What's in a tweet , The Economist (Sep 29)
Tweets may be only 140 characters long, but there is a load of metadata about the author and the tweet. See this infographic.
Article also points to Sipping from the fire hose - Making sense of a torrent of tweets -- in which we learn that Twitter is outsourcing the analysis, distribution, and sale of its data.
Why some ache to tweet, and others couldn’t care less , Ivor Tossell, Globe and Mail (Sep 13)
Twitter has 100 million ACTIVE users - and 10% of those users account for 90% of the messages. It's not all about the trivial details of the lives of those who tweet - and you can avoid those by seeking out the people and organizations who follow topics you want to know more about.
Ivor Tossell concludes -- "It’s a marketplace for ideas and commentary. That’s going to appeal to certain people and less to others. The fact that a medium is useful doesn’t give it a manifest destiny. Twitter’s fans – and I’m among them – should chew on that."
Tweet today, tomorrow what?
Twitter Rolling Out New Features To Highlight Activities & Interactions, Greg Finn, Search Engine Land (Aug 11)
Twitter is turning facebook-esque with new features to activity in network and interactions.
"In addition to seeing the activities of those that you follow Twitter will be highlighting interactions that users are having with their account. This functionality will appear as a new tab with the title @username. Information that will be included on this tab include Tweets of yours that were favorited, retweeted, Tweets directed to you and recent followers:"
Twitter for librarians: a resource guide, Phil Bradley (2011)
Directory to guides and tools for using and searching Twitter. Directed to librarians.
One of the links is to a Twitter Packs wiki site where people have been building a directory to twitter accounts by topic, location, company, and events. Topics page was last updated in May 2011 - suggesting that energy is sagging (as always happens with directories).
INFOGRAPHIC : How To Twitter Effectively, Mark O'Neill, Make Use Of (Aug 15)
Two great starting points - the Complete GUide to Twitter - and the infographic showing all you need to know about username, following, being followed, tweeting. using hashtags #, and privacy.
Twitter Update 2011 by Aaron Smith, PEW Internet (Jun 1)
More are being drawn to using Twitter to post and to read tweets. Mostly these people are using their mobile phone. Something to do during long commutes, perhaps?
"13% of online adults use the status update service Twitter, which represents a significant increase from the 8% of online adults who identified themselves as Twitter users in November 2010. 95% of Twitter users own a mobile phone, and half of these users access the service on their handheld device."
Twitter Upgrades Search Engine, Simplifies Photo Sharing, Juan Carols Perez, IDG News via PC World (Jun 1)
Improvements to Twitter search adds multimedia content to results, and iwill allos users to attach photos to tweets. Great for the iPhone photo bugs.
Twitter Adds Automatic Shortening For URLs, Greg Finn, Search Engine Land (Jun 8)
Twitter's new auto shortening of urls will make tweeting easier.
"The official t.co Twitter shortener will now automatically shorten URLs right from the Tweet box when using the web version of Twitter. The feature shortens links to 19 characters, and shows users a preview of the destination link."
Archiving social media content/context - more questions than answers?, By Jennifer Jones, FUMSI (June 1)
Twitter search says "search what's happening - right now". Twitter stores tweets for up to 10 days (some say 5 days) even though the advanced search allows dates to 2008.
Jennifer Jones gives the reasons why we might need archival search on topics, but says there are more questions than answers.
Indeed, another article tells us that even the Library of Congress is having trouble getting a grip on this. How the Library of Congress is building the Twitter archive
Individuals who look ahead can do their own archiving. Jones mentions a couple of ways. Ann Smarty describes - 3 Methods To Create Your Own Searchable Twitter Archive. There may be more.
But if you haven't planned ahead there's not much choice. Google keeps an archive and shows a timeline, but you'll find that it shows only the last 6 months and displays only a few tweets. It is not the archive service it launched in 2010
[All The Old Tweets Are Found: Google Launches Twitter Archive Search (APr 14)]
Topsy has tweets back to 2007 or 2008 though it may not be complete.
Move Over Time Sorting: Twitter Gets “Top Tweets” Search Results, Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (June 1)
Run a search at Twitter - top results will show first - change the setting, if you wish, to All or to those with links.
"Twitter has added a new “Top Tweets” search results feature, along with “Top Images” and “Top Videos.” It’s a major shift away from showing Twitter search results where the most recent tweet comes first, regardless of real relevancy or quality."
How is top determined?
+ "Relevance for us today is using a combination of signals, your follower graph, who you follow, who’s following you. Another aspect is just looking at the content itself and the resonance of the content,” Mike Abbott, Twitter’s vice president of engineering who oversees search, told me."
+ Personalization - of course.
Twitter revamps 'following' pages, Don Reisinger, The Digital Home (May 27)
When you click on another person's list of who they are following you'll see latest tweets from those people and in another tab usernames and biographical information
Twitter Buying TweetDeck: A Passionate Plea, JR Raphael, PCWorld (May 24)
What does this mean for Tweetdeck? Will it be absorbed, closed, modified? Raphael makes a plea that many will echo.
"Then there's the desktop app -- the piece of the puzzle that worries me the most. I have TweetDeck's desktop app open on my second monitor all day, every day. It's a huge part of my workflow (or, on many occasions, the lack thereof). Maybe Twitter would want to keep TweetDeck around as an officially sanctioned desktop solution. But would it want to maintain the integration with competing services like Facebook and Foursquare under its company banner? Would it be in Twitter's best interest to leave TweetDeck's robust customizability in place? Even if "customizability" were a real word, I'm not so sure it would."
Twitter’s US Adoption At 8%, Report Says, Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Dec 9)
A Pew Internet study found that in the US only 8 % of Internet users use Twitter. They tend to be "females, young adults, and city dwellers ... . And Twitter is more popular among African-American and Latino Internet users than it is among Caucasians. "
Twitter Places: How It Might Challenge Google’s Local Dominance by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Jun 15)
Not only does Twitter have geolocation for its tweets, it has Twitter Places - "Twitter Places, in a nutshell, gives every location its own Twitter page. For now, that page — which you reach by clicking “Tweets about this place” as seen in the image above [see posting]
"To use Twitter Places, you’ll need to enable Twitter’s “tweet with your location” feature, and then click “Add your location” under the text area on your Twitter home page. After that, clicking the location brings up a list of nearby Twitter Places:"— is basically a search results page showing tweets and check-ins."
U.S. Library of Congress will archive every public Tweet from 2006 on , Shane Dingman, Globe and Mail (Apr 14)
Tweeting is more important than we think - there are memorable ones - and Library of Congress is going to keep a record of them.
Some interesting figures:
# Twitter has 105,779,710 registered users.
# It gets 300,000 new users a day.
Dalai Lama joins Twitter , AP via Globe and Mail (Feb 23)
The Dalai Lama has a site that is now at 107,000 followers and growing fast - http://twitter.com/DalaiLama
The recent tweets link to new items at the Dalai Lama's website - a page watching method that is as good (or better) than other tools. Can get a RSS feed as well.
Why You Should Have a Secondary Twitter Account by Tamar Weinberg, techipedia (Feb 16)
Good point - you may have different target markets - business vs personal - therefore work with two accounts.
There are two types of people: those who adore Twitter, follow it faithfully, and contribute to the chatter (some say information) - AND - those who, if they don't abhore it, shirk from it as a mind and time sink.
These two views are fairly well captured by two writers. On the pro side, David Carr explains Why Twitter Will Endure in the New York Times (Jan 1, 2010). On the con, George Packer of the New Yorker wants to Stop the World (Jan 29) and take a big information break.
David Carr has startling stories about his tweets on an airplane being responded to in person by the airline staff. That's eerie. Tweets seem like crack to him (though he doesn't say that). He claims to get much of what he needs to know professionally and personally through tweets .
George Packer will have none of it - no iPhone, no Blackberry. no Google phone - he does have a laptop he'll use to get email if necessary. To him, "The notion of sending and getting brief updates to and from dozens or thousands of people every few minutes is an image from information hell." It's "crack for media addicts".
Packer wrote a follow-up - Neither Luddite nor Biltonite - because Nick Bilton of the Times pounced on Packer's comments about Twitter. He said - The Twitter Train Has Left the Station
Bilton tells his reasons for using Twitter - and they make sense.
"Hundreds of thousands of people now rely on Twitter every day for their business. Food trucks and restaurants around the world tell patrons about daily food specials. Corporations use the service to handle customer service issues. Starbucks, Dell, Ford, JetBlue and many more companies use Twitter to offer discounts and coupons to their customers. Public relations firms, ad agencies, schools, the State Department — even President Obama — now use Twitter and other social networks to share information."
Then there is use by news media (for sending out headlines), citizen journalism, anyone on the scene - cries for help whether that's Haiti or your local neighbourhood.
But George Packer asks how necessary is all this consumption of instant information and what is the human cost.
"There’s no way for readers to be online, surfing, e-mailing, posting, tweeting, reading tweets, and soon enough doing the thing that will come after Twitter, without paying a high price in available time, attention span, reading comprehension, and experience of the immediately surrounding world."
Therefore, there are two types of people: those who like checking for notes from friends, or sales announcements, or headlines, or want to tweet some brilliant thought or sudden need; and those who consider it a poor use of their time - there are better ways to learn what you need to know and to be with friends.
URL Shorteners Come To Google & Facebook by Greg Sterling, Search Engine Land (Dec 14)
With all the short messages everyone needs tools to shorten urls.
"Google announced a new URL shortening service Goo.gl. It doesn’t replace Bit.ly and others because it only works right now with the Google Toolbar (and Feedburner) and you can’t directly access it as you might one of the established tools:"
3 Actual Uses of Twitter Lists, by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Nov 10)
Ann Smarty shows how the new lists feature at Twitter can be useful (though one commenter does ask - what's the point of making the lists?)
1. created a group tweet widget - just for you and your colleagues
2. subscribe to lists with RSS
3. monitor popular lists - and recommends Listorious.
Listorious is the best part of the posting. It is a directory to "awesome lists on Twitter". Maybe this will help answer - what's the point? It is easy to search - eg - can find many green lists.
Refining the Twitter Explosion By NOAM COHEN, New York Times (Nov 8)
Twitter is expected to adopt geolocation on tweets - where it can. This will make it much easier to localize geographically interests and urgencies.
"The idea is to take advantage of global positioning systems on cellphones to allow Twitter users to include a precise location with each tweet. Users would be able, right off the bat, to limit their searches to tweets from a particular location."
Of interest: "In January, there were 2.4 million tweets a day, according to Alessio Signorini, a researcher at the University of Iowa. By October, he reports, there were 26 million tweets a day."
If imitation is a form of flattery, I owe my Twitter impersonator a beer by Leah McLaren, Globe and Mail (Nov 6)
Who would have thought? There are people impersonating others through Twitter. This is like a layer in William Gibson story.
Does Twitter Work as a Music Discovery Engine, Too? by Paul Bonanos, Business Week (Nov 5)
Might not do music, but seems to be doing nearly everything else.
"Twitter is a remarkably flexible application—an efficient news service, a way to keep up with friends, a replacement for RSS feeds, a resource for links worth sharing, a broadcast medium, and two-way method of social interaction (if not quite a social network). But I'm not sold on Twitter as a music discovery engine, despite a recent proliferation of ways to push music into a Twitter feed. Simply put, Twitter and music discovery happen at two different speeds, and music discovery works better elsewhere. "
Twitter for Dummies, AP via Globe and Mail.
Twitter overcomes human isolation, says Laura Fitton, author of Twitter for Dummies. She speaks about Twitter in this short video. Video cuts off abruptly.
In looking for a better copy, I found this site - Cure What Ails You: A Dose of Twitter for Every Day of the School Year by Kathy Schrock -- "n-depth overview of the micro-blogging tool, Twitter"
Twitter tests lists, Pandia (Oct 18)
Here's something to think about - "If you subscribe to the most knowledgeable twitterers in your field, you will get access to top news you didn’t know you should have searched for."
A new Twitter feature lets you sort the people you follow into topics. Pandia points to its own Search Engine Intelligence list.
Postscript: ResearchBuzz on First Look: Twitter Lists (Nov 2)
More on how to create, use, and find Twitter lists.
Using Twitter Searches, Mary Ellen Bates (Oct 2009)
Describes four "real-life uses for Twitter".