In Twitter We Trust

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Thursday, 4 December 2008

One tool to rule them all, one tool to find them, one tool to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Apologies to JRR Tolkien. 

Twitter is doing for realtime, curated information, what Google has done for all the rest.  I played with Twitter at first and then didnt use it for a while. And then I found some funny, useful, people to follow such as @saneel, @37signals, @jeffjarvis, etc. And suddenly it was part of my online routine. 

Google Trends illustrates this nicely (I helped the dip) – it didnt catch fire initially, but…

There are more charts, showing similar trends. But perhaps the Twipping point, was Mumbai (sadly). 

I first noticed news on Mumbai as I clicked through my various news sources. And then the Huffington Post (thanks) directed me to Twitter’s Mumbai feed. Since then, the Twitter feed has been my starting point for updates.  Multiple sources chronicled Twitter’s role alongside local TV coverage, in providing up to the second updates. On a more personal note and for a good specific example, just take a look at @vineetgupta’s Mumbai related Tweets. 

Before Mumbai, I had a similar experience during the US elections earlier this year. Twitter featured a link to the election feed and the commentary, links to news, etc were more colorful than the mainstream coverage (granted we were following online, since we chucked regular TV sometime back). 

Now there are a growing number of useful applications that help you get more from Twitter (although its still not clear what Twitter’s business model is). From analytics to easier Tweeting on your iPhone. And there is no shortage of practical advice , guides and even comandments on how to use Twitter for fun and profit. 

So why is Twitter so great? Tim O’Reilly has a good list of reasons to love Twitter. He gets to the heart of what makes it useful and likely to be successful.

I think of Twitter this way - V.S.R.S.S. - Very Smart Real Simple Syndication. 

The smarts come from the fact that in a Mechanical-Turk-like fashion, everything depends on people (yes, there are some bots, but nobody is making you follow them). As folks who are in the business of news can tell you, its really hard to know whats important without an editor (Techmeme, a staple of automation, recently added an editor). Twitter is the ultimate wire-feed – all you need to do is pick your sources.

So how do you know who is worth following? Increasingly, like the barrage of social-booking buttons, I expect you will see more “follow” or “tweet this” buttons. Also, there are already some tools which do various types of parsing of the feed – if people with lots of followers, are leaders, then these are they, according to Twitter Grader. Twitterbuzz is Digg-like, pulling the most referenced URLs from the ether.

And then there is Retweeting for which I couldnt find a good tool, but some interesting insights on the subject. This might just be the piece that emerges as something akin to hyperlinking – more retweets for a tweet increases its value and similarly, more retweets for a  user will likely do something equivalent to improving their “Pagerank” if such a formal metric ever emerges for Twitter. 

It seems like Twitter may be doing for social media what Google did for search – yes – much useful goodness for fun and profit. Specifically, aside from being fun, its delivering things like leads (dare I say revenue?) according to folks like Hubspot(notice post to Twitter link on slideshare). I’m curious to see where it goes and hopeful that we can work with our clients and portfolio companies to benefit from it. 

Oh yes, lest I forget, you can follow me at http://twitter.com/shaunabrahamson.

Update: John Battelle weighs in on how Twitter changes how we search, resulting in realtime conversations. Interestingly, I just tried to understand an exchange regarding Blackberry Bold between @jowyang and others.  (I’m for the Bold). Realtime reviews? Its happening – the brand reps just need to get into the fray now.

Posted in: Social Media | Tagged: Analytics, marketing, Social Media, twitter | No Comments