Twitter – What’s it all about

So what’s this TWITTER – WWW.TWITTER.COM thing all about ?

The TWITTER project started back in 2006 and was setup as a way of sending SMS type messages to groups of people.

It’s sometimes termed MICRO BLOGGING, as the length of message is limited to 140 character’s and allows people to send a TWEET quickly about what there up to, whereas a BLOG such as this, takes time to compose, compile and review.

A TWEET, a message sent by TWITTER, is defined as A short burst of inconsequential information and many times what you read on TWITTER can be inconsequential, but there can be GEM’s to be mined in the background noise, that give you heads up on things before they hit, if they ever do hit the mainline media.

The TWITTER technology is FULLY integrated into mobile phone technology, even the most basic phone can send an SMS message to a TWITTER phone number that will post the update on your TWITTER channel / stream. NEW SMART phones have fully integrated TWITTER clients that allow both posting of new updates as well as browsing tweets from your connected followers.

Like other social networking technologies it allows you to be part of a meshed network of nodes, where you follow people you are interested in and people that are interested in you follow you. But unlike FACEBOOK, where what you post is PRIVATE and shared only with your followers, TWITTER is predominantly PUBLIC i.e. If you enter a username after the TWITTER webpage, you can see every open post that that person has sent i.e. WWW.TWITTER.COM/INFOSTOCKSY shows all the posts I have sent out on twitter, that aren’t DIRECT messages to other users (which are private between sender and recipient).

One tool that is built into many TWITTER API’s (application programming interface) is URL shortening, basically this takes a WEB address, that can be quite long and squashes it down into a few characters that dont monopolise the 140 characters of message you are trying to convey i.e. the following 72 character WEB address, over 50% of the message space

has been SQUASHED to the following 20 character WEB address

http://bit.ly/asqhbm before the message was posted on TWITTER.

RETWEETING is where you read a TWEET posted by someone your following and find it so interesting that you forward the message on to the people that are following you.

The following are some of the individuals / groups that I follow, many of which you might recognise:-

BBCBANG

9TO5MAC

MACRUMORS

BBCNEWSNIGHT

HOTUKDEALS

JASONBRADBURY

JOHNCLEESE

SEGWAYINC

DAINPROJECT

GARTNER_INC

RICHARDBRANSON

WOSSY

BILLT

THISISDAVINA

STEPHENFRY

CHRISDJMOYLES

It’s very easy to search for People or Groups that you would like to follow on TWITTER, go to GOOGLE type in the name of the individual, group name and follow it by TWITTER and generally what your looking for will be in the results.

The following are the highest ranked TWITTER users from last year with the position they reached :-

1 Ashton Kutcher

2 Britney Spears

3 Ellen DeGeneres

4 Barack Obama

5 Lady GaGa

7 Oprah Winfrey

8 John Mayer

10 Ryan Seacrest

12 CNN Breaking News

15 Coldplay

16 Demi Moore

19 Lance Armstrong

20 The New York Times

Hashtags / strings prefixed by # are ways that people tag things for trending i.e. You might post a TWEET about Christmas and place at # before Christmas in order that Christmas is tracked and trended throughout the TWITTER message world.

Some crazy facts and figures :-

– 75% TWITTER messages are sent from outside of the TWITTER website – via API (application programming interfaces) such as Phone apps, TWEETDECK, TWEETIE, TWITTERRIFIC, TGADGET etc.

– Review of 2000 tweets showed :-

41% Pointless babble

38% Conversational

9% Pass along value

6% Self promotion

4% Spam

4% News

– More than 106 M users

– 300K new users every day

– 55M tweets sent a day = 640 / second

– 41% have not tweeted since they created an account

Demographics