What Isn’t Twitter?

One thing Twitter isn’t is unpopular. It grew over 1400% from June of 2008 through June of 2009, one of the fastest growing services of all time on the web. And an expanding feature set is attracting even more users to this micro-blogging oddity. Twitter is a lot of things to a lot of people. So many, in fact, reluctant adopters are often left asking, “What is Twitter?”

Twitter Isn’t a Little Black BookOnce you have over 50 followers, and depending on how generous some of them are with the minutiae of their lives, you can’t read all of their tweets. This is the first lesson of Twitter. So it doesn't matter how many people you follow, or how few. Twitter is different for everyone, but the number of people you follow doesn't have to be constrained necessarily to the number of people you can realistically follow. I follow people whose tweets interest me those whose bios contain information indicating they may be useful to me in some way. Do they share my interests? Are they near me? Are they in my industry? Potential clients?

Follow to be reminded, search to read. If I'm interested in a person’s tweets, I follow them. They’ll appear in my list of followers and when I peruse that list I’ll be reminded to visit their Twitter page from time to time. If I'm interested in what people are saying about a particular topic, I search on that topic.

But forget about trying to read every tweet that comes in on your main feed.

Twitter Isn’t Slow Twitter, with its shortened URLs and users with huge follower lists, is the perfect medium for responding to information and disseminating information quickly to a large number of people. It can come in handy when you want to quickly get in on a conversation in social media. This is why it’s important to have targeted followers and followers who are influencers, and as many of these types of followers as possible. If they like your tweet, they might retweet, helping you to spread your message quickly.

When a tweet is retweeted often, it’s important to a particular group. A tweet that goes viral is recent, and the social signals it generates are now. If that tweet is about you or your organization, it’s good to be able to respond quickly, particularly if it happens to be a complaint.

Twitter Isn’t a Newspaper, a Book or a Magazine Twitter is a micro-blog. It spits out tweets 140 characters at a time that contain useful words and phrases that are easy to search and that give a good indication of what’s on people’s minds. Lots of people, not just a handful who sit on an editorial board.

Twitter Isn’t Feckless By midday on January 12, 2010, the top ten Twitter topics were related to Haiti or earthquake relief. On June 17, 2009, the State Department asked Twitter to hold off on scheduled maintenance to its servers to avoid disruptions in what had become a useful source of information coming out of Iran during its election. Twitter pushes social signals into the mainstream and helps make what’s important to us a little more transparent.

Twitter Isn’t a Technology That’s Going Away The Twitter syntax is so simple and effective Facebook has adopted parts of it. Type the @ symbol followed by a letter in Facebook and you’ll see friends’ names appear. And it’s search capabilities are so strong Google began including live Twitter rolls on its search pages for timely topical searches.

Historically, search engines have determined the importance of web pages and delivered to us the most relevant ones based on our search terms. But it takes time to determine the relevancy of a web page. What about recent results? This is where Twitter soars. It gives us recent results, many of which are relevant. We’re beginning to see content authority changing, and Twitter is at the root of this change.

Twitter is building up a feature set that has for many become indispensable. Whether Twitter the company will be around for long is to be seen, but the company is valued at around $1 billion at the time of this post, and its technology will most like be around whenever you read this.