multiple simultaneous uses. To build a following you would probably need to pick one primary identity such as "I’m going to post on science/medicine" vs. "I’m going to post about current events, design, medicine, economics and gardening. And also what I had for breakfast." I’m sure you could cultivate a network of people around a shared interest in say, alternative energy +/- community gardening, but would those same folks stick around if you start throwing out a lot of posts about clinical studies or gene mutations or your opinions on religion and economics? I’m not sure. For now I’m just going to post about whatever is interesting to me and see what happens, but in the future it seems like you will need a way to cultivate separate networks. Facebook seems to be moving in this direction by letting you group people in lists.

It’s not immediately obvious how you build up networks of people you don’t know, grouped around common interests. So far I’m just using the search function on the Twitter homepage. I’ve found a venture capital guy to follow based on looking up people that posted on the same topic as me (a research OpEd), and a med student in Hungary with an interest in applying web2.0 technologies to healthcare. Also added some NY Times columnists I read and Angela Hunt, the Dallas City Council member who represents the area near UTSW.

Other stuff I looked up after seeing them in posts: hashtags (#keyword) are a way to tag a keyword in a post. RT means ReTweet. Kind of like an email forward. I also didn't understand what TinyURL were for until I tried to add links within a 140 character message. The other thing I’ve glanced at are trends on the search page. After seeing goodnight trend on the search page around bedtime for a couple nights in a row, I clicked on it and felt a strangely moving sense of community. You imagine this sea of people across the country laying down and turning off the light. Like the end of the Waltons- "Goodnight John Boy", etc.:

goodnight my fellow tweeps :)

Goodnight, Twitterland and all who inhabit it.

OK, I'm putting the laptop away and I'm going to sleep. I will still have the BB handy in case I need to emergency tweet. Goodnight tweeps

And with that I'm off to bed. Goodnight internets!! Sleep well. :)

Goodnight everyone. Look forward to talking to you all tomorrow.

OK time for bed, goodnight Tweeps!

goodnight twitterverse.

Goodnight beautiful tweeple!

I think Twitter is going to be good because whenever I try to blog like this, it always ends up being really long and taking a couple hours to edit my thoughts into something (somewhat) readable. Twitter is more stream of conciousness. Alright, in the words of my new tweeps:

@everyone who read this far: RT “Goodnight beautiful tweeple!”

twitter vs. facebook

I tried several social networking sites- orkut, hi5, myspace, linkedin- before finding on Facebook a tool that has a critical mass of utility (ie users who were my real world friends). I joined about the time they started using the newsfeed function (3-4 years ago?) This feature, while much protested by the original undergraduate users, is what made Facebook useful for me in a way that myspace was not. You could see at a glance what friends from around the country were up to. You also got a sense of what your friends in your immediate circle were up to and could talk about it the next time you saw them.

I first heard about Twitter a few years ago while listening to the podcasts from the SXSW technology conference- it seemed to be all the rage among the technology crowd there, but I wasn't entirely clear on the concept. The users described the utility in terms of having a sixth sense of what was going on in the lives of the people around them. The newsfeed on Facebook pretty much does this for me.

The other thing I didn't understand was how it was used from a time managment standpoint. It seems like constantly updating your status would be a pretty big time suck, unless you were already used to texting from a mobile device on a regular basis. And where do you read your updates? Are people sending you texts every 30 seconds? Is it like IM which I find intrusive and difficult to use?

Anyway, these blog posts were helpful to me in trying to understand what it's all about:
http://www.twitip.com/twitter-versus-facebook/
http://www.twitip.com/the-misunderstood-uses-of-twitter-and-facebook-are-you-a-friend-follower-or-a-fool/

It seems like twitter is more about networking with people you don't necesarily know in real life, while Facebook is a tool for maintaining/augmenting your real-world social networks? Is this accurate? Twitter users out there- what do you do with it? I'm thinking about checking it out, but still don't quite understand if it's something that would be useful to me. On a side note, I also have kind of an aesthetic pet peeve about twitter/tweets. If you're going to send tweets, why not call it Tweeter? Or vice versa? Would I really be able to convey ideas I want to get across in 140 characters? I already find the limits for commenting on articles posted on facebook to be inadequate.

Like more:
email
facebook
phone
reading blogs, articles
ability to communicate with people I don't know
intelligent discourse on comments/message boards

Like less:
Text messages
IM, chatting
"pokes"
application requests
friend requests from people I don't know
hyperpartisan discourse on most comments/message boards

Should I use twitter? Do you use twitter? Help me out here!