Twitter: Why Bother?

So unless you live in a cave somewhere, you've heard a lot about Twitter over the last— who knows— anywhere from last year to the last couple of months. And people ask me why I get so excited when I talk about Twitter, and I thought I'd make a video particularly in response to Mike who was asking me, "What's this Twitter thing? It's a flash in the pan. It's a— you know, why are you so psyched about this? It's a stupid website. It has no features. It's nothing." And, you know, you can look at Twitter and you can say, "What is this? It's nothing." So hang on, I'm going to show you a screenshot of what Twitter looks like in a second here. Okay, so let's take a look at, at a Twitter page. And this is my, my Twitter homepage that you're looking at. And you see that you can custom design your own background, and I've got a little box there kind of telling people who I am. If you start up at the top, you see that the links that are there are for your home, page for your profile where you get to set up, you know, the usual kind of identity about yourself and so on. A way to find people on Twitter or in other networks and see if they are on Twitter. A settings tab and so on. And excuse me while I answer the phone. Stupid marketing surveys. Okay, so that's the very top. Then you Then you look down and right there in the center, in that white area, you'll see that at the very top is a question, "What are you doing?" and you see the number 140. And that's because Twitter is a service that asks you to say whatever it is you're going to say in 140 characters or less. That's because it's SMS-based, based on SMS technology, which is limited to 140 characters. So Now you would think that 140 characters would be a serious limitation for expressing anything at all, and you'd be wrong. 140 characters turns out to be plenty to express a lot, and I'll show you how people have gotten clever with using 140 characters in just a second. Now that question, "What are you doing?" was the original intent of Twitter. The, the Evan Williams and the other guy who invented it thought that people were going to use it to just do that, to tell people what they were doing. Hi, I'm drinking coffee. Hi, I'm eating lunch. And people who don't use Twitter very often still believe that that's what Twitter is for. And in reality, Twitter can be used simply as a way of, um, telling you what people are doing. There's the first indication that you have that Twitter is very, very flexible, and because it's very flexible, people use it in a lot of different ways, which is why a lot of people ask, why do you use Twitter? What good is it? Well, It really all depends, like any great tool, it really all depends on how you use it. Okay, you've got that box there where you type in your— whatever it is, it's called a tweet, by the way, an individual post on Twitter. You type in your tweet and bingo, you're ready to go, right? And then you hit update and it posts out there. Now, where does it post? Okay, let's take a look the next image and I'll explain that. So when you first go on Twitter and you first join it, you are not going to see anything that interests you. I guarantee you that. You're not going to see anything that interests you because what you're going to see is what is known in Twitter as the public timeline. Now, the public timeline is every single person anywhere in the world posting on Twitter. Here's a quick grab of— screen grab of the Twitter public timeline, and you'll see that there are people here who have posted things, one of whom has posted in a language that I would assume is Chinese, but I don't really know. The second one down here by Sweets821, the person, the person who is posting the tweet, you will see their avatar out there on the, on the left-hand side of the screen as you're looking at it, and then you'll see their name in blue, in this case as a link. So that's how you know who it is that has posted this tweet. Now, the public timeline is just made up of everybody, everybody all over the world. And if you watch the public timeline, um, you really think, well, this is madness. Why is anybody watching? Why does anybody care about this stuff? Who are these people and why does anybody care about them? And you'd be right. Because in an unfiltered way, the public timeline on Twitter is just the sum total of every single thing that everybody's saying about whatever it is they're saying anything about at any moment. And if you watch the speed, you have to refresh the pub— the, uh, every Twitter page in order to, um, get the next iterations of, uh, tweets. And if you refresh often you'll see that there are people— I mean, there are hundreds of millions of tweets that are being posted there, and you don't care about any of that. And when— so when you first go on, that's what you see on Twitter. But the power of Twitter— let's go back to my page now— the power of Twitter has to do with this little section up in the upper right-hand corner under my name, which says Tom Guarriello, and then underneath it says 950 following, 1,345 followers, and 4,311 updates. Okay, so the first number, 950, that means that I am following 950 people on Twitter. The next number, 1,345, says that that many people are following me on Twitter.. And the final number, 4,311, are the number of updates that I've made to Twitter. Now I've been on Twitter— I find out just not too long ago from somebody that I've been on Twitter since November of 2006. I was a very early Twitter adopter. So since November of 2006, I have written 4,311 tweets. Okay, so that's The key to Twitter is who are you following and who is following you. Now, how do you figure out who to follow? Aha, there's one of the big tricks in Twitter. If you want to use Twitter as a— well, let's back up. Depending on how you want to use Twitter, that will dictate who you want to follow. Let's say that you've been on Vloggerheads here, or YouTube here, for a while, and you decide that you want to follow people on Twitter who you know from the video world. So you can follow anybody. Most likely now you can find most people who are on video sites also on Twitter. So You will search for people through the Find People function that's up there in the upper right-hand corner of the Twitter stream, and you'll probably be able to find people who you know from video world. Now, if you want to use Twitter for other purposes— in my case, I use Twitter as a business research tool and I want— and a business information tool, and so I want to get information from people who are going to be giving me valuable information on their Twitter stream that I can follow. And that's what I do. So I will follow people like— you'll see the number 2 name on this list is @Rotkaption, and that happens not to be somebody named Rotkaption. It happens to be a woman who is very, very plugged into new media, social media, IT kinds of issues in general, whom I met at a conference about a year ago. So I follow her. Now let's take a look at that tweet that's down there on the second line of the screen. First you see her name, then you see a little ampersand, an sign, and then another name in blue, which means that that's another user. Now, that convention, using an ampersand and then putting someone's name after it, has evolved. This was not an original Twitter feature. This has evolved as a feature of Twitter over time as people have wanted to figure out a way to communicate directly one-to-one with one another. There are two ways to do that. I'll explain here in a second. The first way is if you— if someone writes something, for example, this woman has written something, and if I wanted to respond to her, I would up in the tweet box type in an sign, and I would say @RotCaption, and then I would say whatever I want to say. Nice idea, like your thoughts on Sharky. For example, okay? And then she would get that message appearing in her stream of tweets, and it would also appear— if you look over here again on the right-hand side of the screen, you'll see that underneath the home section is a section that has @replies. Well, that means that if anyone has typed in an ampersand and your screen name after, after it, that that particular tweet will show up in that special section over there in your @replies. Now, as we can continue to go down there, you can also take a look at direct messages. If, if I follow you and you follow me, if we both follow one another in the convent— in the Twitter convention, then I can send you direct messages and you can send me direct messages. You can also block people on Twitter. So you see here on the screen, I have 227 direct messages that have been sent to me. You also can make favorites. You can favorite a tweet just clicking on a star. The Everyone is that public timeline that we saw earlier, and then it has pictures of the people who you are following underneath that, their icons, and you can look at your list of people that you are following. And finally, way down below It says device updates, and you can have, you can have your Twitter updates sent to your phone as SMS messages because there's a 140-character limit and because Twitter is fundamentally an SMS platform. You can have those updates selectively by selective people who you want to have them, uh, their updates sent to your phone. You can have those sent to your phone. So So you see here that the ampersand then is a very important convention of what's happened in Twitter. There's one more very important convention that I want you to look at on this screen, and that one is up here in the first tweet, the one by Matt. Now you will see that as that— actually, there are two conventions here I want to show you. As you go down to the bottom of that tweet, you'll see "Glad LA fought back." colon, and then you will see a URL. Now that is a— as you can see, it's a bit.ly URL, which means that it's a shortened URL. There are many services that provide this. I put— I like TinyURL myself, but what those services do is to take a long URL, which you know can be a lot of characters, and shortens them down in TinyURL's case, to 25 characters. Now remember, you're working within a 140-character limit on Twitter, so the fact that you can find a page out on the web that you want to tell people about in a tweet, do a little bit of an intro about what that page is about, and then pop in a 25-character TinyURL means that Twitter now becomes kind of a You know, a sharing site for telling people about things that are interesting. So now start to imagine you want to follow people who know something about cooking, and you find people who know something about cooking. And lo and behold, what do the people who know something about cooking tweet about? They tweet about cooking, right? If you're gonna tweet about cooking, what are you gonna do? You're gonna show people recipes, you're gonna show people pictures, you're going to show people videos of things. Every one of those is a URL. You grab the URL, you shorten it through a shortening service, you bring it over and pop it into a tweet, you send it out. Your followers are now going, "Wow, that's great! I never knew that was how you made Swedish meatballs." You have now information, valuable information to you based upon your Twitter stream. So That's kind of the, the standard, if you will, way to use Twitter. Now you'll also see that at the end of this first tweet, the one by, by Matt, you'll also see after the shortened URL, you'll also see a number sign, or as it's known, a hashtag, and then @toc, right? You'll see #atoc. Now let me show you now another screen that's going to tell you about hashtags and what they're used for. Oh, hang on, gonna get that for you. Okay, so now the hashtag convention is a way for people who all of whom are interested in the same thing to designate that the tweet that they have written is about that thing. In this case, Let's take a look at this hashtag, #SixNations. Now, it turns out that while I was recording this video, a, a rugby tournament was going on in Europe. I don't know anything about rugby, but what I did know is that when I came over to the Twitter search function, which is search.twitter.com. When I went over to, to this Twitter search function, what I found was that the number 9, uh, most popular trending topic— you can see over here on the right-hand side of the screen— the number 9 most popular trending topic was something called #SixNations. I then put, put that term into the Twitter search box, and lo and behold, here are all of these tweets for the Six Nations Rugby Tournament. Now remember, anything that is happening live is what people are likely to be twittering about. Here is this, uh, A rugby tournament. People are excited about the rugby tournament. What do they do? They write a tweet about it. They put #SixNations on it. Boom! They send it out. This is really the key to Twitter. Twitter is the live web. Whatever is going on now of any consequence, if there is an event of any kind, a rugby tournament, an accident of any kind— airplane crashes into the Hudson River in New York— a cultural event of any kind like the Oscars, the Super Bowl, anything that a lot of people are interested in all at once, that is going to appear in this hashtag stream of tweets. And again, if you're interested in either that event or just simply doing research into what people are interested in at any particular moment, you can go over to search.twitter.com, take a look at what's popular, and immediately know if anything's happening. You see that the number one tweeted term without a hashtag, just kind of put out there, is Valentine's Day. So you can search for things with a hashtag where people all agree that they're all going to essentially tag their tweets in the same way like they did at TED, for example. TED 2009 and #TED2009 and #TED were the conventions that we all used when we were writing about TED, and therefore we could easily go over here to the search function, put in that term, and see what it is that people were were saying about it. So that's the second very, very powerful way, really the third if you count the public timeline. And then the final way is to take a look at just the tweets by any particular individual. Let's take a look at this page right here. This is Clay Shirky's page on Twitter. Now Clay Shirky is a guy who writes extensively about technology and really trends in information and so on. You see that Clay Shirky, uh, uh, has 9,218 followers, so people care about what Clay Shirky has to say. Now you can just simply click on Clay Shirky's name, you know, that little blue link, uh, that we saw, and at any time just see what Clay is writing. So now you can follow individuals. You don't have to read their material in real time if you don't want to. You can just say, you know what, I'll catch up to Clay Shirky's tweets whenever. You can see that the number one tweet here, the top one, is one in which he has an ampersand @ethanz. @ethanz I know is Ethan Zuckerman, who's a great blogger who live blogs TED every year. And I could— if I wanted to, click on Ethan's name and then go see what Ethan's had to say. So now you start to see that Twitter is really only limited by your imagination. The amount of material that you can research using Twitter is enormous. And let me say this: do you remember the impact that Google had on your life and maybe even more importantly, on your brain. When you first discovered that you could search for anything you wanted to search for at any moment, that really changed everything for you, didn't it? Certainly did for me. I know now that my, my brain without Twitter— I'm sorry, without Google— is different than my brain with Google. And I also now know that my brain without Twitter is different than my brain with Twitter. Why? Because if I want essentially to do the same thing that I do with Google, which is to find out information about stuff, if I want to find out things about, let's call it, the dead web, all that stuff from the past, even if it's just yesterday, even if it's just earlier today, you know, Google crawls websites, uh, not in real time. So if I want to find out things about the past, I search Google. If I want to find out things about right now on the live web, what's happening right now, I use Twitter. And I think anybody who is interested in what's happening now is going to be using Twitter to find out what's happening now, and they're gonna find it to be not just valuable but a lot of fun. So I hope that explains a little bit about why I'm kind of, uh, Twitter obsessed at the moment, as a lot of people are, I think. Um, and I hope you get some benefit from using Twitter. And don't forget, when you get over there, follow me, Tom Guarriello, one word, no space. See you out there.