Twitter takes wing on mainstream social web

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• Video: Jesse Hirsh on Twitter (Runs 5.08)

While Twitter has been around since March 2006, the first few weeks of 2008 have seen this micro-blogging service expand past the early adopter crowd and start to establish itself as a staple of the emerging social web.

Micro-blogging is a technology that is the product of an attention-deficit culture that requires instant gratification. Instead of expecting people to read entire blog entries, micro-blogging feeds the reader a small, quickly digestable entry that they can easily reply to with a similarly brief response.

Twitter is by far the most popular micro-blogging service, with Pownce a close second. Another popular service called Jaiku was recently purchased by Microsoft. The status update feature within Facebook is another example of micro-blogging.

The current success of Twitter compared to the other platforms resembles a similar trend observed last year with the rise of Facebook, in which a critical mass of users translates into general peer pressure for others to join and try the service.

How it works

So what exactly is Twitter, and why is it so appealing? Let's start by breaking down the Twitter experience.

Each individual message on Twitter is called a Tweet. Each Tweet can be a maximum of 140 characters, literally a sentence or two. Usually this would be a description of what you're up to, but it might also be an observation, a line of poetry, or a lyric from a favourite song.

In this regard it also helps to understand the appeal of Twitter (and micro-blogging in general) as a mobile application. Many of the people who use Twitter do so via their mobile phones, receiving friends' tweets as text messages and replying in a similar manner — basically a form of mobile blogging.

While it is possible to set your tweets so that only pre-approved people see them, Twitter is actually designed to be a public service, in which random readers will see your one or two sentences. The "Public Timeline" is one of Twitter's services that allows you to read what people are talking about in real time.

Twitter also has an "alert" service that allows you to be notified if anyone issues a tweet containing words you're interested in. This might be your name, the name of your company or brand, or a subject matter you're interested in, such as Barack Obama or Afghanistan.

The appeal

Rather than using the Facebook and social networking style of language that classifies contacts as "friends," users on Twitter "follow" each other, and any time anyone you "follow" issues a tweet, you instantly receive it. This speaks to the performance aspect of Twitter, encouraging you to think of your followers as an audience to entertain.

A big part of the appeal of micro-blogging is the combination of speed and connectedness fostered by such short and constant updates. People who use Twitter are moving beyond what they've cultivated via Facebook and establishing even closer electronic ties with their friends and colleagues, demonstrating a sense of intimacy and involvement that represents the next level of social media.

Where Facebook has been criticized as a chronic time waster, Twitter has been used strategically by politicians, journalists and professionals of all stripes. Many politicians, for example, are using Twitter as an easy way to allow their supporters to feel intimately connected to the candidate. Tweets in this regard are used to promote political events, offer post-debate spin, as well as for distributing small messages to remind supporters that their candidate is hard at work to earn their support.

Many political operatives are also using Twitter, including John Edward's campaign manager Joe Trippi. His "tweets" offer a fascinating inside look into the campaign and the thoughts of leading campaign staff.

Some journalists are using Twitter explicitly as a way to find sources, issuing quick and pointed questions to hundreds of users in the hopes of getting a rapid and relevant response. This type of crowdsourcing can be effective in terms of both reaching out to new voices, but also providing a transparent record of their answers.

There are also journalists using Twitter to help augment traditional news. Several American reporters are using Twitter as part of their election coverage, including Time Magazine's Ana Marie Cox whose single-sentence missives provide a poetic lens of the campaign that is refreshingly funny and unique. Here's an example:

Sarasota, FL: You can tell the election is getting closer bc the correspondents are getting older. Or maybe that's just bc we're in Florida. 07:20 AM January 23, 2008

While snarky, this type of coverage is far more entertaining than the traditional campaign-coverage fare, especially when read as they appear throughout the course of the day. There have been times when I've watched live coverage on television and seen one perspective, while receiving Tweets from journalists at the same event offering unique behind-the-scenes insight.

However, some news organizations are also using Twitter to distribute traditional news alerts in a rapid manner to mobile devices. For example, Twitter users can subscribe to CBC News and receive instant updates about breaking news.

This speaks to another potential application of Twitter within the context of crises and emergencies. Researchers are actively exploring Twitter as a platform to deal with emergency response and notification around incidents like Hurricane Katrina, SARS, or a Tsunami.

However, perhaps the most popular use of Twitter at present is with regard to things like pub crawls. People use it to keep track of which bar their friends are going to, or what after-party to end up at. This social element of Twitter is what continues to drive its adoption. The value in these micro-blogging services lies in their ability to facilitate our social lives, rather than the false myth that all this online activity isolates us from the outside world.

Twitter is not a passing fad, but rather represents a new trend in social media. Facebook introduced many people to the concept of social media, and micro-blogging is just an extension of the status message capability, without all the clutter that has turned some people off of these mainstream social networking platforms.

There are many potential professional applications that can be derived from using Twitter, and as more people sign up for this service and demonstrate its use in creative ways, examples will continue to emerge that clearly show its benefits. In the same way that the business world embraced BlackBerrys as a means of always being connected, so to will Twitter be embraced as the next step of ubiquitous connectivity.

Jesse Hirsh is based in Toronto and can be contacted via jessehirsh.com