Not sure how many of you have caught the Twitter bug, but it really is strangely addictive. When pushed to describe it to people, it's difficult to know where to begin. Telling people "its micro blogging - instant and mobile" and that "you follow and are followed by people, with whom you're able to share ideas and links" just doesn't do it justice. The cutest way I've heard it described is by Wired who described it as "almost like ESP...a Social Sixth Sense".
There has been some dissenting voices in our space, but - like most things in life - there really is no substitute for giving it a try. Once you've found people you want to follow (the best way to do that is by checking out the followers of people - check out me /Carve on Twitter , Matt Alder and Peter Gold for example. If you follow people (and you've got something interesting to say) people will then follow you. And that's it. It's only when you're involved in these micro-dialogues that you realise how powerful it can be. For example, what about an airline providing its followers with real time flight offers, or delays? (one US airline is doing this) Or for a recruiter to send latest contracts via The Guardian recently wrote a great piece on How to get the best out of Twitter For those of you who can't be bothered to link, here's some cool twitter tools you might want to check out:
Finding people
www.Whoshouldifollow.com
www.Twitdir.com - directory
www.Twitterholic.com - the top users and accounts
Searching and organisingwww.Summize.com - search for a word or phrase across the entire Twitter feed. www.Quotably.com creates threads of discussions between people.
www.Terraminds.com - search engine, for users or phrases.
www.Tweetscan.com - search by user and time.
www.Twitterlocal.net finds twitterers near you.
Sharingwww.Twitthis.com,- lets people looking at your site or blog share the URL via Twitter. www.Twitturly.com - what's being most linked-to and talked about?
www.Tweetmeme.com - what sort of topics are being discussed?
Visualisewww.Twittervision.com - Google Maps mashup showing where tweets are being posted.
www.Twitterverse - tag clouds
www.Twittearth.com - visualisation of tweets, put onto a spiralling globe. www.Tweetwheel.com - which of your friends are already following each other?
And..http://pipes.yahoo.com/ouseful/tweetspeech - Yahoo Pipes converts (incoming) tweets to speech
www.Twittersnooze.com - hit the "snooze button", briefly, on verbose friends ( if you're a follow of Alder or Scobble you need this ;-p
http://www.wp.korelab.com/yet-another-twitter-badge-twitter-balloon - your tweets superimposed on an image of your choosing.
www.twerpscan.com, avoid followers who befriend everyone: may be spammers.
After the Digital Recruiting blog beers last night, I am also pleased to report that Twittering is good of hangovers. See you on Twitter! Follow us: www.twitter.com/carveconsulting
Interesting. I’ve got a Twitter account and I think I'm slowly seeing the light, all be I only have 3 people to follow. Our tech guys are working on a feed so if you’re a following MyLongLunch you’ll get all the latest offers, deals and news uploaded by the media. No reason why OnRec or Ri5 could do the same.
Posted by: Jamie Leonard | 15/05/2008 at 08:59 AM
Just been notified that you can NOW follow MyLongLunch on Twitter.
www.twitter.com/mylonglunch
Posted by: Jamie Leonard | 15/05/2008 at 09:21 AM
Nice post Paul. I'm hardly as noisy as Scoble though
Alder = 141 updates so far
Scoble = 11,862 updates so far
Some way to go yet!
Posted by: Matt | 16/05/2008 at 02:09 PM
I've been working with a client looking to recruit and talking to them about simply getting existing staff telling micro-stories. If you can't get your business story down to 140 characters, maybe it's not clear enough. And if you can, heh that's attractive.
Posted by: Paul Caplan | 28/05/2008 at 03:31 PM