A Twitter Experience...

About 6 months ago Twitter.com became huge. Almost overnight. It got an incredible amount of press and everyone wanted part of it. I'm not a natural bandwagon jumper for social networking progressions so it was only after the Mumbai terror attacks and Hudson River plane crash and the role Twitter played in breaking those stories on a world stage I started to take notice. Even then it was more to register my username before someone else did! (that's twitter.com/benchadwick in case you were wondering).

I decided not to post any of my experiences on Twitter until I'd passed through a couple of stages: these were notablly signing up and getting started, understanding how it worked, getting the most (for me) out of it and finally progressing past the novetly factor. Hopefully by waiting I can give a better account and comment on how I found the process.

I began, as I suspect most people do, with the following:

benchadwick: Don't really have anything to say! 2009-01-16 15:49:29 

source: http://myfirsttweet.com

Impressively as I manually search back through some of my early tweets, I seem to have avoided the cliched 'Don't really understand twitter', 'how does this work' and 'this is my first tweet' postings! This can possibly be attributed to the fact that I knew a bit about twitter before signing up or more probably sheer luck!

Lots and lots and lots of people have written on the different stages people go through when using twitter, so I won't! For the record these are good examples: Rohit Bhargava's 5 Stages of Twitter Acceptance (pictured), Jason Hiner's 4 Stages for ZDNet and this by Jemima Kiss (of the Guardian fame). 

So I'd signed up to secure my username, done the usual search of people already on there and started to follow them, all with quite an open mind. Using the search function it started to become easy to see how the plane crash and terror attacks could spread. Almost everything tweeted on Twitter is searchable in seconds. There are also ways of following tags (popular subjects such as #hudson or #uksnow to group information together). I also noticed how easy it was to follow other people. In the main you don't even need to ask them first! What slowely became obvious is that Twitter could be a great source of information, depending on the people you follow, but as such following these people on the web can be a bit constrictive.

Not wanting to name drop but I read a tweet by Krishnan Guru-Murthy (twitter.com/krishgm) who said that about 800 was the right amount to follow. I struggle with 60!! In fairness there are third party applications you can use such as tweetdeck to do this, but I've never bothered. Using the web is more restrictive but it also helps you decide who to follow and who not. 100 posts in 10 minutes by one person can be annoying, especially if they are a news outlet. It can be too much to take in, so I found I tend to folllow people who tweet little and often!

So I'd started getting into the swing of things, following a mixture of the rich, famous, news outlets, journalists and friends. I found it easy to follow themes and conversations as they developed as well as taking part myself (note once had an exchange with the mighty @krishgm! I found head to head against Facebook I'd started to prefer it as new information was in far greater supply. However after a while I found that the novetly was wearing off and that unless I had something I thought people might like to hear, I wouldn't say anything. Too often all I could muster was a comment on the salt outside of my office window! 

Maybe it's just the changing of the seasons: holiday mode is kicking in and people spend less time in front of their twitter pages? More likely I believe both myself and twitter are evolving in our uses. Even during my few months with Twitter I've noticed the commercial world stand up and take notice. Some I like, others less so. The main attraction for me is the access to the usually inaccessible. What @simonmayo, @richardpbacon and other public figures think. How journalists such as @jemimakiss and @davidbartlett1 prepare, research, deliver and comment on stories and in the inside track of what is happening on @bbc5live or @channel4news. [incidentally that's how you send people a message, eg. '@benchadwick' in Twitter. I've found people now refer to other people on Twitter with the @ prefix. Presumably because it links to their profile, but I find it amusing!]

There's a whole other side to Twitter that I am yet to embrace, and that I probably won't ever bother to. Ironically this is one of it's main USP's! Because what we say, who we say it to and are basics stats are all easily searchable, Twitter is a goldmine of information to sift, pick out and target for whatever related aspect you are peddling. I found that out the other day. I'd used a service called Nozbe.com and tweeted my experience. The next day a professor from America had sent me a message regarding it! For me what was a little too small a world! For her it opened up a whole new medium for research. 

To conclude my experience with Twitter over the past few months; I've enjoyed it, will probably use it for the foreseeable future but maybe less frequently than in the beginning. I don't have the personality to drive my usage as far as it can go: making friends, contacts, networks online is not something that interests me. I also don't have a professional interest strong enough to follow through. I can't use social networking to enhance my professional career at this point in time. These are the main drivers behind my twitter use falling into line with the likes of Facebook on the social networking front, and the internet sites I visit as a daily ritual! (the beeb, guardian, google reader being the top set)