US Edition Are you tweeting yet? If not, you probably will be soon. Thanks to the public enthusiasm of several celebrity twitterers, this new mode of communication has suddenly become a national craze. Just as we once rushed to open email accounts or buy mobile phones, now we are signing up to Twitter at a fearsome rate.
One-to-one communication is officially passé. Instead, it is suddenly essential to tell your friends, family, business contacts and even thousands of complete strangers what you are doing or thinking at every hour of the day or night.
TV host Jonathan Ross and actor Stephen Fry are both keen twitterers. They discussed the joys of tweeting (the correct verb, according to a recent discussion on Twitter) on Ross’s recent comeback show, where Ross also recommended it to Hollywood star Tom Cruise, who might just start. Comedian Russell Brand and chef Jamie Oliver have recently signed up. Barack Obama famously tweeted throughout his campaign. John Cleese is a regular. Even Britney Spears is at it. But what exactly is Twitter? And should we care?
According to web experts, this so-called “micro-blogging service” is the new Facebook. Facebook, in case you missed it, was (until Twitter happened) the new email; a social networking website on which you talk to friends, put up pictures and, increasingly, advance your career. But now the world is tweeting. Recent figures show a 974 per cent increase in Twitter traffic over the past year, shooting the website from the 2,953rd most visited site among UK users to the 291st most visited by mid-January this year. Industry analysts say that more than 2.25 million “tweets” – Twitter messages – are now posted every day worldwide.
The good news for technophobes is that basic tweeting is so simple a child could do it. You log onto Twitter.com, create a “profile” – your picture, plus a few words – then start posting “tweets”. Tweets differ from emails in two ways: they are public – anyone on Twitter can find and read them – and they are always short: a maximum of 140 characters long. Other Twitterers choose to “follow” your tweets and you, in turn, decide to follow theirs. This way, you can find out, for instance, that your friend is on a ski lift and your colleague needs feedback on a product idea. (Tweets can contain links to other websites, documents or pictures.)
You can also, of course, follow celebrities. Brand (nom de twit: Rustyrockets) has 20,000 followers. When Ross (“Wossy”) tweets, 55,000 people can learn how he has just fed his pet snake. Meanwhile, 120,000 twitterers (and counting) kept Fry company when he got stuck in a lift at Centre Point earlier this week. (“Hell’s teeth,” he tweeted. “We could be here for hours. A***, poo and widdle.”) More seriously, his support on Twitter for Bletchley Park has led to a surge in the number of people signing an online petition to save the former codebreaking establishment.
Fry is now the third most popular Twitter user after Barack Obama (with 235,000 followers) and the Breaking News Twitter stream from CNN (135,000 followers).
Twitter then can be pure, mindless diversion, or something more useful. As its website says: “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: what are you doing?”
There are many gleeful eccentrics in the Twittersphere who are eager to answer this. “God”, for instance, tweets: “There’s a 50 yr-old salesman with a mullet, an earring, & a suit sitting next to me. He is trying to sell software. I did not make this man.”
Tweets can also be compelling. At “Secrettweet”, people unburden themselves anonymously. “10 years ago, I faked my own death to get out of a boring marriage,” confesses one woman. “Now, he’s a millionaire attorney, and I can barely buy food.” Another secret tweeter muses: “If I make out with one of my girlfriends, do I really need to tell my husband?”
Twitter, though, is not merely an idle pastime for the promiscuous, celebrities or idle teenagers. The majority of users are grown-ups and many of them are using Twitter as a canny professional tool.
The scope and speed of Twitter means that you can use it to network, interact with clients, conduct market research and keep your finger on the pulse. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, a UK antivirus software company, follows 93 people on Twitter and is followed by 224. “I was sceptical at first – I thought it was just navel-gazing,” he says.
But the speed and immediacy of Twitter soon had him hooked. “It’s a really effective way to network and share information,” he says. “I can tell people about brand new viruses the moment I know about them. I also follow people in the industry and look to see who they are following – then I follow them too. If anyone out there spots a new virus, I do too: it’s an extremely effective way to get information, fast.”
“Twitter has rapidly morphed from a fun way to communicate with friends into something people rely on professionally,” agrees Sarah Milstein, web strategy expert and author of the recent O’Reilly report “Twitter and the Micromessaging Revolution”. Jonathan Mathis, 26, who works in PR, uses Twitter for social and professional purposes. “I follow a lot of people: if they want to know something, I can jump in and give them instant answers. It is a great way to build contacts.”
Twitter is very democratic, which makes it a uniquely authentic medium: other twitterers will spot if you are trying to plug something and will quickly “un-follow” you. Since messages can be forwarded (“re-tweeted”) to thousands of people, virtually instantaneously, it is futile to pretend you know something as you will be rumbled. This is why Twitter has been called an “enhanced business card”: it is a great way to gain the trust and respect of others in your field. “It both demands authenticity, and rewards it tremendously,” says Milstein.
Twitter is also fundamentally informal. Since businesses are now realising that the key to winning customers is two-way communication, many are cottoning on to Twitter as a means to interact with customers.
“It allows you to answer queries and deal with problems directly in a quick, informal, lightweight way,” adds Milstein.
Her partner, who runs a software company, spotted a woman complaining about one of his products late one night on Twitter (you can set up your account to alert you to any tweets about your company). One of his competitors had already jumped to offer an alternative, but he was able to quickly tweet the disgruntled customer himself, and within 10 minutes had identified a bug in his software. Without Twitter, it could have been another 12 hours until the problem came to light – during which time complaints would have zipped around cyberspace, badly denting his product’s image.
Big hitters such as Starbucks use Twitter daily as a way to interact with customers, chatting, getting feedback, giving information, even running competitions (a competition on Twitter can reach thousands but take only 15 minutes from start to finish). “It’s all about being accessible and friendly,” explains Milstein.
It sounds fearsomely time-consuming but devotees claim that dedicated tweeting can actually save time by streamlining your internet behaviour. On Twitter you can organise your social life, glean information, network, communicate and promote yourself, all in one place using messages that take half a second to scan.
Jonathan Mathias claims that he only spends about half an hour a day on Twitter. Drew Buddie (aka Digitalmaverick), 44, a teacher from Rickmansworth, on the other hand, is more dedicated. He runs Twitter on his computer or mobile phone “all the time”.
He follows, and is followed by, 2,000 twitterers and sees his “community” as a “personal learning network”. “Twitter is my Google,” he says. “You can find out anything you want to know on it.” He uses it to socialise and share information on music, technology or culture.
He occasionally arranges “tweet-ups” where twitterers meet face-to-face (he has made 10-15 “real world” friends this way). Twitterers abroad can check to see if there is a tweet-up nearby and there is also now an annual “Twestival”, when twitterers in 120 cities congregate in their countries to raise money for charity.
Inevitably, there are also downsides to dedicated tweeting. Hackers recently broke into several high-profile accounts, posting an obscene message from Britney Spears’ and sending a “breaking news” tweet from Fox News channel announcing that its anchor was gay.
The informality of Twitter also means that it is easy to let your guard down. One PR executive from Atlanta recently flew to Memphis to visit FedEx, one of his agency’s biggest clients. On touchdown he unwisely posted a tweet saying: “I would die if I had to live here.” Someone inside FedEx was following him on Twitter. He received a swift rebuke from a furious FedEx team.
Such spontaneity has wide-reaching positive effects, too. BBC journalist Rory Cellan- Jones describes on the BBC website how he sometimes receives first news of a breaking story from twitter. He credits the site with the explosion of “citizen journalism”. This was perhaps most obvious when an aeroplane crashed into the Hudson River in January. One of the very first pictures was posted by a keen twitterer on a passing ferry, who snapped a picture on his mobile phone then posted it as a tweet. People from Iran to Norway were viewing and “re-tweeting” his image, while back in New York the news networks were still trying to locate the plane.
There may be tedium in Twitter, but scratch the surface and there is creativity too. One tweet currently doing the rounds depicts the “Twittersphere” on Obama’s inauguration day. A black screen gradually begins to light up with little flashes – each depicting a tweet from a different geographical location. These little lights intensify as the day progresses, forming a map of the tweeting world as it watches this new beginning.
Twitter, then, is not just for self-obsessed kids. As Stephen Fry put it in a recent blog entry: “I love how Twitter confirms my all too often assaulted belief that most humans are kind, curious, knowledgeable, tolerant and funny. The absurd constraints of the 140-character tweet seem oddly to bring out the best in wit, insight and observation.”