Twitter experiment day 4

I joined Twitter a couple days ago (@aggiemudphud). I had heard that much of the value of Twitter related to the ability to connect and share ideas with people you don’t know. At least that was my goal since it seemed redundant and a waste of time to replicate my real world/Facebook network on another platform. Since I want them to serve different purposes I have not linked my twitter posts to my Facebook status updates.

[Aside] I still can’t bring myself to call them “tweets” although the terminology makes more sense now with the bird icon. To convey a similar idea, but with a more congruous link between the name of the service and the name of the posts I would call it “Chirpy” and “Chirps”. No, actually Chirpy is still dumb. I would call the service “Cricket” and the updates “Chirps”. Then you also incorporate the idea of swarms/mobs by using an insect as the underlying theme. [End aside]

I did not set up Twitter to work with my phone because I can’t fathom how it would be manageable unless you were only following a handful of close friends. And they can text you anyway. I mean, do some people really get the equivalent of their Facebook newsfeed showing up as constant stream of text messages? The interruptions would be incomprehensible! But maybe I don’t fully understand how this works. I think the mobile aspect would be pretty useful once I get an iPhone as long as it doesn’t alert me to each incoming message. Right now I just use it from the website or via TwitterGadget on my iGoogle homepage.

In any case, I’ve been trying to read up on Twitter ettiqutte and how people use it. As a passive information aggregator it seems to overlap with how RSS readers work (although I haven’t actually used RSS feeds). It has an adaptable architecture that lets it mold to a variety of uses, but I’m not sure how well it can adapt to multiple simultaneous uses. To build a following you would probably need to pick one primary identity such as "I’m going to post on science/medicine" vs. "I’m going to post about current events, design, medicine, economics and gardening. And also what I had for breakfast." I’m sure you could cultivate a network of people around a shared interest in say, alternative energy +/- community gardening, but would those same folks stick around if you start throwing out a lot of posts about clinical studies or gene mutations or your opinions on religion and economics? I’m not sure. For now I’m just going to post about whatever is interesting to me and see what happens, but in the future it seems like you will need a way to cultivate separate networks. Facebook seems to be moving in this direction by letting you group people in lists.

It’s not immediately obvious how you build up networks of people you don’t know, grouped around common interests. So far I’m just using the search function on the Twitter homepage. I’ve found a venture capital guy to follow based on looking up people that posted on the same topic as me (a research OpEd), and a med student in Hungary with an interest in applying web2.0 technologies to healthcare. Also added some NY Times columnists I read and Angela Hunt, the Dallas City Council member who represents the area near UTSW.

Other stuff I looked up after seeing them in posts: hashtags (#keyword) are a way to tag a keyword in a post. RT means ReTweet. Kind of like an email forward. I also didn't understand what TinyURL were for until I tried to add links within a 140 character message. The other thing I’ve glanced at are trends on the search page. After seeing goodnight trend on the search page around bedtime for a couple nights in a row, I clicked on it and felt a strangely moving sense of community. You imagine this sea of people across the country laying down and turning off the light. Like the end of the Waltons- "Goodnight John Boy", etc.:

goodnight my fellow tweeps :)

Goodnight, Twitterland and all who inhabit it.

OK, I'm putting the laptop away and I'm going to sleep. I will still have the BB handy in case I need to emergency tweet. Goodnight tweeps

And with that I'm off to bed. Goodnight internets!! Sleep well. :)

Goodnight everyone. Look forward to talking to you all tomorrow.

OK time for bed, goodnight Tweeps!

goodnight twitterverse.

Goodnight beautiful tweeple!

I think Twitter is going to be good because whenever I try to blog like this, it always ends up being really long and taking a couple hours to edit my thoughts into something (somewhat) readable. Twitter is more stream of conciousness. Alright, in the words of my new tweeps:

@everyone who read this far: RT “Goodnight beautiful tweeple!”