What's Twitter for?
Thursday, May 1, 2008 | 01:25 PM ET
By John Bowman
Twitter is becoming more popular by the second, but there's a difference between the way Twitter thinks Twitter is used and the way it's actually used.
Hitwise Intelligence says U.S. internet traffic for micro-blogging service Twitter has spiked in the last week, thanks to some blog and news buzz, but still has only 0.0016 per cent of the market share, ranking 439th among social networks.
Now, Hitwise's methodology here is, they admit, flawed. Because Twitter has so many ways to add content (web, text message, instant message, applications such as Twitterrific) and so many ways to read content (all of the above, plus RSS feeds) that measuring how much traffic twitter.com gets doesn't really show the full picture.
So, it's growing in popularity, but what is Twitter for, anyway?
The description on its site says its goal is to allow users to answer the question "What are you doing?" The Common Craft video "Twitter in Plain English" says it allows you to write about what's happening in your life between e-mails and blog posts (resulting in the same jokes about over-sharing we heard about blogs seven years ago).
That's the intended use, but Twitter is so simple and flexible that people are using it for a lot more than that.
You can send direct messages to Twitter users by including their username, preceded by the at sign, in the message (e.g. @johnbowman). In this way, Twitter becomes a sort of instant messaging system that is viewable to the public. However, if you go to the Twitter page of a user who does this, the result is a series of nonsensical half-conversations. It's telling that this use of the service originated with its users, and only later became an official Twitter feature.
Many Twitterers use the service to create a link blog or tumblelog, a blog that consists mainly of links to other blogs and news sites, perhaps with a short commentary on each. In order to fit in Twitter's 140-character post limit, the links are often converted to shorter URLs using TinyURL or Snipurl.
The result is a bunch of posts with visible URLs (messy) that provide no clue about where the link is headed (this is how people get Rickrolled, or worse). There are better tools for creating a tumblelog, such as Tumblr or Pownce, but that's yet another account on yet another social media site and, well, maybe Twitter's just good enough.
Another related use for Twitter its creators perhaps didn't anticipate is to notify users of an update to a website. Several blogs and news sites have Twitter accounts for this purpose.
There's already a format that does this, RSS feeds, but they can be pretty slow. I mean, the time between an article being published and a new RSS item showing up in users' readers can be up to several minutes. Might as well send a letter. A Twitter post can show up on the public timeline in "less than 5 seconds."
Don't get me wrong, Twitter has a lot of potential, and some exciting journalism is being done using it, including KPBS's coverage of the California wildfires last year.
Twitter is still emerging, still "niche," as Hitwise puts it. And Twitter — and its users — are still trying to figure out what it's for.
Related:
- Journalism.co.uk: How to: master Twitter, if you're a journalist
Blog Watch »
About the Authors
John Bowman has been with the CBCNews.ca since January 2001 and has been blogging on the site since November 2005. He writes more frequenty and more briefly on Twitter at @CBCbw.
Amil Niazi is an associate producer with CBCNews.ca. Before joining CBC she was the editor of Only, a weekly arts and culture magazine in Vancouver. Her freelance work has appreared in Vancouver Magazine, The Westender and CBC Radio 3.
Recent Posts
- Take Issue: Budget 2009 #cdnbudget
- Wednesday, January 28, 2009
- Twitter shines in T.O. blackout
- Thursday, January 15, 2009
- CBCNews.ca on Twitter
- Wednesday, January 14, 2009
- Take Issue: Harper's Senate picks
- Monday, December 22, 2008
- Year of the Tweet
- Friday, December 19, 2008
- Subscribe to Blog Watch
Archives
- January 2009 (3)
- December 2008 (7)
- November 2008 (5)
- October 2008 (7)
- September 2008 (15)
- August 2008 (5)
- July 2008 (9)
- June 2008 (9)
- May 2008 (9)
- April 2008 (10)
- March 2008 (17)
- February 2008 (24)
- January 2008 (9)
