How I use Twitter

Twitter has changed the way information flows on the Internet. Quite frankly I don't believe we have completely understood Twitter's impact just yet but some emerging trends are obvious:

• RSS vs. Twitter: Many people now follow their favorite Bloggers or media companies on Twitter rather than reading their RSS feeds in a Reader. This is ultimately good news for content producers, as users will now actually go back to their proprietary sites to consume information, ultimately making monetization easier.

  Image via CrunchBase

• IM/SMS vs. Twitter: Twitter is of course first and foremost a communication service. As opposed to IM and SMS, which are mostly one-to-one, Twitter allows one-to-many communication. In addition to that, it is also possible to communicate with one person publicly or take the conversation private.
• Blogging vs. Twitter: Of course Twitter would be rubbish to write a blog post like this, but for many it has become their service of choice for micro-blogging. People update the world about their thoughts and whereabouts via the web or their mobile phones.
• Search vs. Twitter: Google search is still the undisputed king in most countries for search, however, as the crawlers don't read all websites in the web immediately, there is a delay between the reality of the web and Google's index. With Twitter search you can find real time Tweets on a certain topic. This is especially powerful for real time events like for instance a Gmail outage. As you can Tweet from your phone or the web, stories often break on Twitter rather than on traditional media.
  

One of the keys to Twitter's success has certainly been the openness of its platform. Taking the same approach as many of the most buzzing online companies of our time, like Facebook and Google, Twitter has created a whole eco system around their service. This of course means that users can enjoy a wide variety of applications that enhance the Twitter experience and expand its functions.

Hootsuite is my client of choice to send out Tweets. Hootsuite has four distinct benefits over the traditional way of Tweeting: 1. It allows you to manage multiple Twitter accounts seamlessly 2. It helps you with shrinking long URLs into short links that won't take much space in your 140 character Tweets 3. You can get Analytics like information about the clicks on the links you have attached to your Tweets 4. It allows you to monetize your Tweets via Adsense if they contain links.

To receive Tweets I use Tweetdeck because not only is it a slick looking application but it also allows me to group people I follow. This is useful as people behave very differently on Twitter. Here an extract of an interview with Twitter Founder and CEO Jack Dorsey in the LA Times who brings it to the point:

"Why would I want to join this stupid useless thing and know what my brother's eating for lunch? But that really misses the point because Twitter is fundamentally recipient-controlled -- you choose to listen and you choose to leave. But you also choose what to put down and what to share. So if you decide to hook your plants up to Twitter and have it report when it needs to be watered, then that's a valid usage, or if you just decide to report what you're eating for lunch, that's a valid usage too. [...] The whole bird thing: bird chirps sound meaningless to us, but meaning is applied by other birds. The same is true of Twitter: a lot of messages can be seen as completely useless and meaningless, but it’s entirely dependent on the recipient. So we just fell in love with the word. It was like, "Oh, this is it." We can use it as a verb, as a noun, it fits with so many other words. If you get too many messages you’re "twitterpated" -- the name was just perfect."

While I don't understand why people make their life accessible to the global public, potentially forever, by Tweeting about their whereabouts, mundane tasks and actions, I am sometimes interested to read those sort of things about my friends. Tweetdeck allows me to group my real friends, online friends and news sources in different buckets whose updates I can read when I see fit. Tweetdeck is also ideal to Retweet, or in other words forward a Tweet.

I also use Twitterfox which is a Twitter app that lives on the bottom right corner of your Firefox browser allowing you to quickly read incoming Tweets in browser. You can also use Twitterfox to Tweet, however if you are sending a link Hootsuite has the tracking benefit.

As mentioned previously you can have multiple Twitter accounts. I for instance have one public account thecoolgeek where I Tweet cool links I discover on the web and one private account with no friends that I use to microblog a diary. I Tweet all sorts of things to my private account: what I'm doing, what I'm eating, what I'm thinking, what I'm feeling. The great thing with Twitter is that you can update it with the phone or the web so pretty much most of the time. I would never make that feed public though.

The latter point is worth elaborating. While one could argue that public Facebook status updates are no different than public Tweets there is a difference. All public Tweets can be used by third party applications of all sorts to mash those up. This is not the case with your Facebook status as that stays on Facebook. Who knows how long after you account is deleted those third parties will still have your Tweets. The big problem with public Tweets is that they are brodcasted to the net not only to your followers. Your update about that hot waitress will be available to anyone who searches on Twitter search. I guess it really depends on how much of an exhibitionist are, but I'd rather keep my personal Tweets private and my Facebook status only visible to my friends list. That way I still have control over my online identity.

There are of course many other cool applications that exist within the Twitter-verse. They range from enabling micro payments to to-do list aids. To see a comprehensive list go here.