What is Twitter – A Primer

What is Twitter, Who started it, and Why?:

Twitter was started by a guy named Evan Williams (@ev) as a way for people to update their status. Some of you non-nerds may think that facebook came up with the status idea, however, ever since time in memorial; Nerds have been broadcasting their status. From .plan files on unix shells, to /away messages on IRC, and then “Away” messages on AIM, every time a new communication medium is created nerds figure out a way to update their friends on what they’re doing. With the growing prevalence of cell phones it was just a natural evolution for nerds to update their status via Short Message Service(SMS) and want it to propagate to all of their Points-of-presence. After all, according to Wikipedia “SMS text messaging is the most widely used data application on the planet, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74% of all mobile phone subscribers sending and receiving text messages on their phones”. So Twitter is the convergence of the nerds need for statusing, saturation of cell phones, and the open protocols of the internet. Basically, @ev and his team of hackers wrote a little app that took SMS data and published it in a “micro-blog” on the web. The reason that tweets (The nomenclature used for twitter posts) are limited to 140 characters is due to the SMS standard being restricted to that length.

What can I do with it?

You can use the tool in several different ways; Twitter is part Hive-mind, part global consciousness, part blog, part marketing tool, part instantaneous telepresence, part flashmob generator, and last but not least a nifty way to synchronize your status on your social networks.

Hive-mind is the concept that none of us are as smart as all of us. If you post a question on twitter and tag it properly, there is a good chance that you will get a response. Even if you don’t post a question, if you use some of the twitter search tools you will find tons of leads that will point you in the right direction.

Global consciousness is similar to the idea of a hive-mind, but it has more to do with awareness. Twitter has users all over the world and there are tools that will automatically translate their posts for you and translate your responses back to them. The staccato nature of twitter posts leads people to speak concisely and directly, a side effect of this is that messages tend to be easier to translate. The asymmetrical nature of twitter allows for interesting dynamics, you can follow anyone you wish who has an account. They get notification when you do and get to decide if they wish to follow you back. Twitter gives you access to some of the biggest influencers in the world. I follow a plethora of technologists/futurists, the dalai lama, lance armstrong, tony hawk, levar burton, and kevin smith. Interestingly enough some of them follow me too, on a theoretical level this means that my reflection on a subject could influence the dalai lama’s view of our existence… neat, huh?

I originally joined Twitter in mid-2008, right before I left for Arizona to travel back to New York. I used it to micro-blog my progress across the United States. I didn’t know if I would have reliable internet access, but I wanted to be able to update my family and friends and allow them to know where I was at fairly regular intervals. With twitter I could type a message up via SMS and even if I didn’t have cell phone reception at the time I could rest easy, knowing that it would be beamed to my account as soon as I had the slightest hint of cell phone reception. Since then, I have used it mainly as a way to document and journal interesting events as they happened, so that I could reflect on them later or share them with friends in real-time.

You can also use twitter as a marketing tool. As I continue to develop my Photography, I seek both models and feedback from my fellows. I can tag a tweet with the word #photo or #photography and it instantly becomes accessible to the thousands of photographers around the world.

Twitter is a stream of data, you choose how much of the flow you want to consume by carefully selecting who you follow. Every second of every day, hundreds of thousand users are adding tweets to the unimaginable choir that is the twitterstream. Many of them tag their tweets so they can be more easily filtered out of the noise and heard by those who are interested in the associated topic. When Continental Flight 3407 crashed in Clarence, NY (15 minutes from my house) the twitterstream provided an immense amount of data, within a few hours I had links to youtube videos from the scene, tons of photos on flickr, analysis of the crash from other pilots, even the ATC radio traffic in mp3 form from a local Hammer. All I had to do was search for #3407, #Continental, #BuffaloCrash and a few other tags. Twitter provides you a rich source of data from anywhere in the world at any given time.

Another powerful feature is it’s ability to generate “FlashMobs”, unrelated or loosely tied affinity groups that suddenly appear at a location. An example of this is two days ago when Levar Burton invited his followers to meet him for a beer in Toronto. If I had a car at that moment, I would have raced across the border to share a drink with Mr. Reading-Rainbow-LaForge himself.

Lastly, if you’re not interested in the consciousness, the celebrity, or the networking aspects of the application; you can use it for it’s original purpose… To update all your status notifications! There are plugins for just about every social networking site, blogs, and instant messaging clients that will allow you to automatically synchronize your status messages from your twitterstream.

How do I get started ?

1. The first thing you need to do is go to: http://www.twitter.com and sign up for an account.
2. Then I recommend setting up your mobile device and adding the twitter SMS number to your contacts (40404)
3. Grab a twitter client, I highly recommend Tweetdeck: http://www.tweetdeck.com
4. Tweet your first message to the twitterstream
5. Next start following me by going to http://twitter.com/clarkdever
6. Then use Twitter’s tools to find other contacts you might know: http://twitter.com/invitations
7. Now might also be a good time to google for plugins for twitter and social networks
8. Lastly, if you’re looking to find other random local people (say for marketing purposes) I recommend the following googlehack: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:twitter.com+”Location+Buffalo,NY”+OR+”Location+Buffalo” (Obviously, replacing the city with your own).

Twitter’s Grammar

It’s up to you to decide how you’re going to use twitter. I’ll leave you with a few twitterisms.

@username This is the way to publicly reply to a user
d username This is how to send a private message to a user (you can only DM people who are following you)
RT @username This is how you tell people that you are “Retweeting” what another said. Important Note:If you want to comment on their post, your comment goes before the RT (ie. Congratulations Dude! RT @clarkdever Check out this magazine article that I’m featured in: http://bit.ly/12hours)
#keyword This is how you identify the topic of your post, even if you didn’t say it directly (ie. “#Buffalo The 198 has an accident by the albright knox heading East Bound” Users who have searches for the word #buffalo would instantly get the traffic update.)

I also recommend using tools like http://bit.ly (which has the ability to tweet built in) to shorten long urls, so you can provide some information about the link you’re posting if it’s not apparent from the URL itself.

Please share this Primer and feel free to Copypasta it as your own note, all I ask is that you ask people to follow me if they join twitter!

Hope this was insightful and I’ll tweet you later,
Clark Dever
https://twitter.com/clarkdever