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Evan Williams and Biz Stone of Twitter Robyn Twomey for TIME ENLARGE + Print Reprints Email Twitter Linkedin Buzz up! (44) Facebook MORE... Add to my: del.icio.us Technorati reddit Google Bookmarks Mixx StumbleUpon Blog this on: TypePad LiveJournal Blogger MySpace The one thing you can say for certain about Twitter is that it makes a terrible first impression. You hear about this new service that lets you send 140-character updates to your "followers," and you think, Why does the world need this, exactly? It's not as if we were all sitting around four years ago scratching our heads and saying, "If only there were a technology that would allow me to send a message to my 50 friends, alerting them in real time about my choice of breakfast cereal." Related Audio Host Katherine Lanpher talks with TIME's Just Fox on stocks vs. bonds and Barbara Kiviat about the housing market's new movement Download | Subscribe Specials The World of Twitter Specials Top 10 Celebrity Twitter Feeds Specials 10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Business Stories The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher More Related The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher The TIME 100: The Twitter Guys by Ashton Kutcher The Future of Twitter I, too, was skeptical at first. I had met Evan Williams, Twitter's co-creator, a couple of times in the dotcom '90s when he was launching Blogger.com. Back then, what people worried about was the threat that blogging posed to our attention span, with telegraphic, two-paragraph blog posts replacing long-format articles and books. With Twitter, Williams w

"Injecting Twitter into that conversation fundamentally changed the rules of engagement. It added a second layer of discussion and brought a wider audience into what would have been a private exchange. And it gave the event an afterlife on the Web. Yes, it was built entirely out of 140-character messages, but the sum total of those tweets added up to something truly substantive, like a suspension bridge made of pebbles."

--I am looking for a good Twitter software for PC Windows7 desktop.  This article Twitter apps review 11/1/11: 1st gen of 3rd-party Twitter clients for mobile devices made the service take off.  Twitter bought iPhone-only Tweetie, and turned it into this multi-platform must-have. 

Twitter is one of the most popular micro blogging and social media site, which is growing at a rapid pace. A lot of individuals and organizations are using Twitter in order to enhance their sales and marketing. It is also effective in brand building. Twitter is a social media site where you can express your views and thoughts in 140 characters. You can also share links along with your thoughts. A lot of tools are available which makes the usage of Twitter more smooth. I have been trying a lot of tools and each day many new tools emerge, which are simply superb. I would like to share some important Twitter tools that I have found useful in managing Twitter accounts.

For a service that is remarkably simple, Twitter is often difficult for new users to understand and to quickly turn into something useful. In fact, the simplicity of Twitter can actually be a barrier in the beginning, because there's not much to help a new user get started. So, we've put together this guide, which will help you understand the basic jargon of Twitter, find a good set of Twitter add-ons to streamline and strengthen your Twitter experience, and give you a list of 100 technology experts who are active on Twitter and are worth following.

Let's face it, the Twitterverse is made up of individuals and brands. While the branded Twitter accounts are staffed by people, the persona of each Twitter account is either an individual or a company or a brand. For example, General Motors has a branded Twitter account, and they also have product branded Twitter accounts. Like you I receive dozens of new Twitter followers every day. When I plow through them, I usually make my decision to follow back (or not) in under 5 seconds.

Those who have panicked that their Twitter followers have dropped - don't be paranoid! The twitter spammers have again taken the axe. Twitter self corrects about every 90 days and you'll get used to it. The fact is that Twitter is for meaningful, authentic communication - albeit short and if you do that, it can be a fun, and useful part of your personal learning network. It is unique to you and how you want to do it! Remember that it is not about the followers although you'll have people direct message you that you can somehow buy 200 or even 500 followers a day -- like that will enrich your life! Come on -- twitter is great and it is not about how many people follow YOU anyway - if you get tied up in that too much then you're probably really there for just selfish reasons anyway. Enjoy and have fun!

"Because social-networking tools are forums for personalized, socially focused conversations, the communities that spring from these tools are person/people-centered. As Porter explained, this person/people-centeredness results in the value of participation being opaque for anyone who is not participating. To address this problem, we made sure that students who chose not to participate (because the value of participation is opaque for them) had access to our tweets by incorporating an RSS feed-like Twitter widget in our LMS. (See Figure 5.) Many widgets like these can be found online, although we should note that this particular widget has limitations. As seen in the example in Figure 5, the widget only displays Joni's posts, not the back-and-forth exchanges between her and members of her network. Students might incorrectly assume that the interaction is one-sided and less than dynamic. Besides keeping students apprised of the resources we shared via Twitter, however, this widget allowed them to vicariously discover Twitter's value. Some students later chose to join us in Twitter because they had a better understanding of what they were getting into because its value was less opaque. Ultimately, we found that Twitter helped us achieve our student-engagement objective, but we also quickly discovered that students' Twitter participation led to other notable instructional outcomes."

Excellent article about the research from several researchers about Tweets that are compelling and those that are turn-offs. This and the original research are both great reads. I thought it funny that people particularly hate foursquare check ins mentioned through Twitter, so unlink that account or lose followers! "One piece of advice: Nix the "sandwich tweets." People do not care what you are eating for lunch. (Specifically: "Sorry, but I don't care what people are eating," "too much personal info," "He moans about this ALL THE TIME. Seriously.") Twitter, as a communications platform, has evolved beyond nascent Twttr's charmingly mundane updates ("cleaning my apartment"; "hungry") and into something more crowd-conscious and curatorial. Though Twitter won't necessarily replace traditional news, it increasingly functions as a real-time newswire, disseminating and amplifying information gathered from the world and the web.

Some tips for twittering from the marketing point of view. Relevant ideas to building a PLN too.

One guys idea of the Why's of using Twitter.

Twitter been widely used micro blogging services for instant sharing with friends and followers. Since Twiter is updated instantly users can easily share information such as links, images, video and now you can share files instantly with all your friends on Twitter. FileTwt is a simple file sharing service on Twitter. Lot of us use Rapidshare for file sharing, but now FileTwt let Twitter user to share files up to 20MB maximum instantly. At present all files are hosted on Rapidshare, but FileTwt will soon start hosting the uploaded files themselves in a few days!

Lovely down to earth look at twitter for beginners. I like this: Kindness, appreciation, and generosity are very meaningful on Twitter, just as in real life. Come to think of it, Twitter IS real life with real people who think and feel.

Ok, so what is Twitter and why should you care?  First, let's start with what it isn't.  Twitter is *not* about micro-blogging.  Yes, it is described this way - yes even by it's founders.  But they have also admittedly publicly that much of the innovation on Twitter has happened in the user base - the convention for retweets (RT), for example, came from the user base.  For those of you who are new, RT is just a way to a convention for sharing a message from someone you follow to your own followers.  It's sort of citation plus recommendation plus message all wrapped in a little two letter acronym.

Twitt(url)y is a service for tracking what URLs people are talking about as they talk about them on Twitter.

Twitter offers a real-world education, right at your fingertips. It is a wonderful tool for collecting information, much of it educational. You can find educators, librarians, museums, and more on Twitter. Read on, and you'll find 100 of the most educational feeds on Twitter.

The new Twitter iOS app and Android app works on the discover feature and search. Discover is supposed to show you more about what retweets you've gotten,etc. I've found it easier to see this information in hootsuite and for scheduling I use buffer. Twitter is amazing, but I rarely go to the site itself on my phone or computer. I have a feeling this is strategic for Twitter as they look to monetize. Update and check it out.

"These little bits of information" are complementary to what journalists do. Twitter is working on relevancy and heping people find what is more relevant to them, says Williams, but sees a role for journalists in helping audiences sifting the signal from the noise. He talks about journalists' role as curating the messages on Twitter, with the Huffington Post being a leader in this area. But Williams also says the company wants to build more trust and authenticity into Twitter. The company is working on reputation systems, though this is still at its nascent phase.