Sorting out the chaos of Twitter
My 15-year-old daughter recently asked me to explain the wonders of Twitter, the popular social networking service. Her reaction? "Sounds boring."
I felt the same about Twitter when I first logged on about a year ago. The service provides a forum to spit out tiny text messages, or "tweets," to other Twitterers, and receive incoming tweets from friends and family who've signed up to "follow" users online. Tweets can be no more than 140 characters in length - enough to remind a spouse to buy milk on the way home, or exchange sporting insults with a pal who's rooting for the Chicago Bulls.
In all, it seemed to be a modestly useful Internet tool, but hardly a life-changer. I logged off and forgot about Twitter for months. Lots of Twitter newbies do the same; according to the Nielsen Co. ratings service, 60 percent of new users fall away within a month. They perhaps run out of amusing things to tweet about, or decide they could do so just as effectively with e-mail.
And yet, now I log on to Twitter several times a week, having finally begun to figure out what it's good for. It turns out Twitter is a superb way to capture the wisdom of crowds. With help from a variety of free online Twitter tools, that wisdom can be accessed with ease.
After a long time away from Twitter, I logged on to find I had several hundred followers, mostly tech industry people. I realized I could put them to work. When searching for a technical expert or the answer to a question, I toss off a quick tweet and cross my fingers. More often than not, it produces useful replies from people who know their stuff.
Once a reason to log onto Twitter is found, the quest is on for an easier way to use it. Thank heaven for TweetDeck, an excellent little program that serves up a customized Twitter desktop. Visible at a glance are all incoming tweets, with separate columns for messages aimed directly at the user.
TweetDeck, which runs on Windows, Macintosh, or Linux computers, offers a heap of Twitter-centric tools. There's a feature that collects messages from specific users, or groups of users, and displays them in a separate window. Another feature offers the latest updates from friends on Facebook.
TweetDeck has a nice word-search feature to find Twitter messages on any conceivable topic. It's an easy way to discover people with shared interests. But for high-powered Twitter searches in real time, reopen the Web browser and go to Twitterfall.com, an amazing site that sends the latest tweets cascading down the screen in real time. Plug in a search term, like "Red Sox," and see only tweets from baseball fans. But it gets better. Twitterfall has a geolocation feature that captures the Internet ad dress of each incoming tweet and uses it to figure out the approximate location of the sender. Tell it to allow only messages that originated within 10 miles of Boston, and that's what comes in. Or request baseball tweets from New York, and enjoy the wailing and gnashing of teeth.
For those who don't want to be tied to the browser, real-time tweet searches can be forwarded to personal e-mail. Go to TweetBeep.com and log in with a Twitter username and password. TweetBeep can search out tweets by subject matter, the name of the sender, or the city they were sent from, and feed the results to anyone's inbox. It runs even when the recipient is logged off, providing constant updates on anything that matters.
There are lots of good Internet file-sharing tools, such as Drop.io, but there are a couple specially created for Twitter buffs. TweetCube.com lets users share files up to 10 megabytes in size; LinkSocial.com has a 20-megabyte limit. But they both work the same way. Log on with a Twitter password, upload a file to share, and type a tweet to go with it. Followers see a link that will download the file. It's a good way to pass around documents or photos.
None of this is likely to excite my teen, but what do kids know? Research firm ComScore recently found that Twitter is most popular among those ages 45 to 54. Clearly, this is one Internet innovation that's wasted on the young.
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com. 