Tom Guarriello explains how to use Twitter's Track feature to monitor keywords and stay updated on breaking news. He shows how Twitter reported a Chinese earthquake three minutes before the US Geological Survey, demonstrating the speed advantage of following experts and setting up notifications for topics that matter to you.
Well, hi, it's Tom Guarriello. Just a quick one today because I don't know how many of you guys are using Twitter, but you know, Twitter has become a really important part of me keeping up with the things I need to keep up with. Now, a lot of people use Twitter just to chat with their friends, and that's fine. It makes a lot of sense to use it that way. You know, you and your friends follow each other, you don't let anybody else follow you and, you know, that's that. But Twitter is a lot more than that. When you start to explore the possibilities of people who you could follow who are experts, you know, kind of leading-edge thinkers in areas that you care about, you start to be able to develop a stream of information coming at you that can really help you to stay in touch with the things that you care about. Now, it takes a little bit of tweaking and it takes a little bit of practice like any technology platform does, but once you get it, once you figure out who you want to follow, and then you start to use this this advanced feature called Track, which really allows you to track specific words like, you know, for example, your username and get notified on your phone if you want, or on Gmail if you use Gtalk in your Gmail. You start to be able to realize that you can stay in touch with anything you want to stay in touch with via Twitter. Probably more quickly and more effectively than you could do that almost anywhere else. For example, when the Chinese earthquake the other day, Twitter was about 3 minutes ahead of the US Geological Survey in reporting the earthquake. Now, you know, all you have to do is follow, you know, CNN breaking news or one of the breaking news channels on Twitter, and the next thing you know, you're getting things faster than you would have gotten them in any other way. So, uh, just a quick tip that if you're interested, Twitter is really a fascinating, uh, way to go to stay in touch with people and things you're really interested in. So take care, uh, see you soon. Bye-bye.
