Thanks for the encouragement, I hope Twitter brings aboard new Audioholics and hopefully takes on a life of its own. I'll try and describe it as best I can - although I'm hardly a major authority.
Twitter is another social media outlet like Facebook. Although Facebook has recently changed its format to be more like Twitter with “status” updates. Believe me, I’m not saying it’s going to be a boon to your business or personal life – it’s just another outlet for communication, but it’s one I believe has proven itself in recent months.
They call it a microblogging, each twitter account becomes its own blog hosted on the Twitter site. You can ‘tweet’ short 140 character messages. This forces you to focus your message and use tools like Tinyurl.com to shorten links to points of interest.
You “follow” those you find interesting and some who may find your “tweets” interesting will follow you. The net result is a huge social-web because the Twitter Search apparatus connects all users and all tweets.
You’ll see a list of “trending” terms, these are the most popular terms at any given moment. This is where Twitter’s strength of breaking news can come up but it’s often just a snapshot of superfluous garbage people are yammering about that moment. No doubt there is a lot of noise out there. But you never know what kind of global or world event is going to ‘trend’ on twitter that you’ll hear about on the news that night.
Currently Zune HD is trending, I hadn’t realized that you can already pre-order them. It gives me an idea to write an Audioholics article. Making fun of Zune again is just too tempting.
So, the real strength in Twitter is this interconnecting “web”. Plus, it’s now indexed by Google so it’s not a web in a vacuum anymore.
My personal twitter account WaydeR is connected to a lot of tech-industry workers in the Guelph, Kitchener/Waterloo of Ontario where I live and I’ve tweeted about traffic jams and been thanked for helping someone avoid it. Of course I was parked anytime I do a mobile-tweet.
Sometimes I’m notified of a pub night or a spontaneous Trivia session. Sure, I could have just been called and invited or asked what someone is doing. But using Twitter is a way of sending out a general invite rather than a specific invite. It’s friendlier to ignore if someone is not interested in a Pub/Trivia session but can be a catalyst to an unplanned event.
For AudioholicsLive I think our best bet is representing the Audioholics message. To me it’s about love for good sound but also “real world” skepticism and/or myth-busting in Home Theater and Hi-Fi.
I believe it’s important to make it more than just a series of links to Audioholics articles. Short quotes about a product – such as someone’s declaration of love for a new Denon receiver (or frustration with an owner’s manual for a set-top-box) with credit to the writer, would be a great tweet. Of course it’s not a ‘review’ per-se and it’s possible that receiver was never reviewed by Audioholics. But that’s not the point, it’s just a quick message perhaps a link to the discussion.
So, please… if you see one of those “gotcha!” quotable lines someone laid down on this forum that just says it all in a short burst – even if it’s part of a larger post – let me know. PM me or if you start a Twitter account send me an @ message.
You’d be surprised how widespread twitter is. Of course there are a lot of real estate and porn spammers but there are people with very general non-technical jobs using twitter. Housewives, woodworkers, sports fans, military, work-out fanatics, celebrities, cartoonists and techies and marketing people, all of any age.
For those interested in testing out Twitter here’s a few quick tips.
Do: create an icon for yourself.
Do: Be honest and fill out your name/images and bio (based on whatever you’re twittering for or about)
If you join look for and follow WaydeR and AudioholicsLive I’ll refollow you back.
Words on some of the vernacular:
The @ sign before a Twitter account name will serve as a message to that person that everyone else can see. @wayder or @AudioholicsLive will get to me in a publicly viewable message anyone else can respond to if they wish.
RT @accountname is called Retweeting, it’s a way of resending a message you find clever or funny to anyone following your account.
