Creative Ways to Use Twitter

I'm sorry the service is temporarily unavailable. Okay, say wale, Yes, we're going to talk about everybody's favorite hundred and forty character limited blogging service Twitter Twitter. We've talked about Twitter before, but this time we're gonna talk about some cool stuff you can do using Twitter. That because before we were just kind of talking about what the service was, and and you know, by now, pretty much everyone's heard of it thanks to people like Oprun, Ashton Kutcher and really more.

They they they used Twitter well noticed ye Ashton could could jump off the Twitter bandwagon at any minute, And boy are we holding our breath for that announcement, because lord, I don't know that I can sleep at night knowing that Ashton isn't on Twitter has at least a million more followers than I do. Sure, yeah, I mean the guys got the guy's got plenty of followers. I'm not one of them. I have a hundred and nine people I'm following or thereabouts, and and strangely enough, he is

not among that that crew. Yeah, but I follow you, Chris. Okay. Twitter, Now, just in case somehow you don't know what this is. Twitter? Is this this messaging service. Really. It's used over the web and you can access it either through a computer or your cell phone, and you can send messages that range up to a hundred and forty character at a time. And people who first joined Twitter often get overwhelmed by it.

They don't necessarily see the value in it. And there are a lot of people who they look at it, they decide it's not for them and they leave, and that that they don't look back, and that's it. Yeah. I think a lot of people who are just coming to Twitter after being told, hey, you should check this out, are kind of put off by the message on the home page of Twitter, which is you know, what are you doing right now? I have to be what you're doing. Yeah. See,

that's that's I think that's a big misstep. On Twitter's part, because that question makes you think, oh, well, I just tied my shoes, so I guess I should type that in the type of I just tied my shoes, and everyone who's following you, assuming that you have followers, looks at that and thinks, I don't need to follow this person. All they do is type about tying their shoes. It's not interesting to me, it's not relevant, and it's not entertaining,

so there's no reason to follow them now. Um. However, if you use Twitter to do things like share interesting news stories or tell some jokes or or things like that, if you're entertaining or informative, or if you're a famous person, people will follow you and continue to follow you. Yep, yep, And um, you know, that's one of the cooler things to do with it. In my opinion, it's really sort of mundane if you think about it, because it doesn't

sound sexy and exciting. But you know, make a new friend. Yeah, it's really easy to do, and you kind of have to get past the what the heck am I doing with this thing? And I think everybody has that moment of what the heck am I doing with this thing? You know, you sign up, you throw a few comments on there, you follow a few people, and nothing happens, and you go, do I really want to keep going

with this? If you do, you know, there are some simple things that you can do to kind of push that, and you can start actually talking to people and having conversations, and that's kind of a neat thing, right, Yeah, So the first thing you would end up doing is um probably trying to find a few people that you want to follow. Whether these are people you know in real life, like good friends or family and you just wanna keep up with what they're doing on a daily basis, Well,

you can follow them. If there are any journalists that you particularly admire, or news agencies that you know that you think provide a valuable service, you can see if

they have a Twitter account and follow them. There are a lot of news agencies that have Twitter accounts, Twitter feeds, and you can keep up with breaking news that before before it hits any major news source, you can find out about it on Twitter, which can be very useful if you happen to be heading in an area that, let's say just is about to get hit by a tornado. It's good to be able to see that before it happens.

That's true, providing you have time to actually check your Twitter, and all depends on whether how you're receiving the messages to um, but there are lots of Once you start following people and you start seeing how this works, you have to keep in mind people who follow you, they are going to receive the messages that you send out for the most part. There are a few exceptions. Will

get into those little bit a little bit later. And then there's a public timeline that unless you change the settings in your account, your messages will also appear on that public timeline. So anyone looking at the public timeline around the time you you post a message will be able to see what you type. So it's not just the people who are following you who see that, unless, of course, you've, like I said, adjusted your settings so

that your messages do not appear on the public timeline. Now, that doesn't mean that that the only people who will ever see anything you write are either following you or watching the public timeline. You can actually direct messages at people. In fact, it's using the at reply UH method, and it's simply the AT symbol followed by the person's handle, and that message will appear in that person's Twitter feed. And if the person is getting tons and tons of

Twitter messages, they may not see it anyway. But if they aren't getting tons, then there's a good chance they'll see your message. So it might be someone that you know who isn't aware that you're on Twitter, and you can let them know and then maybe they'll follow you back. If someone is following you and you're following them, you can send a direct message, which is a private message between the two of you and no one else can

see it. And it's much more likely that they're going to see a direct message, and they would, you know, with a simple at reply, right. Most Twitter clients have some sort of special notification for things like at replies and direct messages and uh. Those can be applications that are either on computers or on your cell phone smartphone, that kind of thing, UM and you can you can adjust.

Most of these have have sayings that you can adjust so that it will alert you whenever there's either a new tweet, which is of course the noun version of the message UM or at least one of them. There are also people who call them twitters uh or if that's a little overwhelming, and it might be because, like I follow a hundred and nine people, if I had my phone and alert me every time there was a new tweet, it would never stop vibrating. So in my case, I just have it where it alerts me for replies

and direct messages. So that's the basics. Now let's get down to some other kind of interesting things that you can use Twitter for two to really get the most of your experience. Okay, do you want me to start or you want to you know, I could go either way. Why don't you go ahead? All right? Sure? So hashtags? Hashtags are good, that's appropriate. Right on the end of the after so as Chris, as Chris goes on a rampage through the studio, apparently hashtags or something. He feels

very passionately about hashtags. So hashtags, h you're using the little hash symbol, which is the pound sign or the nice the octathorp busting now the octathorm. So yeah, when you're using you use that in front of uh, whatever term that you are are talking about, like if you're talking about a specific subject, and that allows people to search for that term in a in a more effective way,

they can put the hashtag in front of it. They put the term there, and then they you can use a Twitter search engine to pull up all the tweets that relate to that topic, so you can actually follow group conversations about a subject. And the interesting thing is about in the in these group conversations, you may only see three or four the people in that discussion from your Twitter feed, and you can even participate in that discussion.

When you do the search, you'll see everything, so you'll suddenly get a bigger picture of the discussion that was going on, and it actually becomes pretty interesting. There are a few people within the Twitter verse who are probably the lynch pins for these big discussions. These are usually the people who have hundreds of thousands of followers and so they kind of end up seeing everything anyway. But

I'm thinking of you guy, or Neil Gaiman. Neil Gaiman is he's he's sort of the center of my Twitter verse. Neil Gaiman and uh and Stephen Fry, the two of them together pretty much like it's interesting. I can see I can actually see messages from some of the people I follow get responded to by other people I follow, and I had no idea that there was any connection between the two until that happened. So Twitter searches, like I said, that has a lot that that ties back

into the hashtag thing. Those are very useful. You can search for pretty much any term you want. I've done it for how stuff works before, to see what people are saying about us, and it's a it's it's pretty useful. Um. The Twitter search function tool if you just if you go to the regular Twitter search engine, it'll, uh, it'll pull up all the most recent tweet and it will even update as time goes on, so as people send

more messages, you'll be able to see them appear. Mm hmmm. Um. One of the the things that I like about Twitter is it's great for finding quick answers to questions. Um, crowdsourcing, Yes, crowdsourcing, and it's it's um really simple to you know, just throw up a question on your Twitter feed, especially if you have a reasonable number of followers, and get a reasonably quick answer as a result. Uh. Famous people have no trouble finding answers to anything on Twitter because hundreds

of thousands of followers. Yes, and and it invariably happens when somebody will uh post a question and I will race to answer it because I like knowing answers and and you know, surprising someone and going, hey, I know the answer to that, and uh, usually within seconds of my trying to type that in and at reply to this person, um, I'll get four tweets from the original person saying thank you the sixteen people and thank you these twenty four people. I'm going, wow, I slightly beaten

to the punch there. Yeah, but it's it's very easy if you uh, you know, even people where you say, I've seen people who are teaching classes say I'm going to talk about this in my class. Can any of you tell me why something something happens? And then uh, you know, they get the answers they want immediately, you know,

just in the process of demonstrating Twitter. I've used that same method when I was visiting different cities and I would send out a Twitter message just saying, hey, any of my Twitter followers happened to live in and say, Austin, Texas, where's a good place for me to grab now a really good taco? Stuff like that. You're gonna get responses the sort of thing. Now. Now, granted, if you have five followers, then your your responses will be somewhat limited.

Um and the way you get more followers usually happens fair organically, unless you're a celebrity, in which case you know people already are interested in you, so they're following

you anyway. But if you get mentioned by other folks, like if you are contributing to discussions in a helpful way, they will likely reply to you in such a way that there are other followers can see that you know, what you're saying is interesting, and then they their followers may say, hey, let me check out this other guy because apparently he knows what he's talking about, and then

you might end up with followers that way. I've I've had that happen a few times, usually whenever I chat with anyone, you know, a pretty significant stature in the Twitter verse. There's also a thing called follow Friday, which is really a meme on Twitter. It's a meme that uses the hashtag that that Jonathan was talking about earlier.

And usually what what follow Friday does is the people who participate in it, they just list some of the folks they follow that they think are pretty cool and that you know, people and more people should follow those people, and I've been on a couple of those lists, So, um, now I'm still a small fry. I mean I'm talking major small fry in the Twitter verse. I have three

hundred and eighty or so followers right now. But when you're looking at people like Ashton Kutcher who have over a million, and then you have lots of other folks who are in the six hundred thousand, five hundred thousand range, three is tiny. Yeah, but uh, I have great followers, So I don't mind the fact that I don't have that,

MANI because the ones I have are awesome, excellent. Um, you know, I was gonna mention before we get away from the using the crowdsourcing aspects of Twitter, A cool website that I found that that works for this is straw pole now dot com. And you can sign up and basically create your own poll and you can ask people, uh, you know, and log in and give you a graphical representation of your you know, it's a two question pole, which is better red or blue? Or you know what,

what do you prefer? Ice creamer cake? You know you do do those kinds of either oars but pretty neat, little neat, little website and and sticking with the crowdsourcing thing. Information on Twitter tends to spread viral e because people retweet it exactly retweets. Another important part of Twitter. A retweet is when someone takes the message that another person is sent and then posts it. And the general format is you type in our T meaning retweet uh at

and the original person's name, and then the message. And this way you you hit a larger audience because theoretically the second person who retweets the the first person's message is going to have different followers or at least a few different followers than the first person, and it will spread that way now greatly when when something gets retweeted by a big name, uh, I mean, you can still retweet it, but here's a good chance that everyone following

you is seeing it somewhere else already. Because when you're talking about the big big names, they're just there's so many people following them that you know, it's it's kind of a silly thing to retweet something that maybe Stephen Fryer, Neil Gaiman or Ashton Kutcher or any of those big names have said, because chances are it's gotten around already. You can still do it. There's nothing wrong with it, and um, so that's a good way to to learn about what's going on in the world. And if you're

interested in a very specific subset of information. Um, I find it incredibly useful to follow tech news that way. I followed tons of tech journalists and and tech news sources and even users. I've I've received some really cool information from users that lead to fantastic blog posts. I can think of one in particular that is still going strong two months after I wrote it. And um, you know that's the thing is that that, like I said, the information spreads virally. So if you are an information

junkie like I am, Twitter is awesome. Hey, we'll also gradually suck your life away, but in a good way. Yes. Um. Something else that's cool to do with Twitter, um, surprisingly enough is to promote yourself. Uh. And I you know, most of the time shameless self marketing is sort of you know, frowned upon because it's you know, shameless, but you look at it, and uh, you know, that's that's what a lot of people do on Twitter, sort of

expected depends on on who you're twittering or I'm following. Actually, and especially with somebody like, uh, you know, famous famous people, famous authors or actors. Um, you're following them probably because you want to find out when their next you know, big project is coming out, how that's going, or you want to find out what's going on behind the scenes. So people say, oh, you know, I I uh, it's ten minutes to the show. Little anxious, you know, people go, oh,

that's kind of that's kind of cool information. It's definitely a little bit more interesting than tying your shoes. And a lot of people follow uh. I think a lot of people follow Jonathan's feed because he regularly posts when he's got a new blog post up. Um, so you know, when people who are interested in reading the tech stuff blog, uh, you know, read his Twitter feed to go, oh, hey,

there's new blog post. And then I've seen lots of people do that, you know, So that's uh, it's it's not a bad thing to do, and people don't get all bent out of shape because you're promoting your latest project. Speaking of self promotion, if you want to follow me, my handle is John Strickland j O N S t R I C K L A N D. Moving on. Um, yeah, self promotion is a big part of Twitter. Um. One

of the people I follow Jonathan Colton, the musician. Yes, he uses Twitter to not only announce when he's going to have a new tour date or a new song is out, he even uses it to ask his followers for uh, song requests when he comes to their town. So come to He came to Atlanta not that long ago, and he sent out a Twitter message saying, all right, give me your song requests, and people will send in their messages and he played those songs and uh. I mean.

That's another great thing about Twitter is that it's this interactive medium and you get to have some sort of interaction with people that you really admire or you just you know, your gaga over that particular celebrity. There is a chance that you have that little bit of a connection,

and that's a very enticing thing. You also get to see some really cool conversations between different celebrities, Like if you follow both parties, you get to see both ends of the conversation, assuming they're not speaking in direct messages that is. And it's fun. It's like you're at a Hollywood party and you're in the corner and you're watching two celebrities just kind of gossip and chat and joke around. It's awesome. It's so much fun. And that you know,

social nervousness that comes from being in a big Hollywood party. Right. They don't they don't even notice my my profuse sweating or my uh habit of cursing at inappropriate moments. Um. You know, I have another one that's sort of related to that, to the cursing. Networking, it's great to to meet people. UM. Directory that's become popular, at least one of them is that we follow dot com and um, you could go on there and basically tag yourself up to three tags, isn't it so it was when I

when I started, when I joined, it was three. I'm assuming it hasn't changed. Um, And you know, for example, I have myself tagged as an editor and writer on there, and you can you can go on there to find people. But you know, if you can, you can start to find other people who do what you do and add them and start conversations with them, you know, retreat, retweet some of their their messages and and uh you know,

mention them and get ato hashtag conversations with them. You can actually you can actually network and make new friends and and sort of build a community around yourself and join in existing communities, which is, you know, pretty neat. Yeah. Actually, when I was while I was at the UH the Electronic Entertainment Expo E three. While I was there, UH, a fellow tech journalist tracked me down via Twitter, followed me on Twitter, sent me a direct message, and asked

me for a favor. Unfortunately, I was unable to help Miss Natalie dell Conti of c net. And although she's dreamy and a fantastic tech journalist, I had a flight I had to catch, so I couldn't help her out. But that's a cool opportunity that I never would have had at all if I didn't have Twitter. You know. But she knew she knew me, she just didn't follow me on Twitter at that point. She's still following me as of the recording of this podcast. That could change

by the time this goes live. She might be like, totally don't need this, dude, X. But um, right now she's still following me. Ye, So uh should I give you another one? Yeah? Go ahead? Um? You could uh you could start a revolution. Oh, I say you want a revolution. We all want to change the world. You know,

it wasn't that long ago. We were talking about the Twitter and uh I mentioned the UH this sort of protest going on in Moldova where people were using Facebook and Twitter to coordinate their activities using hashtags and some of the other messaging UH to sort of stay one step ahead of the authorities because they would you know, message where they were going to be at what time, and people would start showing up. Um. However, since that podcast went we recorded it before, you know, a ways

off before one live. Since that time, UH, there has been a very major media event that in which people use Twitter and not they're not nearly as peaceful, and that would be the recent protests in Iran following the elections, Right, so we're talking about a a massive chaotic situation in Iran. Uh. We're actually recording this podcast just a couple of days after the election. So when this goes live, this this is gonna be you know, old news, but at the

moment it's very fresh in our minds. And part of the issue was that Iran government officials had started to restrict internet access, started to throttle the broadband connections, really limiting what people could access and what they could do. But Twitter uses a hundred forty characters. It is not it doesn't put a huge demand on broadband. It's easy to get messages through if you can find a connection

to the internet. And so a lot of people involved in this conflict have been using Twitter to broadcast information about what is going on to the general public, who otherwise may not ever be aware of the situation. Now. To do that, they've had to do things like find proxy servers so that they could access sites that were not being blocked by the government and UM. But that's exactly what's happening right now over in Iran, right now

being at the time of recording. Yeah, As a matter of fact, in a show of solidarity, people UH in the United States, at least some that I follow UM have been tinting their profile pictures green as a show of support and retweeting UH messages sent by protesters in Iran, basically talking about what events are going on in the street, UM, which at the time of this recording, again is forbidden. You're not supposed to be reporting from what you know,

what's going on in the street, that what happens. Foreign journalists are barred from reporting. So what's going on there so people are sharing things and not using their names unlike norm when you would typically use an apt sign with a person's handle on Twitter, they're not doing that now, They're just using certain hashtags. Yeah, and there's a point out that it's because they don't want anybody to get in trouble, right. And there's been other changes as well

in normal behavior. For example, for a while you were seeing people tweet proxy sites, but now there have been tweets coming out and saying that the officials are monitoring Twitter and looking for these sort of things. And so if you were to publicize the proxy site, then it would just speed up the the response from the government and have that shut down. So it's interesting there's actually like their manifestos out there that explained the right way

to use Twitter in this kind of situation. It's really a cyber war situation. Yep. And uh in a in a a move that sort of surprises me. Twitter has been planning on some updates to the site, and they were going to do some site maintenance and take the site down. Because people are using the site for this purpose,

they're putting off the maintenance. Originally was going to be scheduled for June fift but because there were so many people depending upon Twitter to get information out from Iran, Twitter said, you know what, we're going to delay this, and uh, it's an interesting move on Twitter's part, very you know, because it is a business after all, get one without a business plan. Another cool thing you can use Twitter to do? Get out of jail. Oh yeah, I mean not really, but one guy did it. That

would be James Carl Buck, who was a student. He was in Egypt and Egyptian officials detained him and he tweeted the word arrested, and some of his colleagues were following him on Twitter read it and they got in touch with some authorities who got in touch with people in Egypt, and eventually that led to Buck being freed by the official So, I mean there are some I mean it's kind of hard to argue usefulness of Twitter when you're like, well, I got got a guy out

of a foreign prison. Well that's that's pretty useful. Um. And yeah, it's one of those things where it might have taken days or weeks to get them out through normal channels, because it would just take that long for the information to get back to anyone who could do anything about it. Uh, there are other cool things you can do too. Like one of the things I like to do, I like to follow various folks over at NASA to keep up with what's going on the Space program.

You can follow astronauts, and the astronauts are sending messages while they're in space down to NASA, who in turn are posting it to the astronauts Twitter accounts. So you're not actually reading tweets sent by you know, an astronaut typing on his iPhone up in orbit, but you are reading real time information about what's going on during the mission, which is pretty cool. Some of the uh, some of

the equipment even has its own Twitter feed. Sure. One of the Mars rovers had one of the most famous, the Phoenix Lander, had one most famous Twitter accounts early on and had devoted fans following. And when the Phoenix Twitter Twitter account had the last message from the Phoenix Lander, there are people who are crying because they had an emotional attachment to this artificial construct that had kind of

a humanizing effect because of the tweet. The tweets, and I mean the same thing is true just about any Twitter account. If you're following someone from Twitter, you start to feel like you get to know this person, and even if you have no other connection other than through Twitter, you might get upset if you find out something has happened to this person. We're seeing that with the Iran

issue as well. People are starting to get emotionally attached to these names and there's no real name attached to these these handles, but they're getting attached to these personalities and there's genuine concern about what's going to happen to these people. It really puts a humanizing effect on on situations around the world and in space. Actually, I guess it's not just around the world. You know, I have one that's much eight er in mood. What's that? No

crying involved? Shameless corporate promotion, but not on not on the part of the UM, you know follower, because a lot of companies now are starting to offer coupons to follow their company UM and they'll they like doing stuff that's timely, I guess, because it's cool to be, you know, social media oriented. Now he'll see, you know, hey, come in between three and four and get off or get a free something donut or you know, cup of coffee or something, and people show up. I thought you were

going to go with Skittles. I wasn't aware of the Skittles I wasn't aware of the Skittles thing. There's the Skittles thing. You haven't heard about this. So what Skills did was they they they change their wealths different now, but they change their website so that their website was

publishing tweets that had the words Skittles in them. So if you went to the website, all it was was a Twitter fee of various people that said something about now, and then people began to post ridiculous or rude or obnoxious things that had the word Skittles in it, just to troll the Skittles website, which, come on, you had to expect that. How could you not know that was

gonna happen. It's the Internet. I mean, I'm a decent person, but even I would find it difficult to resist not putting some goofy joke that has nothing to do with Skittles and then just add the Skittles tag at the end, just so it goes up on the site. You know. It reminds me of the General Motors promotion that they did a couple of years ago, where they would let

you do. Put whatever messaging you wanted to on an ad and put it online, and people started talking about gas guzzlers and environmental stuff and all sorts of profane things. Sad trombone. Yeah, that's sort of opens yourself up for that kind of thing. I got one more before we Uh, okay, we're gonna have to start. We can wrapping this up because it's this is a long one. So m you

can complain about stuff. Oh yeah, you can get responses. Yeah, so Chris and I have both had this happen where and it wasn't our intent to get a response from anyone based upon what we were talking about, but we would. You know, you you something not work, that isn't working the way you expected it to. You might you feel like you said nolla tweet about you know, you have this thought, Hey I really wish this would work the way it was advertised, you said alla tweets saying hey

I really wish blah blah blah would work properly. And then before you know it, you have an executive right to you and say, hey, I work for such and such, how can I you know, help this? What's what's going on? And then suddenly you've got very personalized customer service. It doesn't always work out the way you might want to to,

but and not everyone has it. I mean, you shouldn't go on Twitter and just start complaining about every major company you can think of, because that's not really you know, first of all, people are gonna notice it. Yeah, but second well that's not what Twitter is for. But it can happen. I mean I've I've had it happen, so um, you know I've got more. But we're thirty minutes into this already, So why don't we just go on to listener mail? I don't know about that. So this is

from Ben from London, Ontario. Hey guys, just listening to your podcast on Vince Surf and the listener mail you answered. By the way, I can't help sheldy listener mail along with you, even when at work when there's people around. I bet you're going to get that one. And you equated an IP address to a street address. However, I think this is analogy is not right. I've worked tech support for several US Internet companies and I found a better One way to talk about this is say the

IP addresses like a phone number. The number can change, however the physical equipment will not. What I would say is more like a street address, the MAC address associated with the Ethernet card slash modem slash router. Each street address MAC address is assigned a phone number I p address, but that phone number can change even if the street address is the same. That That was all air quotes.

The best response I got to that analogy was a customer that said, well, wouldn't that be confusing if the phone company kept changing my phone number all the time? And I replied with, well, that's why you and your friends would get speed dial. Then all you do is dial my friend John dot com and you can talk with John. Suddenly, this older man understood how the Internet works and was overjoyed with how simple it is when

you strip away the more complex stuff. Sure it's not exactly how it all works, but it's enough to get someone who's completely lost get a general idea of how the internet works. Thanks for the great podcast, and please keep up with the listener mail. Then you're I'm just gonna sit here and say thank you. Um. Also, I will deal with all the email I get for saying listener mail like that so many times in one address.

But yeah, that's a that's a great point. Um, it is more like a phone number than a street address. I was trying to think of it in a sense of, you know, delivering mail, the way you deliver packets of information across the Internet. But you're right, when it doesn't have to relate to a physical location, it does tend to confuse things a little more. I guess I'm sorry.

I was checking my Twitter feed all right, So if you want to learn more about Twitter, you can go to how stuff Works dot com, where we have a great article written by who's that hack? Uh? Oh right, Strickland, that guy. Um, if you want to follow that guy, remember John Strickland over on Twitter. I expect to see lots and lots of followers after this, and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this

and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog. Now on the house stuff What's homepage brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you