TwitNine

With today being the final day of the World Cup tournament, Twitter’s servers can finally breathe a sigh of relief. Over the past few weeks, Twitter has experienced more downtime than usual – due to record usage numbers because of the World Cup tournament in South Africa. In June 2010, Twitter experienced around 5 hours of downtime, compared with 50 minutes of downtime in February 2010 and only 22 minutes in November 2009.

And the reason behind all of this? Well, it’s largely down to an extremely high number of tweets any time a goal is scored. Twitter streams have suddenly been inundated with “GOAAAAALLLLL” or “GOOOAAAALLL #ESP”, etc.

Twitter’s head of communications, Sean Garret, did acknowledge that Twitter had anticipated issues because of the World Cup bring an increased number of users.

In a way, having higher usage levels than every before is a good problem to be having. And Twitter’s programmers can see this as an opportunity to make their platform stronger – to be able to cope with such concentrated levels of traffic. All in all, Twitter has served as a great way to bring the world together during this World Cup tournament.

And how can I forget the vuvuzela? Yes, there is a vuvuzela Twitter account which is dedicated to the highly annoying monotone instrument that is taking over the World Cup soccer stadiums in South Africa.

As of today, the vuvuzela has over 11,000 followers and it’s “BZZZZZZZZZZZZ” tweets have been retweeted all over the web. I think this account is a great example of how Twitter, and the internet as a whole, works.

The artist Prince said this week that the internet is dead. I think that this vuvuzela account proves him wrong. The fact that this Twitter account was able to generate over 11,000 followers in 3 weeks shows how viral Twitter actually is. It’s a phenominal way of bringing the world together, and I think it’s safe to say that Twitter is here to stay! (Hopefully, unlike the vuvuzela!)

While your Twitter universe grows and grows, you probably want to find the  best way possible to keep up with your followers and who you’re following. Twitter itself falls short in this area. For some reason, Twitter doesn’t offer a way to search your follower or following lists . It also doesn’t offer a way to sort your followers alphabetically or navigate in any way more efficient than the slow page-by-page scan.

You can quickly find out whether someone is following you back by trying to send that user a direct message. If you’re on the Twitter Web interface’s DM update screen, that twitterer’s username appears in the drop-down list only if he follows you back. If you’re on a desktop client, you can try to direct message that user  if he doesn’t follow you, you get a message telling you so.

Networking is by far one of the most powerful uses that anyone can make of Twitter. But, finding interesting people, maintaining your network, and digging in to really understand who you are connected to are not always straightforward. Here are some tools that will improve your networking experience on Twitter:

Find your followers. You can use sites such as Twitter Karma and FriendorFollow to check and compare who follows you and whom you follow, and to keep up with those people you want to add to your follow list. You can use these kinds of services to check out your followers and to
double-check that you’re following the people who are important to you:

• Friend or  Follow (http://friendorfollow.com): Came onto the Twitter scene more recently than Twitter Karma, and its interface is a little bit easier to understand. The FriendorFollow interface tells you who your mutual follows are, whom you follow without  being followed back, and who follows you without you following them back. You can then pick and choose whom to follow and whom to stop following. FriendorFollow connections don’t automatically opt you into individuals’ device updates, so it’s okay to
  use the tool to connect to many people, even if you have device updates turned on for your account.
• Twitter Karma (www.dossy.org/twitter/karma): Offers you a way to see whom you follow, who follows you, and which users both follow you and are followed by you. You can also use Twitter Karma to add followers, as well as remove users whom you no longer want to follow. But Twitter Karma tends to select Notifications On as the default setting when you add a new follower from Twitter Karma’s interface, so be sure to double- check
  that user’s profile if you don’t want to receive her notifications by text message

Find new people to follow.

• We Follow (www.wefollow.com): User-generated Twitter directory launched by Digg Founder Kevin Rose at SXSW in April 2009. Associates up to three hashtags with each twitterer who lists themselves in the directory and then presents the most followed individuals and accounts for each category. Because the results are searched by follower numbers, it’s a particularly good way to find the top celebrities, musicians, journalists, politicians, and so on who are using Twitter at any given time.
• Twellow (www.twellow.com): Structured like a Yellow Pages for Twitter, allows you to find new followers based on category, name, location, or trending topics. If a Twitter user has been active long enough to have a few tweets on the record, as well as a bio, you can find him on Twellow. If you search for yourself on Twellow, you can claim your profile, meaning that you contact Twellow and prove that you are you in order to get editing privileges for it, and then tweak it to categorize yourself so that others can find you based on your interests, services, or professional categories.

Whether you do it via Twitter or an old-fashioned Rolodex, your business, personal, and career success depends heavily on a little thing called your network. If you’re looking for ways to network more effectively or you want to find interesting, valuable people efficiently Twitter can help you build up a genuinely interesting, astonishingly relevant, and powerful network.

Entire new horizons of opportunity can open up when you finally connect with the people that are right for you. Building a network comes naturally on Twitter. The platform makes it easy to interact and connect with people and businesses who share your interests and goals, and because of @replies and other links between Twitter networks and Twitter users, to randomly interact with and discover interesting new people along the way.

The more you interact on Twitter, the more your network increases. You can build almost any specific type of network on Twitter, too. Twitter offers access to all levels of people and businesses, from those seeking work or a better social life to CEOs and national politicians.

One of the most interesting phenomena on Twitter is the communication and collaboration that can occur while businesses network with one another in public. Twitter offers a level of transparency that erases normal boundaries and rivalries. Take, for example, the CEOs of competing companies IntenseDebate (http://intensedebate.com; @IntenseDebate) and DISQUS (http://disqus.com; @disqus), two companies that build comment management software for blogs. Through a debate in Twitter, they collaborated on some cross-functional features in their otherwise rival products to make both companies’ customers happy and solve a problem.

Twitter can also help business networking in the employment sector  it’s a fantastic way to meet and evaluate new employees, and also to find new work. This movement towards a “Hire 2.0” culture (applying so-called Web 2.0 technologies to the job market), creates a more open and flexible hiring environment for all kinds of companies. You can observe potential employees while they talk about what they know, get referrals from people who know them, the friends of friends who are more likely to know about job opportunities and job candidates.

Freelancers who network and collaborate on projects can use Twitter to find former colleagues from past companies with whom they lost touch, and to get to know their existing employees and customers. We really can’t overstate how versatile a networking tool Twitter can be. In so many ways, Twitter acts as a portable business networking event that you can pop into when the time and availability suit you. Bonus: You don’t have to talk to anyone whom you don’t want to.

You can use Twitter as a fantastic public-relations channel, whatever kind of business you work for. It offers global reach, endless connections, networking opportunities, a promotion platform, and immediate event planning and feedback. Best of all, if you float your ideas out there in genuine, valid, and interesting ways, others can pick them up and spread them around. Many Twitterers from individuals to large corporations   report scoring numerous press opportunities as a result of engaging other Twitterers and sharing on the Twitter platform.

Some traditional public relations firms may be intimidated by Twitter’s potential to connect stories, sources, and journalists. Many of them don’t yet see the opportunity, or they’re thinking about it too narrowly. Twitter is just one more tool  albeit a powerful and efficient one  to add to your arsenal if public relations is important to your business. Twitter simply gives you a
way to make what you do more accessible to people who might otherwise not hear your message.

You may have heard about Twitter in the first place in the context of a mainstream news story about an event of global importance that was first reported via citizen journalism on Twitter  such as the emergency landing of a commercial airplane in the Hudson River in January 2009. Indeed, Twitter is an exceedingly powerful tool for detecting breaking events. You don’t
always get in-depth analysis (at least, not until links to longer writings about the story begin to spread), but you do frequently find yourself way ahead of the game when a story breaks if you’re on Twitter.

Journalists and PR practitioners are among some of Twitter’s most avid users, and they do some pretty interesting things with it. On Monday nights, professionals from both sides of the field gather to talk about current stories, their professions, and the future of media, all by simply tagging their tweets with the word #journchat. Because #journchat is an agreed-on tag and a longstanding event, people know to point their search tools (or http://search.twitter.com) at that word and watch the conversation scroll by.

It was Twitter innovator @PRSarahEvans who came up with the idea for #journchat, and the community she built catapulted her from obscure community college PR practitioner to an extremely well-known social-media innovator. John A. Byrne (@JohnAByrne) of BusinessWeek implemented a similar standing event (Wednesday nights, for those of you playing along at home) when he went onto Twitter one night to answer questions and encouraged the use of the #editorchat hashtag.

Keep it real! The be-genuine Twitter rule applies at all times, even when you’re embarking on a publicity campaign (often especially when you’re attempting to drive sales or awareness to your product, service, or site). Twitter’s users can be very turned off by empty marketing banter.

Remember your balance. Just because you want to see fast results doesn’t mean that you should bombard your Twitter followers with link spam (numerous tweets that contain links to your business) or constant  about whatever you’re trying to promote. Remember to space
it out. On Twitter, overly aggressive promotions can slow your progress and reduce your audience. Tread with respect.

Give your idea wings. Come up with a pithy or witty statement about your promotion that inspires people in your network to share and pass it along (to retweet the statement, or RT) to their own networks. Getting your message retweeted is much more effective than hammering your point home on your own.

When Washington state Republican Representative Jennifer Dunn died in September 2007, people read about it on Twitter before the news hit traditional media sources or even Wikipedia. On January 15, 2009, Janis Krums was on a ferry crossing the Hudson River when he snapped a photo of a downed plane and posted it to Twitter with a short message. The photo was picked up by news services. It is easier to compose a sentence or two and share immediately with others than it is to prepare an in-depth report. For bloggers and journalists alike, the tweet stream can be a great source of story ideas.

CNN’s Rick Sanchez, a Hispanic-American news anchor best known for immersible stunts, solicits tweets for his weekly afternoon news show and features them on the air. Report Twitters, an effort to strengthen the community of professional and amateur reporters, encouraged its members to tweet about the process of getting and filing a story, offering tips and a transparent look behind the bylines.

The pipeline flows the other way, too. News outlets of all sizes, from the BBC and CNN down to local papers and radio stations, make use of Twitter to share breaking news and provide links to their published articles. Bloggers Blog posted information about the 2007–2008 writers’ strike on Twitter, adding to the solidarity base  highlighting
the widespread support for the picket line.

The flip side to news is rumor. As much as we in the Twitosphere like to make a big deal of how quickly we can find out about earthquakes
and plane crashes, the desire to keep the information flowing can lead to mistakes. As with any information you find communicated by media, double-check your sources

November 2008 marked the second anniversary of Robert Scoble’s first tweet in 2006. At a clip of about 17 tweets a day, this A-list blogger has spent the past two years using Twitter to promote his site and share his life with a mass of readers. Amazingly,  Scoble manages to converse with many of his 37,000 followers (most of whom began following him in the past six months). In fact, most of his posts are now directed replies to other users.

Scoble  is one extreme on the user spectrum, but he  isn’t the  leader  in any category. According to TwitDir, as of November 2008 the Twitter account for Station Portal (@InternetRadio) held the record as the biggest producer of content, with over 550,000 tweets and counting. Station Portal monitors about 20,000 Internet radio stations, tracking the number of times each song is played. That account is in the top 1,000 with 1,700 followers, but many Twitter accounts that update über-frequently attract very few followers. In the summer of 2008, the twitterer who attracted the most followers
was Barack Obama, whose throng of 107,000 followers outnumbered those of Digg’s co creator Kevin Rose by 40,000—the equivalent of one Scoble. Obama posted about once every three days throughout the campaign.

A University of Maryland study published  in 2007* captured 1,348,543 tweets from 76,177 members over a two-month period between April and May. The researchers analyzed both the content and the network structure of their sample. One  of   the  outcomes was a graph showing the relationship of tweets to followers, which led them to identify three kinds of Twitter members. Members with high numbers of posts and few followers are considered spammers, and those with many followers and few posts are  information sources (e.g., @BarackObama).  The  authorities sources  such  as @Scobleizer and @InternetRadio—have high numbers in both areas.

The same study also concluded that there are four common user intentions for Twitter members:

Daily chatter

Talk about daily routines and activities Conversations Use of the @ to specifically reference another member Sharing information Inclusion of a pointer referenced in the tweet

Reporting news

Manual and automated reporting of new information, typically through mash ups  with RSS feeds.

This first attempt to officially categorize twitterers through academic analysis offers a good road map for understanding how people make use of their 140 characters to contribute to the information stream. Still, much has changed since the study was done in 2007. The ways people use Twitter today are wide-ranging.

If you want to keep tabs on your Twitter network without logging into Twitter.com, you can use RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to pull in your Twitter stream like it’s a blog. Really Simple Syndication is a format for delivering dynamic Web content blogs, news stories, and multimedia  in a standard, easy-to-read format (called feeds). RSS isn’t a Web site or a Web page: It’s a raw data feed for the content on a Web page or Web site. You often find RSS on blogs and news sites, but any site that has live and updatingcontent, including Twitter, can use RSS.
Most modern browsers (such as Safari, Firefox, and later versions of Internet Explorer) have RSS reading capabilities built in, but you likely want to use a dedicated application or Web site to handle your feeds because then you can
go back later and search them, refer to them, catch up on many at once, and
more.

An RSS reader, such as Newsgator (www.newsgator.com) or Google Reader (www.google.com/reader), aggregates RSS feeds, which you can then read. Within these applications, you subscribe to an RSS feed, which allows you to access your favorite Web content within a single destination and keep up with frequently updated sites.

RSS is a fundamental part of Twitter because it allows users to share and access timelines from virtually anywhere on the Web, as well as through desktop applications and mobile devices. Each user’s timeline has its own RSS feed, which you can read via an RSS reader.
By the way, the gentleman credited with inventing RSS is on Twitter! Say
hello to Dave Winer (@davewiner).

Grabbing RSS feeds

If you have a smartphone that has RSS capabilities, you can use that smartphone to get Twitter while you’re on the go. To grab the RSS feed for your Home screen, click the RSS button in the bottom-left of the status window and follow the specific instructions for your RSS reader. If you hover over the RSS icon in your browser (depending on which browser you use, the location of this icon varies), it also displays the feed address. You can then add the feed address to your RSS reader of choice, such as Google Reader or Bloglines.

You can obtain an individual RSS feed address for your Home screen (the Twitter stream of all your friends), the Everyone page (the public timeline of all Twitter users), and your @username page — but not for your Direct Messages page. To read direct messages, you have to rely on e-mail, text messages, or another method. Also, Twitter Search has RSS capabilities built in. You can pull any search that you perform on Twitter Search into an RSS feed directly from the site.