Icio Week 12(b) – Twitter Posts

Incredible week for Twitter news. Let’s get into it.

• If you’re tired of checking Twitter on the web or on your desktop application, try one of these 17 visualisations (my favourite is Twitter Vision)
• Twitter is for conversations. Here’s how you track them.
• Did we just witness a Twitter marriage proposal? (credit to Andre for the Tweet)
• Twitter is the tech water cooler. I have no doubt about this.
• Yet another post on how to “get” Twitter.
• 5 ways to have fun on Twitter. #4 – Using Twitter to meet new people is my favourite. Just entering “Singapore” on Tweetscan works wonders.

If you liked all that news but aren’t sure how to get started on Twitter, my handy guide called Twitter 201 is available:

• Part 1: What is Twitter & what uses does it have?
• Part 2: How Twitter can be useful & how to grow your network
• Part 3: Best Twitter apps & general advice

Explaining Twitter. Visually.

After Twitter 201 part 1, part 2 and part 3, you still don’t get Twitter?

Maybe this video will help:

Got the gist? Great. Now, follow me on Twitter.

Twitter Recap Of Yahoo! Firing

Yahoo! laid off some workers earlier this week and one employee gave a step-by-step account of his ordeal via Twitter. Some of his posts:

Y! layoffs today, I’m “impacted”. I’m heading into work to pack my desk, get my severance paperwork and hand in my badge…more to come. about 10 hours ago

On the plus side, my commute just got a lot shorter. about 10 hours ago.

Walking around saying good bye to some great people and good friends. about 9 hours ago

Waiting for the call from HR so I can go pick up my paperwork….C’mon, c’mon! I’m busy here! Let’s get this over with. about 8 hours ago

Thanks to everyone sending the positive tweets. I’ve got plenty of free time now so just let me know if you want to meet up for lunch. about 8 hours ago

I first read about the whole story over at Jaffe Juice, head over there to read the rest of the tweets.

While undoubtedly it’s a sad instance in which Twitter was used, I can’t help but wonder if this really does help portray how useful Twitter can be in certain settings. What would we have heard if a someone two buildings away from the Twin Towers was on Twitter on 9/11? There’s still decent amount of debate online whether or not Twitter is useful. I’d love to hear what you think. Largely useful? Somewhat useful? Not useful? Don’t know? Give me a shout.

On the upside, I noticed that my Twitter 201 coverage got almost double the views than of the Twitter100 series. I really hope that that’s benefited you and helped you use Twitter a little better. New articles on Twitter are coming up literally every half a day, but I’m going to move on from covering those stories unless it’s something original that I come up with. If you want to follow me on Twitter, my username is uniquefrequency.

I’ve been playing around with both AssetBar and LinkRiver for about two hours today and I’m beginning to get a pretty good feel of them. I’ll probably be directing some attention to them this week.

Both creators were kind enough to post responses to my posts on them, and I really think you should check them out. They’re both not as fun without people on them, because they’re meant to be social! So far I only have Louisgray for company. If you do sign up, add me as a friend: uniquefrequency

Twitter 201: Epilogue

I kept these till the end because I was toying with the idea of creating something like this, but decided I simply didn’t have the time. Here are 2 video guides to using Twitter. Enjoy!

Doing It Right

After the terrible experience with Todoist, I went on to experiment with Remember The Milk. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it was covered in part 3 of Twitter 201 under best apps to use with Twitter.

So why is Remember The Milk such a great improvement over Todoist?

1) Complete step by step guides for various features

2) The Twitter plugin

3) The Gmail plugin – everytime I open my Gmail, the tasks I have yet to do are staring at me in the face. No way around it.

Their online interface and brilliant way of weaving in other platforms like Twitter and Gmail has even made me switch over to Firefox for the first time, and even give serious thought to paying $25/year for their premium service, including MilkSync, so I can use it on my phone.

Two companies operating on the internet. One fully embracing Web2.0 and understanding exactly what customers online want, the other, utterly clueless. What do you think?

Twitter 201: Part 3 – Best Twitter Apps & Advice

Here’s the final part of Twitter 201 which will cover the best applications for Twitter, as well as a few things I’d advise against on Twitter. If you missed earlier parts, here are the links to part 1 and part 2.

Best Apps For Twitter

1) Tweetscan – Allows you to search for specific things that people are Tweeting about. This is a favourite of mine and I’ve had a great experience where I was searching for “chinese new year”, found someone else’s blog, commented on it and a reader of that blog then came here and commented. Can’t recommend this enough

2) Snitter is an application you download to your desktop and it looks a little something like this:

The benefit is simple: you don’t have to continually go to the Twitter website, but just update your Tweets from this instead. Your friends’ updates will be sent right to you as well. I’ve been using this for a few days and have found it to be fairly non-intrusive.

3) Twitter Cal helps with productivity and scheduling, which can be useful. I haven’t personally used this very often, but the perks are definitely there.

4) Facebook Application – search for this on Facebook, and anytime you update your Twitter status, your Facebook status gets updated at the same time. Pretty neat.

General Twitter Advice

Know who your audience is. This can make a difference between whether you Tweet yourself to remember the milk, or publicising something to friends.

Too much “noise”. Twitter your thoughts (Why I dislike Chinese New Year) vs actions (wondering which pair of socks to wear). Do keep in mind that Twitter also functions as an extension of your personal brand, and people will stop following you if you post too many frivolous Tweets.

Be aware of who you’re following. Best example of this – When Seth Godin isn’t Seth Godin.

Trivia

SianAh – Trust Singaporeans to come up with a Twitter clone for you to fill in what’s bothering you. Unfortunately, I think SianAh is gone now because I can’t access the website

That brings me to the end of the Twitter201 posts. I really hope you enjoyed it and most importantly, learned something that will help you use Twitter a little better. As always, feel free to comment if you have other uses/suggestions on Twitter below.

References:

Publishing 2.0 – Why I Stopped Using Twitter
Chris Brogan – Twitter Revisited
ProBlogger – 9 Benefits Of Twitter For Bloggers, Tips For Bloggers
Lifehack – Twitter: Use It Productively

Edit: There’s a new Twitter write-up on Makeuseof that just got posted which covers almost the same scope as this but with variants in the apps and with a section on word tracking. Worth a look!

Twitter 201: Part 2 – How To Make Twitter Useful & Grow Your Network

Part 2 of Twitter coverage focusing on making Twitter useful and growing your network. If you missed it, part 1 was an introduction to Twitter & its uses.

How Is It Useful?

For Twitter to be useful, it’s got to be more than a website you visit from time to time to update your status. It actually has to be a part of your daily life. One of the websites I read actually had the person saying he sets specific times of the day to remind himself to Twitter.

Once Twitter is a permanent feature in your day, you need to generate enough friends or acquaintances to fully realise the network externalities of Twitter, and eventually translate this network into real benefits.

How Do You Grow Your Network

1) Join or create a conversation. This is relatively simple, reply to what people are asking/saying to “appear” on their radar. If you’re replying to someone directly, use @theirusername so that they know it. Most importantly: Do not just broadcast one-way. That makes it very hard for someone to enter a conversation with you.

2) Post interesting/thought-provoking Tweets. The thing about Twitter, is many people on it just generate “noise”, such as my example yesterday. It’s fine from time to time, but reading about a friend who just updates about going to the toilet, choosing underwear, printing notes etcetc will get tiring. So how do you not create “noise”? Chris Brogan has great advice: “Instead of answering “What’re you doing?”, try answering “What as your attention?””

In part 3 of Twitter 201: best apps for Twitter and what not to do on Twitter. Check back or subscribe to my RSS if you don’t want to miss it. Once again, feel free to follow me on Twitter: uniquefrequency

Twitter 201: Part 1 – What Is Twitter & What Uses Does It Have?

Roughly trawling through 10 webpages and roughly 470 comments later, I’m ready to “graduate” to Twitter201 and give you a good if not definitive guide to Twitter and it’s uses. This will be part 1 of 3, so check back or subscribe to my RSS feed to know when parts 2 and 3 are out.

What Is Twitter?

Twitter is a mashup between instant messaging (IM), email, facebook and even sms. It’s mobile, can be targeted specifically at friends or widely at anyone you choose, is instantaneous, and social.

When you visit Twitter, you’ll be prompted: “What are you doing?” and that’s exactly what Twitter does: let your friends/acquaintances know what you’re doing at any given time. For example, mine currently says “yet another great cup of Hazelnut latte at Borders Bistro”, that lets people know what I’m doing and where I’m at. Let me just say that that’s a bad example of how to use Twitter, and a good example of “noise”. More on that in part 2.

If I haven’t made it clear by now, Twitter’s usage is to help you stay connected with whoever you choose.

More Twitter Usages

Besides connecting people, Twitter also allows you to ask questions to find out more about what the people in your network think or what they’re doing. A really good example is found on ProBlogger where Darren got 30 responses to a question in 10 minutes. (You should really click on the link and check out the screenshots to get an idea of what I’m saying).

Also Twitter can be used very easily as a traffic generating device. Everytime I have a new blogpost, I announce it on Twitter for anyone who’s interested.

Twitter can also be used as a to-do-list. Remember The Milk is a cool site where you can send messages to your Twitter to remember stuff like, well, buying milk. If your phone is internet or wi-fi enabled, this can be even more useful because you can just update your Twitter status to remind yourself to do something later.

Finally, Twitter can be used for friendsourcing. Surfing around Twitter the past few days, I’ve seen quite a few tweets going like “need a ______ on behalf of a friend”, which can be really useful if there’s something specific you need, and a particular audience you want to tap onto.

Before I end, let me say that this list is nowhere near exhaustive and of course there are business uses that I’ve neglected to mention. Given that I don’t own a business, I don’t think I have the necessary expertise to talk about that. Also, this guide is targeted at the average blogger trying to figure out how to use Twitter for the first time, I’ve decided to leave out all the business bits.

Part 2 should be up tomorrow, covering what you need to do to make Twitter useful, as well as how to grow your Twitter network. Meanwhile you may want to check out my previous posts Twitter 101, Twitter 102 and Twitter 103, as well as let me know what’s on your mind with regards to Twitter in the comments below!

PS: If you like what I’m doing, please add me to your Technorati favourites () and/or follow me on Twitter, user: uniquefrequency

Twitter 103: Apps For Twitter

Fimoculous introduces six apps that will probably help enhance your Twitter usage. My favourite of the lot is by far TweetScan.

Jac, Amelia and myself were thinking about how Twitter can be used for us, and a quick TweetScan search on “photography” quickly turned up some results that would probably of use to Jac, and I’m sure searches for food would yield similar results.

I think I’ve read quite a bit on Twitter, and I’m ready to progress to Twitter 201 which will talk about how us regular bloggers (ie the non-famous people of the world), may actually have practical uses for Twitter. This’ll probably occur after Chinese New Year, so stay tuned!