Happy Birthday Twitter!

The microblogging site Twitter is celebrating its 5th birthday today.

After being someone who couldn't quite see the point of Twitter - I’ve now become a converted fan. Despite my enthusiasm and the fact that Twitter has an estimated 200 million users, I still meet many people who just don’t get it.

I was talking to a friend at work who told me he’s been thinking about setting up a Twitter account. I got the impression he thought it was something he should do, but wasn’t really sure why he should do it.

As he’s interested in politics and has ambitions of becoming a local councillor, I immediately thought Twitter would be ideal for him.

Twitter could be a great way for him to increase his political profile, by making contacts, networking, getting involved in online discussions, and sharing information.

I’m not going to deny that Twitter can be trivial and pointless at times, especially if you have nothing to say – but if you know why you’re using it, have objectives and know what it is you want to get out it; then it can be very useful.

When you join Twitter you become a member a community. It might be community of people following a particular person - or you might have a community of people following you.

Twitter allows you to talk to these people in the same way you might in the real world. You can have discussions, debates; you can share information or just listen to other people. Depending on people’s motives and objectives there are lots of different outcomes you can get from Twitter.

We’ve seen with the recent political demonstrations in Egypt, that protesters used Twitter to organise and coordinate their protests. Companies and brands are using Twitter as an alternative marketing tool; developing closer relationships with their customers by having online dialogues with them.

Politicians, celebrities, and sports stars are using Twitter as a way of raising their profiles, speaking directly to their followers, counteracting any negative or false stories circulating about them in the media.

I use Twitter as an extension of my blog, when I don’t have a 500-word post to write, I can make a quick comment on Twitter that immediately updates on my blog. It’s another good way of promoting myself and my writing.

It’s also chance for me to chat to people I know, even when they’re not in the same room as me. Today I was tweeting during the Ireland/England 6 Nations rugby match. I was only tweeting the same things I would say if I was watching the game down the pub. My followers on Twitter and Facebook then have a chance to respond to any of my comments.

This is the key for me; you have to have something to say, or have something that’s going to add to the conversation of your followers, friends, and community. If you can get that right then Twitter starts to make more sense.

Facebook and Twitter - A violation of your privacy?

I came across this article yesterday in the Evening Standard entitled Facebook and twitter users invite violation of their privacy. Scientists are now claiming that people are 'undermining' their own privacy rights when they use such social networking sites to reveal every little detail of the private lives.

When I read this, it didn't come as a real surprise. It seems there are loads of people who no longer know how to separate their public and private lives.

I've touched upon this subject in previous posts, I think there's a growing number of people who seem to believe that by sharing and telling the world every little detail about themselves it somehow validates them as people. What I mean by this, is that they feel it gives their lives more meaning or value by constantly sharing everything!

It's like on Facebook when you get people who have thousands of photos of themselves out and about socialising with mates. There's nothing wrong with having a good selection of photos representing who you are and your lifestyle, but sometimes I think some photos have only been uploaded to show the rest of us what a crazy and exciting life these people lead!

People don't need to prove this too me, which is what it sometimes feels like.

I'm not anti Facebook or twitter, I'm on both of them. I just think it's important to get the right balance between sharing your thoughts and life with the people that matter, but retaining some sense of a private life.

Anyone out there with any thoughts on this, let me know.

I’m now on Twitter!

A few weeks ago I decided to join Twitter. Nothing particularly unusual about that you might think, but considering that when I first started this blog, I wrote a post about how I thought Twitter was a pointless waste of time, it’s a bit of a turnaround for me.

Over the last few months I’ve slowly begun to change my opinions, and I’ve started to see that Twitter does have many potential good points.

I think the original reason that I wasn’t keen on Twitter was that I couldn’t understand the use or value of it. You can only post messages of no more than 140 characters. What can you say in such a small amount of space?

Secondly, it appeared to be the equivalent of the Facebook updates you receive from people, where they post their own comments, thoughts and updates on what they’re currently doing.

Of course I like keeping up to date with what my friends are doing, that’s one of the good things about Facebook - but I’m not interested in being constantly bombarded with boring, banal comments from people who have nothing of real interest to say. I assumed that Twitter would be exactly like this with millions of people posting irrelevant comments.

My opinions slowly began to change during this year’s Iranian elections. There were huge protests directed against incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad following his controversial election victory.

During the protests against the election results, many people used Twitter as a way of communicating to the outside world what was happening on the streets of Tehran. It also allowed demonstrators to communicate and organise themselves.

This seemed a really important development as the Iranian authorities had censored many traditional media outlets. Foreign journalists were unable to find out everything that was happening on street level, but by following the tweet commentary and updates from protesters the rest of the world was able to have a better idea of what was going on.

Despite this I was still reluctant to join up, as I thought I already have my blog, in which I can communicate my thoughts and opinions to the world. Surely blogging is better than Tweeting as you can go into far more detail about stuff.

The reason I started my blog, was that as a journalism student it was important to start writing on a regular basis and have an ‘online presence’. I was told it was all about promoting yourself and your work.

I'm always hearing about how Twitter and blogging are is becoming important tools for journalists and freelance writers to promote their work and themselves as ‘brands’.

I’m beginning to understand this. You have a huge amount of celebrities promoting themselves as brands. The actor Stephen Fry has the most number of followers in the UK, and The Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s wife Sarah Brown is also a big twitterer.

But it’s not just individuals who recognise the value of promoting themselves in short soundbites. Many businesses are seeing that Twitter offers new ways of marketing and communicating with consumers.

In terms of advertising, there was at time when we had to sit through and watch adverts between tv programmes or listen to them on radio. Nowadays we can fast forward the add breaks if we’re not interested. Email adverts that come into our email accounts can be deleted as spam.

The thing with Twitter is that as a consumer we can make a choice as to whether we want to receive messages from a particular company or business. We can also communicate directly back to that company in the form of our own tweets. It’s now more of a two way process.

What I’ve realised is that by being on Twitter I don’t need to post loads of messages everyday if I don’t want to, but what I can do is pick particular individuals, organisations, and publishers to keep up to date on news, gossip, promotions and general networking with different communities.

Already this week, I had my first Twitter follower, a certain Krishnan Guru-Murthy from Channel 4 news! I thought this was a major coup after I decided to follow him, but I soon realised that he’s already following another 1500 people!

So far he tweets about what he’s doing on a daily basis, but also on news stories of the day, political gossip, what’s happening on the show that evening. Seeing as I’m interested in politics, it’s a way of being nosey and finding out little bits of info you might not always hear in a news bulletin or 30 minute programme.

I finally decided about a month ago that Twitter was something that I should at least make the effort to use more, but if I’m being honest, after creating a profile I couldn’t quite think of how or why I was going to use it.

After stumbling across a few other blogs, in which people had attached their own Twitter updates, it occurred to me that I could add Twitter to my blog as well.

During those days when I haven’t written a post, it would be good to have a couple of updated tweets giving my various thoughts and opinions. I can now see that it’s a good way of enhancing my current blog with more regular and shorter updates! Hopefully it will help to push and promote my blog further.

I don’t know what the future holds for Twitter, I read that it’s currently now valued at $1 Billions dollars, but it’s yet to start making a profit!

We'll have to see if it’s just another Internet fad, or whether it's now an essential marketing tool for businesses and individuals. I’ll stick with it as a way of pushing my blog, and putting more of my thoughts and opinions out there into the world.

It seems Twitter does have its good points after all!

Last month I wrote a post entitled ‘Not convinced by Twitter’ in which I spoke about how I couldn’t understand the point of Twitter, and why people would make any real effort in following people’s tweets.

You can only write 140 characters in your message, so just how interesting can it really be in following such comments?

Well I have to admit that following the recent elections and political demonstrations in Iran , it seems I may have been too quick to dismiss Twitter, as it appears to have come into its own as a way of challenging the political establishment.

During the demonstrations many protesters began using Twitter as means of communicating to the outside world, what was actually going on in the country.

This is such an interesting development. With the Iranian authorities restricting access to the Internet, and other communication outlets, and international news organisations struggling to report what was happening on the ground, Twitter stepped up to the mark to provide quick and instantly updated commentary on what people were doing, and how they felt about the situation.

Not only this, the constant messaging also provided a way by which protesters could organise and mobilise themselves in their protests against their leaders.

I suppose it should be remembered that many of the people sending the tweets were not acting as journalists or reporters in the traditional sense. They were not there to report the facts in an impartial journalistic way.

I can imagine that in such a situation many of the tweets being written were nothing more than rumour or gossip on what was taking place. I suppose the challenge for traditional journalists and reporters was to figure out how they could gather together the various tweets and try and makes sense of them all. By doing so, they could then hopefully be in a position to provide some form of context and narrative of the events taking place.

The Iranian authorities soon began to realise the potential dangers and advantages of Twitter themselves. They set up and started sending their own decoy Twitter tweets to try and trap the protesters, and also to put out false information in order to control the demonstrations.

It’s going to be interesting to see how in the near future, authoritarian and semi-democratic regimes such China and Iran deal with the development of media technology and social networking sites like Twitter. Modern media technology has shown that it has ways of avoiding censorship by governments, and providing news and information to the outside world.

Of course authoritarian governments will still go out of their way to control and suppress information . China is still very adapt at doing such things.

The problem that these governments face, is the increasing challenge of sharing the same media technology as the West, which their young media savvy populations desire and want to share in; but in doing so they are creating future problems for themselves, as they do not have the democratic freedoms and ideals that accompany such media in the West.

This inevitably creates tensions, as seen in Iran, whereby the movement of information is increasingly used to share and formulate ideas in ways previously unseen, which authoritarian regimes cannot or don't know how to control.

Not convinced by Twitter!

I seem to have been reading more and more stories recently about the social networking phenomenon Twitter. For those not in the know, Twitter allows you to post messages of no more than 140 characters, which are known as tweets. These tweets can be described as a combination of someone emailing, texting and blogging. People can follow you and your messages, and you can also follow other people.

It’s very similar to the status updates that you get on Facebook, where people tell you all kinds of exciting and interesting things they are currently doing or thinking, such as the update I found on my Facebook profile yesterday which read: LC… Has done absolutely nothing all day..... What a waste of a Sunday!!’ What a wast of a comment! Thank you for sharing that with me!

Apparently all kinds of celebs are now on twitter giving you constant updates of every little detail of their lives. At the moment I’m struggling to get the whole point of Twitter, and I’m not sure I want to get it!

Although I’ve not joined Twittter, and currently have no intention of doing so, I am on Facebook and get their Twitter equivalent of updates from people. Admittedly I do like to hear want close family and friends are up to, and some updates can be very amusing, but what you do get is a lot of boring and banal comments.

The sort of comments from people I went to school with, who I haven’t actually spoken to since 1993! The idea that I would join Twitter to follow other people, whether they be celebs or friends so that I can follow every little detail of their day to day life is too much!

What amused me this week was reading the blog of Hip Hop superstar Kanye West. He had a bit of a rant at those people who had set up a twitter profile impersonating him. On his blog he wrote:

"I DON'T HAVE A FUCKING TWITTER... WHY WOULD I USE TWITTER??? I ONLY BLOG 5 PERCENT OF WHAT I'M UP TO IN THE FIRST PLACE. I'M ACTUALLY SLOW DELIVERING CONTENT BECAUSE I'M TOO BUSY ACTUALLY BUSY BEING CREATIVE MOST OF THE TIME AND IF I'M NOT AND I'M JUST LAYING ON A BEACH I WOULDN'T TELL THE WORLD. EVERYTHING THAT TWITTER OFFERS I NEED LESS OF."

I know Kanye is never shy of telling the world how talented and creative he is, but I think he does have a point. I personally don’t have the time nor interest in posting constant updates on what I’m doing, and I’m sure most people aren’t interested in hearing every little thing I’ve done in an average day.

What I find quite worrying about aspects of Facebook and Twitter, is the amount of people who seem to want to live their entire lives in the public domain. It’s as if people have to share everything about themselves to the world, in order to validate who they are or to confirm that they actually exist.

I occasionally put up my own posts on Facebook, but I don’t feel I need to live my life in public. The argument for sites like Twitter is that it allows greater interaction, and that people can share their lives, thoughts and feelings more, but I still feel that people should have a public and private life.

I’m quite happy to share lots of personal thoughts and feelings with family and friends, but I don’t need to include the rest of the world.

Add to this I’ve always had a deep distrust of the ‘Big Brother’ state, I don’t want the world to know everything that I’m doing or to know that there are people following me. For the time being I’m sure that Twitter will continue to become more popular, but for now you can leave me out of it all.