In and of itself, Twitter does nothing. Twitter is simply a platform, or framework, that allows communication to occur. That communication is based partially on you alone, but also on the interactions between you and your “followers” as well as the people you follow and their followers. During the part of the day that I’m not a PhD student, I’m the technical director of an interactive media company; one of our services is consulting with businesses on their social networking strategies, including the use of Twitter. We use the following example when explaining Twitter to clients who are, let’s say, “skeptical” about the whole thing: Twitter is not about standing on a mountain shouting “I just had coffee!” into the valley and hoping someone hears. Instead, Twitter is about standing on that mountain and hollering to the person standing on the next mountain, and hoping that they’ll relay the message over to the next person on the mountain or maybe in the valley, and so on and so forth until your message is heard throughout the land.
Sometimes people stand at the bottom of the mountain and shout up at you. Sometimes you’re that person at the bottom, shouting up to someone else. Your position in the communications relationship may change, but you’re still communicating. When using Twitter, everything you say affects your followers, because you’re adding to their incoming information stream, and everything said by the people you follow affects your incoming information stream. Twitter itself has nothing to do with that communication except to enable it; Twitter’s effectiveness or ineffectiveness has little to do with itself and everything to do with your control over your incoming and outgoing information stream and the community of friends and followers that you cultivate.
How exactly you control that stream—which can be overwhelming—is the topic of this post. Namely, this post introduces you to the use of third-party client applications to interface with Twitter and what to look for in those clients. That’s right—there are more ways to access Twitter than just through the Twitter web site.
You might not know there are better tools, or better options for managing the information stream. There are. Third-party clients tend to feature all of the functions you get from the Twitter web site, but with these added advantages (among others):
- See more tweets at once. At the Twitter web site, you get to see 20 tweets before you have to manually press the “more” button to see 20 more. With a desktop or mobile application that number increases—your stream could be one, two, three hundred tweets or more right in front of you, available with simple scrolling and no lag time.
- Visual difference between mentions (@ replies), direct messages, and regular tweets. Depending on the client, you could see your mentions, DMs, and regular tweets in the same column or window pane but with a different visual indicator such as a different background color or outline. This information might be available in different columns or panes but accessible with one click, or you could have both options. For instance, with twhirl, I can flip to the mentions pane, or DM pane, but I can also see those messages in my information stream but with different background colors.
- Sharing images or videos without accessing a separate site. Many Twitter clients have direct integration with photo/video hosting, URL shorteners, and other features that allow you to perform different tasks directly from within the client.
- Manage multiple accounts. Many third-party clients will allow you to login to several different accounts at once, making the task of checking multiple accounts quite simple (image you have a personal account, a professional account, an account for each class, and so on)—typically one click will open a new window or a new pane. Compare that to logging out of the Twitter web site and logging back in for as many times as you want to check your accounts per day.
- Groups. Many third-party clients allow you to create groups as well as saved searches, so you can quickly and easily filter your information stream. These groups and searches are typically available within one click, integrated into the current view.
The first step in managing your information stream is knowing that there are ways to manage it. Overall, the top Twitter client is still the web, with somewhere around 65% of all tweets coming through the web interface. Once I started following more than a handful of people, and once more than a handful of people started following me (my following/follower numbers are currently 365 and 318, respectively), the web interface simply did not work for me as I find it too limiting and with too many latency issues. Your mileage may vary, but I urge you to think about the features of third-party apps that appeal to you, and then find an app that has those features. Check out Mashable’s recent post, “19 Twitter Desktop Apps Compared”, and consider the following as well:
- Of the 1570 tweets I archived that used the #dh09 hashtag (conversations around the Digital Humanities 2009 conference), the top Twitter client was TweetDeck (39.8%), followed by twhirl (23.5%), the web (22.98%), Tweetie (3.69%), and Nambu (3.11%).
- Of the 3308 tweets I archived that used the #thatcamp hashtag (conversations around THATCamp 09), the top Twitter client was TweetDeck (38.7%), followed by the web (17.04%), Tweetie (13.2%), twhirl (9.8%), and TwitterFox (5.17%).
Take some time to figure out how and why you use Twitter, how you would like to use Twitter, and what you could achieve with Twitter if you interface with it in the most comfortable manner possible. There is a client out there for you. Finding the right client to suit your needs, and then spending some time cultivating your community and streamlining even further will help you to see the power and usefulness of Twitter (if that’s a question for you).
A recent study has provided some interesting statistics regarding Twitter use, all of which point to Twitter being used as “a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.” In my Twitterverse, that’s not the case; my Twitter use has been a transformative peer-to-peer communication experience. I attribute that directly to using third-party applications to maintain a happy and healthy stream of information.
Questions about Twitter applications, features, possibilities? Please use the comments area to continue the conversation, or follow me (@jcmeloni) or @ProfHacker on Twitter.
Comments
1. Nels - August 21, 2009 at 11:22 am
I've been trying out some of these things for the past few weeks, but what I found is that I don't want to manage all of the information I'm getting, I want to decrease it. I tried the groups thing and some of the other things here, but what I have found is that it doesn't matter how I divide, group, or organize information. That just moves it all around. The amount of information is the same. For people who love that amount of information, these tips and clients are great. But I've spent the last month realizing that I just receiving that much information may not be the best move for me to make. (Since writing this comment, TweetDeck has noted over twenty new tweets from people.)
2. Joanna - August 21, 2009 at 11:51 am
I have two separate Twitter accounts: one for professional/public/informative types of things, another for intense and voluminous conversations with fellow obsessive fans of a particular pop culture phenomenon. I don't want to bore or spam the first group with the lively chat of the second. There is almost no overlap between the two groups. The way Twitter works depends on the motivations of the Tweeters.
3. Julie Meloni - August 21, 2009 at 12:08 pm
The downside of having a lot of people you want to follow is, of course, that you're following a lot of people...and their information. This is actually where tight-knit online communities cause a problem for some (like yourself) in the Twitterverse because the ambient conversations that take place between common followers are going to show up in your timeline. For instance, you and I have something like an 18% overlap in the people we're following. Any @ replies to them (and theirs to me) are going to show up in your timeline, and that's extra information that can be difficult to manage. Or not -- just unfollow! Or, Twittersnooze people for a while.
I wouldn't be surprised to see some more nuanced handling of tweets and replies at the individual user level, in some client, sometime soon. The infrastructure makes it possible. But that doesn't help you now. You have to manage who you follow, and how, the old-fashioned way. I don't know that people attach the same emotional response to unfollowing as they seem to do to unfriending.
4. Nels - August 21, 2009 at 12:31 pm
Oh, I've been unfollowing people left and right, which has not made some of them happy because I get notes later asking why I didn't respond to a certain tweet that didn't mention me but was about something I usually respond to. I tried TwitterSnooze a few weeks ago but found that I should either follow people or not. It's like hiding people on Facebook. I forget who is hidden and who is not and just get more confused, which means more time spend on it.
Hmmm, maybe I'm becoming a Luddite. I've even been writing in my paper journal a lot more than my blog this summer, too.
5. Julie Meloni - August 21, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Hm. Yeah, managing actual people is something for which technology isn't terribly helpful. With Facebook, I just have three groups: "oklist", "students," and "all". I have my main page set to "oklist" which is a subset of about 60 or so people out of the 157 who are technically my "friends". No one in "students" is also in "oklist" so I never see their stuff unless I actually switch to that group view. I don't do the hide/unhide because I also forget who I have or have not hidden.
6. Julie Meloni - August 21, 2009 at 01:15 pm
It really does. The Twitter abandonment rate is pretty high, but a really high percentage of those who abandon Twitter never actually tweet or try to establish a community. That's not really "abandoning" it as much as it is "not really starting." For sure Twitter is not for everybody, and that's fine. I'm not particularly enamored with other forms of social networking, and that's fine too. But when you really get Twitter working for you, boy howdy is it a cool thing. I know I'm preaching to the choir on this one, but still.
7. Drew - August 21, 2009 at 05:57 pm
This is the best blog post about Twitter I have ever seen. I especially like the imagery of shouting up/from a mountain top.
Drew
8. Drew - August 21, 2009 at 06:38 pm
For an un-networked person, or for someone establishing a network Twitter is the hardest to feel a part of a community. Social Media like Facebook is very much the instant gratification that many desire out of their online networking.
In a nutshell: I suspect many abandon Twitter because it requires more work to create a cohesive community.
9. Julie Meloni - August 21, 2009 at 09:35 pm
Thanks Drew!
10. Brian Croxall - August 22, 2009 at 11:36 pm
This seems like a very cogent analysis, Drew. It took me months to get a Twitter community assembled that was providing me with the information that I wanted. And it took longer still to get most of them to follow me. But, as Julie says, "boy howdy," has it changed everything for me.
Facebook, on the other hand, I can totally live without.
11. Amy Cavender, CSC - August 23, 2009 at 12:16 pm
It took me a long time to develop a helpful Twitter community, too. I started by following @academicdave, and noted whom he followed and who followed him back. I found lots of interesting people that way, and it snowballed from there. A lot of these Twitter contacts have been very helpful.
Facebook, for me, serves a totally different purpose. It's been great for keeping in touch with (or getting back in contact with) old friends and classmates. I use it almost exclusively for personal purposes.
Twitter, on the other hand, I use for more academic/professional reasons.
12. Drew - August 23, 2009 at 02:42 pm
Until recently Twitter has basically been drudgery, Profhacker has exponentially improved the community that I follow on Twitter. I find Twitter and Facebook to be equally valuable, but I use them in different ways. I aim to keep Twitter professional with limited interference, and most of my facebook communication is phatic.
13. Otis - August 23, 2009 at 04:38 pm
Facebook for me is an alumni tool. Twitter is mostly for professional information community use with some fun. Do you feel the need to use these tools for alumni development and contact as I do? Any requirements from your institution on this task...yet?
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