Twitter: Do It
August 18, 2009 / 9:42 am • By Dr. Melissa ClouthierMany of you still don’t see the point of Twitter. This is why I Twitter: Imagine you could gather 200 of the smartest people in a room and they had access to areas of expertise you had no time or hope of gathering. Those people would sift through information and bring up the best stuff for you to know so you don’t have to do the grunt work. You don’t even have to use Google.
Twitter is like a human search engine. It’s opt in, which means you’re only hassled as much as you want to be and by whom you want to be hassled. Instead of computer metrics, you choose the brains who sift the information. And even more than that, you can become friends with the people sharing that information. It’s not just an information exchange, though it can be just that, it’s a social exchange of people pre-selected for interests that sync with yours.
Twitter: It’s time to do it. Here’s how:
Twitter (Released July 2009):
http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/
Mashable (Released Aug 2009):
http://mashable.com/guidebook/twitter/
DAG (Released Sept 2008, Revised + Expanded June 2009):
http://twitter101guide.com
Start with DAG, first. That’s David All and he’s a conservative consultant in D.C.
8 Responses to “Twitter: Do It”
August 18 2009 / 10:52 am
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Melissa: Thanks for this post. I’m glad I follow you on Twitter and was able to see it.
It seems like you’ve hit on some of the best reasons to become active on Twitter.
I like the idea of a “human search engine”…it’s an apt tagline for Twitter and sums up the utility quite well. And it’s also fun.
As a writer and marketing professional, I use Twitter as a means of testing the waters. I like to see what others are talking about, share links to find people with common interests and concerns, and to spark new ideas.
Always moving forward. That’s one of the greatest benefits of Twitter. It never seems to be stuck on a single topic. Things just keep moving along, and the opt-in feature makes it easy for users to just follow whatever they wish. Quite liberating, actually.
Thanks, again. Keep Tweeting.
@mediamatt
August 18 2009 / 11:41 am
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ugh. twitter is for twits, but only because of the fortuitous syllable synchronicity. In reality, it’s for self-absorbed douchebags. There have always been people who think they need to say every stupid thing that comes into their heads: now we have a means to broadcast it immediately to a group of other smug douchebags.
No one is that witty. No one has that many intelligent, important things to say. And I refuse to believe anyone is bettered by reading any of this useless tripe.
Thankfully, it’s a trope so stupid and useless it’s become risible and passe even as it’s booming. I give it another half a year before the sheer idiocy of “tweeting” your own deep thoughts incessantly is reduced to that circle of people who are oblivious to their own pathetic boobery and the well-deserved ridicule of the rest of us.
Blogging and commenting (not excluding this one) brought writing to it’s least well-thought out, unimportant and retarded level. Well, tweeting has managed to reduce writing to the cyber-equivalent of instantaneously disseminating your brain farts far and wee.
Anyone who sends out twitters is a pathetic douche. Anyone who willingly subjects themselves to twitters is a fucking idiot.
August 18 2009 / 12:23 pm
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I kinda agree with Doc. I don’t really see the point of it when you can write a post (that’s usually heftier). Twitter just seems to be blurbs. Sorry, but I just cannot get into the Twitter fad.
August 18 2009 / 5:42 pm
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You still don’t get it. Many of us simply don’t want yet another channel with a mind-numbingly low signal-to-noise ratio.
And I can only buy into your human search engine 1) if you always search within a narrow knowledge domain, 2) you have a significantly large Twitter following of people with expertise in that domain, 3) you don’t need source citations, and 4) the info is so new/dynamic that it can’t be found on the intertubes.
August 18 2009 / 6:06 pm
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“This is why I Twitter: Imagine you could gather 200 of the smartest people” and they never . shut . up. I wouldn’t go as far as doc and Matt, but Twitter isn’t opt in for information, but for people. And Sturgeon’s Law applies to tweets just like everything else.
I have in fact tried Twitter. The one thing I noticed first is that it hands agency to someone else. *They* decide when to tweet. In contrast, with weblogs and an RSS reader, *I* decide when to read. I tried writing my own tweets but I found that for about the same energy it takes to tweet, I could just write a couple paragraph post and get a better result.
I am sure there are some people who can tweet successfully, and other who will find that interesting. But I don’t think either are the majority. If you’re one of them, great, I am glad you find a useful tool.
P.S. How is one supposed to find these “200 smartest people”? You? But you have a weblog which I can read, so why follow your tweets? If they don’t have a weblog, how would I find them? Randomly subscribe and hope it’s a smart person?
P.P.S. You should really make a note that DAG requires an email address to get the document.
August 19 2009 / 1:54 pm
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Twitter or equivalent? No thanks.
The closest I have come was using a sister’s computer to fix some problem she was having. She used one of the preceding-generation “Instant messaging” aps. Over the course of an hour, I was interrupted no less than fifteen times by messages, which is why it took an hour to do a fix that shoud have been at most fifteen minutes. (I would have blown the ap out of the water, but she also had “parental” software installed that would not let me get at even such basic tools as Task Manager!)