Twitter: Tech Tuesday

Twitter. It’s a buzzword but it’s also an extremely puzzling site. The usual response to Twitter explanations is “I don’t get it”. So instead of telling you what it is I’ll start by telling you what it does. Twitter lets you have a conversation over the web.

That makes it sound like instant messaging, but a better comparison would be the chat rooms you used to find on the net in the 1990s. You’d type in a short message and wait a couple of minutes for a response. You’d have to wait because the other users in the room would be sendng messages scrolling others off the screen, but the update was slow. I remember chats with book authors that could rob you of two hours for the sake of a minute or two’s reading. They were rubbish. Twitter works because it gets rid of the rubbish bits. It does this two ways.

One is that you can filter who appears on your screen. You can see the list of people I follow here. When I go to twitter.com then I see the latest messages by these people. So if I see three workmates are on Twitter, Adam, Betty and Clare and I find Adam’s constant pondering over what the best Star Wars film was annoying, then I can follow just Betty and Clare without Adam.

The other useful feature is Twitter is persistent. If I go away for a few days I can catch up on what’s happened. Messages in a chat room might not even last an hour. A conversation you can pick up and drop while you’re working can be useful.

The point I’m trying to make, which was driven home to me by ajcann, is that Twitter only makes sense when you follow people and converse. That’s why I don’t think labels like ‘microblogging’ are helpful, because you can blog just for yourself, but solitary tweeting would be a bit weird.

So how do you use Twitter?

The easiest way is via the web. Sign up and then start following people. The easiest way to follow people is visit their twitter profile and press the follow button. Of course you’d have to know who you wanted to follow first. If you want to follow scientists David Bradley has an ever updated list at Sciencebase. Another way of finding people is to look at who other people are following and being followed by. For instance here are the people I’m following, and here are the people who follow me. They may share similar interests to you.

The core of twitter is the text box on the homepage you can say something, but you’re limited to just 140 characters. You type something and anyone following you will see it.

If you look at the side of the messages posted you might also see a curved arrow. This is for replying to a message. Click this and an entry will start with @user-name in the box. Putting @name in a message will draw it to the attention of the named person. A reply will also have a link back to the original tweet to allow the tracking of a conversation.

Another thing you may see in a tweet are hashtags. These look like #this. That’s an odd way to write but it makes it easy to specify a topic. I like formula one racing. If I go to search.twitter.com and search for #f1 then that search finds all the tagged tweets without having to know who else likes f1 and has been tweeting about it recently.

Advanced Tweeting

Once you have a handle on how Twitter works, you may want something a bit more customisable. This is why Twitter has taken off in the way it has. Its API means that lots of people can build applications to run Twitter. Programs like Twitterfox, Twhirl, Tweetdeck and Digsby all sit in the background checking your Twitter account every few minutes. If nothing new is added, then they sit quietly, but if someone you follow does say something, then they’ll give you a brief alert. Depending on how many people you follow this may or may not be useful.

You can also tweet from your phone, with varying results depending on your territory. It’s easier if you have a smartphone as they are able to use Twitter clients. I tend to use Tweetie on my phone, which means I can see what’s happening when I’m out or else stuck in bed. Mobile clients can also allow you to tweet your location, helpful if you’re trying to meet someone and you’re lost. Via integration with another website, usually TwitPic, you can also tweet photos of where you are.

There are limits to what you can do with twitter. 140 characters is not going to lead to in depth conversations, but it could get you a quick answer to a question or a sympathetic ear when someone goes wrong and you want to yell. That might sound a little trivial, but then that’s part of life.

One thing that 140 characters does help with at all is tweeting links to things you’ve found. There are ways round that, like using URL shortening services like tinyurl, is.gd or bit.ly . These can be made easier to use with the use of bookmarklets, which I’ll talk about next week.

If you have any questions you can leave them in the comment box below or tweet a message to me by starting your tweet with @alun.