I joined Twitter back in early 2008 not realizing what I was getting myself in to. I was convinced by several friends that twitter was "a good thing" and that I had to "try it to really understand it". And they were right. I really didn’t get twitter, but I have to admit that Twitter has changed my life pretty dramatically (and I recently sanctioned this on Facebook by officially becoming a ‘twitter fan’).

When I joined Twitter, they were getting over all the major bashing they took right before and after SXSW. Thankfully right about the time that I got on twitter, they were on their way to rectifying a majority of their issues. Not too long ago, you saw posts from the big guns: "Twitter fails Macworld Keynote Test (1/15/2008)" and "Twitter: Something Is Technically Wrong (5/20/2008)", "It’s Time For FriendFeed To Kill Twitter (5/23/2008)" – you just don’t hear things like that being said about Twitter anymore (aside from the recent phishing scandals). No news is indeed good news, I suppose.

One of the biggest reasons I’ve started enjoying twitter is because how I’ve been able to catch up with current events. For example, in the past couple of months I’ve caught two breaking stories on Twitter – the Mumbai terrorist attacks and the Continental flight incident in Denver through the people I follow on Twitter:

Twitter isn’t just about updating your network about your current status – it is way more than that. And the way twitter is being used is way beyond it’s original scope of wanting to answer the simple question – "what are you doing?" Twitter helps you report your life to the world. The abundance of client applications has undoubtedly helped propel the use of Twitter. Applications like Twhirl for your dekstop and TinyTwitter, Twittelator and TwitToday for mobile phones makes it extremely simple for you to tweet and keep up with you friends. Properties like Twitpic, which lets you share a picture quickly with your twitter network, have definitely pushed the boundaries and let you share more than just text. And of couse, there is Summize (now Twitter Search). Summize has to be the best twitter utility out there – hands down.

The growth of users and engagement on twitter is definitely very impressive. As of November ’08, according to compete, the site has seen a 640.2% growth in traffic YOY. I think the collective increase in engagement on traffic has definitely been a lucrative reason for me to want to use it as well. There are people from all walks of life who are using Twitter, celebrities like Jimmy Fallon, Shaquille O’Neal, and Lance Armstrong to tech luminaries like Guy Kawasaki and Tim O’ Reilly to president (elect) Barack Obama.

We, at Microsoft, have been looking at how we can use Twitter as a marketing tool. For example, I’d noticed that events are a common ground for people to tweet from. With the recent launch of BizSpark, we were in several cities marking the launch. I wanted all the attendees at the event to twitter about ‘@bizspark’ so that those who couldn’t make it to the event could track what was happening there. The offline to online marketing idea seems to have worked, methinks:

So, I stand corrected. I’d said this back in January 2008:

"… having done my share of research on teh internets, the only thing I can conclude is that Twitter is more-or-less useless. I’d love to be wrong"

And, I was wrong.

I’m starting to push 30 – clearly a huge life milestone for me. What’s most exciting for me is to be able to look back at my tweets 5, 10, 15 years out and look back at all the ridiculous things I was thinking out loud about.

"ai"

This ~110 character tweet by Veronica Belmont sums up why I too, have been blogging less.

I’ve been wanting to write a post about my 75 day experience Twittering (which may very well end up becoming my 90 day experience Twittering). Either way, for better or worse, I’m twittering a LOT more now.

Follow me.

"ai"

I’m proud to announce the beta launch of thatsWhatSheTwittered.com. The co-founders gave me an early preview of the site. This has to be one of the most brilliant ideas I’ve ever come across, and I’m proud to be a part of this new venture.

thatsWhatSheTwittered (starts with a small ‘t’) is an amazing concept. Here’s how it works :

1. You follow ‘_twst‘ on twitter.
2. For every tweet that you twitter, you will get an automatic reply from _twst that says "thats what she twittered". If you think about what that means contextually, you’ll understand that nothing has ever made more sense. Ever. For example, check out this thwead (thats a ‘twitter thread’, also a cute way to say ‘thread’) :
   
3. Every interaction with _twst will automatically make its way on to thatsWhatSheTwittered.com and will appear in a threaded fashion (that is much friendlier than what appears on quotably.com). The site is currently in private beta.

I hear the co-founders are currently to raise a round in the 50-100 mil range. If you want in on the beta, please send an email to ‘thatswhatshetwittered@gmail.com’. 

I’d also like to take this opportunity to thank Dan Lyons for his support on this project, but sorry Dan, I’m out of time.

"ai"

I’ve started using FriendFeed. Not as a consumer of different people’s feeds (because there is just way too much information), but because I can now point people to one location (http://friendfeed.com/anandiyer) where most of my different social networking services’ activities are getting aggregated. I really like it for that purpose. However, shouldn’t Twitter be able to accomplish exactly the same thing? TwitterFeed, for example, can be configured to ping your blog and post tweets about your blog posts. Why can’t Twitter ask you which services you use, ping those services for your activities, and then auto-tweet them for you?

Besides, I can see how I’m probably inundating my friends on friendfeed (lets call them ‘friendfeeders’) :

1. I’ve configured Twhirl, a client I use to Twitter, to auto-post my tweets to Pownce. So if you go to my friendfeed feed, you’re likely to see duplicate messages :
   
2. At one point, I’d started using TwitterFeed. Some my friendfeeders, saw my blog post on FriendFeed. And, TwitterFeed tweet’d (or is it twittered?) it, which means it showed up a couple of times on my friendfeed. I’ve stopped using TwitterFeed.
3. Every now and then I send cute tweets about a blog post that contained a picture on Flickr (much like this blog post will). So, my friendfeeders saw my Flickr photo go up, they saw my tweet about my Flickr photo, and they saw my blog post with my Flickr photo, and my tweet about my blog post with my flickr photo.

Twitter can (and should) be the non-walled garden for aggregating data from different social networking services. I also find Twitter’s RSS feed more superior than FriendFeed’s. If not for anything else, it’ll save us the trouble of having

1. yet another account (which means managing credentials) on a site like FriendFeed (or SocialThing), and,
2. a group of friends on another service.

"ai"
PS: I’m going to be twhirling this post. So you’re likely going to see it show up thrice on my friendfeed :|

I cave : http://twitter.com/anandiyer

"ai"

I don’t twitter. Millions have asked me for my twitter handle. Millions. Yet, I stick with the simple philosophical reason that no one cares and that’s why I don’t twitter.

Why I don’t twitter

1. No one cares enough to read through dozens and dozens of updates. People don’t care enough about my life to want to know what I’m doing (all the time).
2. I don’t care enough to want to let the world know what I’m doing (all the time). Look at my last few facebook status updates, for example. Just rubbish.
   
3. I don’t have relevant breaking news that I want to share with the internet. Or my internet friends. Or my supposed twitter friends. I would share breaking news via SMS. If it’s internet worthy, I’ll blog it.
4. I find blogging to be good enough.
5. In the last year or so, Twitter has gone down several times. Apparently there’s even a site dedicated to figuring twitter’s up/down status : http://istwitterdown.com/.
   

Why I think people Twitter

I set out to find out if there are others out there who want to know why people twitter. Here are Goog’s search results. Here are Live’s search results. Between those sets of search results, I found these two somewhat relevant articles :

1. Why I Hate Twitter : This is from a user who has been using Twitter and is annoyed by some of its "features". So not entirely relevant, but still captures a user’s frustration.
2. What Do You Use Twitter For? : Whoa, ok, I feel like ripping this article apart. I know this was written almost a year go, but, to quote the author, Amit Agarwal :
   1. "Reducing Information Overload" : I don’t think the problem is so much information overload but using another channel, like Twitter, to receive information that you could otherwise just receive in the form of an RSS feed. If you don’t know how to parse your RSS feeds efficiently to look for what is relevant to you then we need to chat. You don’t need to use twitter if all you want is to be notified about something through GTalk or in an SMS.
      And I don’t know if Twitter really "reduces information overload". I’ve been looking at some of my friends’ twitter feeds, and they are just inundated with irrelevant stuff and chatty crap.
   2. "Enhance Your Blog Posts : Say you type a twit “how do you download Youtube videos” and almost instantly, your fans will message you the various methods / hacks they use for downloading videos. That kind of instant research is not possible with other methods."
      I’m not even going to comment on this.
   3. "Contact Busy People" : Why not use the phone? SMS? What exactly is so old-school about picking up the phone and calling someone? Unless you don’t know the person’s phone number, in which case you possibly can’t have something that important to message "your friend" about.

Some time back, my friend Mario over at LinkedIn had posted this question : "What business relevance do you find in Twitter?" I couldn’t find a single answer in that thread that was relevant, except for the one by Laura Thomas from Dell.

A writer who I have huge respect for is Dare Obasanjo. I was a little taken aback when I read that Dare had signed up for Twitter. To quote Dare :

"I’m now at the point where I really, really, really want to blog but have too much going on at work and at home to take the time out to do it. To deal with this I’ve created a Twitter account.
…
In the meantime, you can get my thoughts on various topics in 140 characters or less from Twitter."

Why not just blog it, Dare? All you’ve done at this point is create another RSS feed. You don’t need to sign up for a Twitter account to write short-ish blog posts. Look at Kevin Rose‘s (link) blog, for example.

Here’s why I think people twitter :

1. So having done my share of research on teh internets, the only thing I can conclude is that Twitter is more-or-less useless. I’d love to be wrong. The one big benefit I can see however is that Twitter can serve as a one-stop-shop for different feeds that have seriously condensed content. So I can find and befriend Direct2Dell or DellOutlet, for example, from within Twitter, as opposed to somehow stumbling upon it. But this wouldn’t have been relevant if Twitter weren’t so popular. However that feature does sound useful.
2. Twitter is another channel for attention seekers. At some point of time, Scoble set out to evangelize the heck out of twitter. Do you remember this :
   
   And the awesome evangelist that Scoble is, he succeeded in making Twitter popular. So people twitter-friended Scoble. Then they started twittering so that Scoble’s twitter feed would show their tweets. Some replied to those tweets. And on it went. This could be complete hypothesis on my part, but from my limited experience of using Pownce, I’ve noticed that people have been using it as a channel to simply broadcast what they have been working on. That’s it. And sometimes people respond.
3. I couldn’t really find any articles on the internet that spoke about why people twitter. It seems to be one of those fads and people twitter because others twitter.

So, why do YOU twitter?

Now playing in my head : "Tous Les Garçons Et Les Filles", by Françoise Hardy

"ai"

PS: Stay tuned for, "why do my friends facebook message me when they know my email address and it is on my facebook profile?"