According to the web analytics company Complete, in January 2009 Twitter, the social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to send and read other users’ updates, received just over 54 million visits and ranked third in social networks behind Facebook and MySpace. Not bad for a company that launched just 3 years ago (March 2006).
Evan Williams is the co-founder of Twitter. He spoke recently at the annual TED conference in Long Beach, California. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design, and provides some of the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers the opportunity to talk about science, business, the arts and global issues facing our world.
One of the things I found interesting about Twitter is that it was launched as a side project. In his TED talk, Williams shares that he’s learned to follow his intuition:
Now, it’s hard to justify doing a side-project at a startup where focus is so critical, but I had actually launched Blogger as a side-project at my previous company thinking is was just a little thing we’d do on the side, and it ended up taking over not only the company but my life for the next five or six years, so I learned to follow hunches even though you can’t necessarily justify them or know where they’re going to go. And that’s what’s happened with Twitter time after time.
He goes on to explain how many of the ideas driving Twitter’s growth have come from the users themselves. Check out his short 8 minute talk below.
Last month, Nash over at The Daily Nash-on came up with a list of reasons Why Scientists Won’t Use Twitter. He points out that the reasons he came up with are also applicable to other “Web 2.0″ Science resources. Perhaps it’s no surprise then that someone like me who embraces Web 2.0 Science resources would be using Twitter. I’ve found Twitter to be a valuable networking and communication tool, especially for one-on-one conversation/messaging.
The problem with Twitter
The problem with Twitter is that it can be a “noisy” social media platform. The way to manage the noise is to only follow high-value Twitterers. That is, only follow people who closely share your interests and post relevant content. That way you maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio. You can determine high-value Twitterers by screening new followers before you start following them back. Here’s some tips:
- Check out recent tweets and take a look at who they follow — their network will reflect their interests and the conversations they may participate in.
- How many people are they following? The ratio of people followed to followers can give you an idea if they also screen new followers.
- Check out the link provided on their profile. If it links to a blog, read some of the recent posts. Look for an “About” page to learn more.
- Check and see if they have a FriendFeed or LinkedIn profile.
David Bradley at Sciencebase has been compiling a list of Twitter users that are connected to science in some way. Review his list of 252 Scientific Twitter Friends. In addition, WeFollow, a user powered Twitter Directory, currently has a list of 164 users that have tagged themselves with the term “science”.
Do you use Twitter? If so, let us know in the comments below!
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Okay, Walter, you’ve almost got me to the point of adding twitter. Almost. I’ll have to employ the “high value” metric you suggest more conscientiously to my current 2.0 activities — it seems that while I’ve done that for the blogs I follow, I still don’t have a way of keeping track of these activities in a way that fits my workflow…maybe I don’t have enough of a workflow!
Nash does make some interesting points in his post, some of which are cultural in nature — just this morning, a pair of local DJs were hashing out whether Facebook’s new look was better — one of them made the observation that in a year, it won’t matter: it will just be the look of Facebook. I’d reply similarly to Nash: for some tools, it’s just a matter of time. They’ll be used because they are used, and if the lab-bound researcher intends to keep up with grads (let alone undergrads, an increasingly large population of researchers b/c NSF provides funding provisions for their inclusion), then real-time text-based comm tools will be a reality.
I do agree the name “twitter” is off-putting — and I’m not convinced that the instant messaging utility of twitter makes it necessary for science groups. Any IM system would work for that. Rather, Twitter offers some kind of “ambient” experience (see Lisa Reichelt’s slideshow and Herot’s thoughts) which is beyond (or at least different from) transmitting messages or consuming information. I think Twitter — and these sorts of 2.0 tools in general — encourage a kind of ambient literacy in which the user builds a dynamic, meta-net understanding that tracks/keeps aware of memic types of happenings — a sort of meta-awareness similar to what we say about the “feel” of a place — only the “place” here is mostly ideas, information. I don’t think selling twitter to scientists as a way of keeping tabs or managing labs (one of Nash’s examples) is how people use twitter or why it is experienced as valuable. I would like to know what about the ambient experience scientists and their kin find valuable.
It would also be interesting to begin some kind of web-based, longitudinal, community wide survey that asked some simple questions about 2.0 use — I think it was Bora who commented after a post (pretty sure it was on NN, but I’d have to look) about the value of science blogging that at the earlier stages of his career, he had a very different relationship with the web — and that as his career progressed (I’m assuming steadied out after the frenzied initial years of achievement), there was (in part) simply more time to find out what other people were doing. But I’m betting we’d find trends in peaks of use and non-use that were career related.
PS — is there anyway I can persuade nextgensci to add a preview button to make sure that links and such worked?:)