When was Twitter launched?

A friend on Twitter posed a question in the form of a statement recently. She asked, "Still searching for the full official launch birthdate of Twitter! Only got March 2006 so far...Even tweeted the creators!". It was an innocent enough request.

In reading Foucault's Nietzsche, Genealogy, History I can't help but think about posing the response to this question in a different light. Or, as Foucault did in The Subject and Power, ask it a different way. Foucault reformulated the question "what is power?" to "how has power come to operate in our society?". I could do the same with the Twitter question. Rather than "when was Twitter launched" it could become "what is it in our recent past that allowed Twitter to emerge?".

Of course I could be accused of being pedantic and rightly so. But the question of when evades the why and the how. It also performs a function that Foucault was particularly wary of, and that is to inscribe a linearity of history, an assumption of a unified whole having an unbroken line of existence from a distant past to the present.

In establishing his genealogical method (based on the work of Nietzsche) Foucault made it clear that it was with the body, inscribed as it is with the marks and fissures of history, that we must start. Unlike the traditional historical approach where the historian starts at a distant past and moves back to the metaphysical present, the genealogical approach begins at the most recent history - the body - and traces these many fissures and ruptures into the distant past.

In proposing this method of analysis Foucault sought to establish the many and variant influences that serve to shape the notions we hold as universal truths today. Ideals, such as liberty, freedom and rationality, are but creations of society at various stages. Each serve a particular end and purpose in the ebb and flow of a will for power and knowledge.

Foucault warned that, rather than some human rationality being responsible for the emergence of various phenomena, these occurred through accident and cleavage at points far distant from their apparent metaphysical arising. History, then is laden with contingency and breakages that can be observed shaping all phenomena, particularly the human body.

"The body", he said, " is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits or moral laws; it constructs resistances. "Effective" history differs from traditional history in being without constants. Nothing in man - not even his body - is sufficiently stable to serve as a basis for self-recognition or for understanding" (p. 88-9)

So to ask "when was Twitter launched?" is to miss the richness of its emergence into social consciousness. It misses the many accidents that made it possible and the many discourses that prevailed in so many ways to invite its emergence. It treats Twitter as a body whole and complete from its birth.

But it's still a good question. The answer is July 15, 2006.

Making the most of hashtags

Hashtags on Twitter are a way to create groupings or channels. Channels can be used to filter information that relates to an event, product, service, person, geographical location. See the earlier post by Chris Messina.

Subscribe to the RSS feed for any hashtag here.

Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They're like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag. (www.hashtags.org)

Making the most of hashtags | FactoryCity

The track facility provided by Twitter makes some # tags redundant. Eg "There's a heatwave in Adelaide" is just as trackable as "There's a heatwave in #Adelaide". The # just makes the post look ugly and provides no additional context.

This was not the case with the #mumbai tag. Adding that tag allowed the tweeter room to post other more descriptive information. The #mumbai tag provided the context and the rest provided the content. Eg. "#mumbai Snipers on the roof" meant much more than "snipers on the roof".

See also Using Hashtags and Themes for Twitter.

How to use the #tag at An Introduction to Twitter Hashtags.

And a bit more at Tweet Your Message to a Larger Audience with Hashtags (from Twitip).

Twemes is another tag aggregation service.

Why do people use Twitter? / we are social

Why do people use Twitter?

Couple of videos in which Twitter users are asked why they use Twitter.

Thanks to Hans for bringing this one to my attention.

FriendOrFollow.com - fletchthemaven's Contact Results

People I'm following who aren't following me.

FriendOrFollow.com - fletchthemaven's Contact Results

Twitter popularity does not equal business acumen | Feeds | ZDNet.com

Twitter popularity does not equal business acumen | Feeds | ZDNet.com: "These are hard times and we have businesses making critical decisions to stay afloat. At the same time we have social media marketers and software developers breathing down these decision-makers necks saying that social media can help them save money and improve their sales. In some cases, this is true. Social media presence could help some companies during this time (more consumer than enterprise, in my humble opinion). On both sides of the coin, however, it depends on the company. Those company leaders will then have to determine who to trust to help them lead this social media charge, and it’s my estimation that trusting someone to help you because of a Twitter follower count or blog subscriber list is a gigantic mistake."

Ways to use Twitter

Love it or hate it, Twitter is getting the buzz, and as usual, there are any number of ways to use the service as a marketing tool.

MediaShift . Point of Presence::Your Guide to Micro-Blogging and Twitter | PBS: "Media companies such as the BBC, The New York Times and Al Jazeera are trying out Twitter as a way to send headlines and links to stories. The campaigns for presidential candidates John Edwards and Barack Obama also have Twitter profiles, with thousands of “friends” and “followers” who check out updates."

Despite that I'm doing Internet studies, there are very few of my friends and associates on Twitter or Jaiku. I wonder if it's a cultural thing or will Australia catch on to this technology in time.

How main stream media is about to be Twitterized

If you can't write your story in 140 words or less, you better think about what you want to say again. As David Berlind, from ZD|Net suggests, mainstream media is about to be 'twitterized.' In the same way that blogs have disrupted print media (show me a decent newspaper that isn't at least planning to have a blog), Twitter and other micro-blogging sites are turning business logic on its head. So if you have a message for the world, think about how you could write it in the 140 or less characters of a Twitter tweet. In so doing you open up your business to many other opportunities for relationships with your customers that you've probably not yet considered.

If you've already been using Twitter for your business, how has it been working for you?

Twitter - why it's here and what to do about it

Introduction

What is Twitter?

It's a world-wide phenomenon that lets people post short messages of a maximum of 140 characters in response to a simple question - "what are you doing?". Users can send these messages via IM, mobile phone, from the Twitter web site, or via a number of applications that feed and publish tweets.

demo

How is Twitter being used?

• Staying in touch with family and friends. A hybrid between email, IM, and text. Provides a rich context for offline interaction and a sixth sense for what's happening in peoples lives.

• Reporters use it to break news, to announce headlines that may be reported in more detail on the Internet, radio, TV and print.

• Bloggers and businesses use it to promote themselves and create a dialogue with their followers. See Barack Obama and author and tech guru Robert Scoble. Drives traffic to their sites.
  

Why does Twitter exist?

Reasons for Twitter's popularity.

• Attention crash, brevity rules - people want the attention of others - the quicker the better

So having attention is very, very desirable, in some ways infinitely so, since the larger the audience, the better. And, yet, attention is also difficult to achieve owing to its intrinsic scarcity. That combination makes it the potential driving force of a very intense economy.

• Growth of mobile technologies requiring shorter messages - shorter but more often

• Rise in social networking - we filter what we want and don't want
  

• Fascination with the trivial - Perez Hilton

• The speed of life is increasing exponentially with the growth in population. This includes the felt need to stay in touch.
• Stimulation addiction with a twist. Twittering is like the cocaine of blogging or e-mail but refined into crack.

  Substance abuse is something visible. Psychological addictions are caused by wanting to hang onto or enhance positive feelings and stimuli, like winning in gambling, playing computer games or projecting whatever personality you like in chat rooms.

Not everyone's a fan

Some criticisms may be the result of a lack of understanding of the way Twitter works:

dezzychick - hopefully finding something to do tonight. (Good luck! Hopefully one of your friends will Twit “hopefully finding something to do tonight” and then the two of you can see each other Twits and put 1 and 1 together to realize that goodness, the two of you might be able to hang out!)

and

Twitter is a bad, bad thing — not just because of what it does, but because of what it says about all of us and our need to be connected. Twitter's whole existence is based on the premise that we aren't yet in touch with one another quite enough.

And that may be because critics haven't immersed themselves in the technology:

So why has Twitter been so misunderstood? Because it's experiential. Scrolling through random Twitter messages can't explain the appeal. You have to do it — and, more important, do it with friends. (Monitoring the lives of total strangers is fun but doesn't have the same addictive effect.)

So what?

• Very low penetration in Australia compared to US - opportunity for students to become an expert in blogging and micro-blogging before the wave hits.

• Once the hype dies down it may simply become useful.
• New features such as grouping (friends, family, colleagues) may make Twitter more usable
  
• How will Twitter respond to competitors such as Pownce, Dodgeball, and Tumblr
• Another part of the confusing web 2.0 jungle - making sense of it all
  

Twitter is experiential

If you, like me, have visited the Twitter home page and read the dozens of seemingly meaningless messages about the fragments of peoples lives, you're probably thinking that it's a load of rubbish. Why would anyone want to be so self-obsessed to write "gone to lunch with John. Will probably have sushi" and think that someone, anyone would care? Well, as it turns out there's lots of good reasons, but it's a bit like sky-diving or sex - you won't understand it until you do it. As
Clive Thompson points out, Twitter is an experiential thing. Far from being something that's self-obsession creating, it can become a way for people to have a much fuller and richer understanding of their world; and this comes about through a more granular view of the people around us. Give it a go (or try Jaiku)and see if what I'm saying has any truth.

Scoble on Twitter

When tech guru Robert Scoble says something's hot, you can bet that it is. And guess what? He's as hot as hell on Twitter. On this video, Scoble explains in detail how businesses can hit home runs galore through the use of this micro-blogging service. Scoble also discusses Jaiku and Pownce, the big competitors for Twitter. He claims that Pownce has the better user interface and some cool features, and points out that these services enable threaded discussions. In answer to the question about Twitter's lead, Scoble suggests that Pownce is pulling in big numbers of users - and fast. He suggests that these platforms won't be mainstream for another couple of years and all of the platforms struggle for the attention of consumers. He suggests that companies such as Twitter are cheap to build and run and are not as exposed to the problems of the tech bubble that we saw in 2000.

Have you set up a Twitter account yet? Visit mine here or my Jaiku profile here .

Interview with Scoble here.

Building loyalty with a Twitter feed

Bloody hell, maybe there is something about Twitter. There's lots of stories now beginning to surface about companies having a Twitter feed that allows people to keep up to date with short snippets of what's going on inside a business. For example, a real estate agent might use Twitter to alert his or her subscribers of a new listing coming on stream - or the potential of a new listing if they're doing an appraisal. A stock broker could have a Twitter feed that gives their clients up to the minute news on what's happening in the market and what stocks are running hot.

The potential here is enormous. Think about building a Twitter feed into your blog. It'll be a micro-blog that'll fill in the gaps of the main theme of your blog. Is there any way to mash Twitter with Facebook and Google maps?

Read more here...Twitter for investor relations and disclosure of material news - IRWebReport.com

How businesses can make use of Twitter

It seemed like the daftest of all new social networking sites but I'm beginning to see how Twitter may be useful in a business or professional environment. The home page of Twitter suggests that the posts are pure banal crap, but the more I look into it, the more I see the possibilities. Barrack Obama is using it in the US, wonder if we'll see our local pollies use it in the lead up to the next election.

Have a read of this article and let me know if you're using tweeting on Twitter...Twitter – Can Your Company Or Podcast Do It?

Twitter and Jaiku - The next email?

I may be a twit because I don't get Twitter. Here's something I found that made a tiny bit of sense.

The Next Email - Twitter - Jaiku - Pownce

Twitter

I don't get Twitter or Jaiku. Do you?

What's it all about? Why should I use them?