(About this interwebs tubes thingie: Part Two)

Twitter has been having a lot of problems lately. In the past few weeks months, the Twitter servers have been buckling. The Fail Whale has become something of a pop icon. (Buy the t-shirt!) Ironically, Twitter's problems may have actually helped Twitter.

After all, what have people been Twittering about? Twitter. Twitter's up. Twitter's down. Twitter was down but now it's up. Twitter is partly up but some features are down. Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter Twitter....

As Mary Hodder Tweeted this morning:

i really wish one twitter client would get the whole thing right. then we could concentrate on making tweets.

Screenshot: Scoble

How may other web services could possibly seem to get more popular by having so may problems? Twitter stands out because there really is no other web service that

1. has the service
2. has the apps ecosphere, and
3. has the community.

That last one is a biggie. Plurk, FriendFeed, Pownce, Tumblr, and others have their angle on the microblogging thing, some with features or interfaces that can add a lot to the experience, but they don't have the flock that flies to Twitter every hour of every day. In fact, one could argue that for most of these other web services, their existences are, to a large extent, propped up by their ability (thanks to the Twitter API; see below) to aggregate users' Tweets.

Twitter wins for losing. Or something like that.

It's about the Twittering, not the Tweets

In the past few months, Twitter has snuck into my life like a prairie horned lark. Twitterstats tells me I've found my call only recently [stats available until 20 July 2007].

I actually joined Twitter early in 2007, but got overwhelmed early. First I joined and started lurking on the main feed homepage and finding people who were tweeting interesting things. But as I added people, I had trouble keeping up, and so I started not following people who Tweeted "too much." But that's not what Twitter is about. You see, my mistake was trying to keep up with each and every tweet.

You can't keep up. Or you don't have to, anyway. You can miss a Tweet. If it's that important, the person will have blogged it and you can find it there. Tweets are more incidental, more passing, more spur of the moment. And if the Tweet is hot, people will retweet the news.

Twitter moves quickly. For may people, it's a way to follow personal friends. Not me. I'm following over 100 Tweetpeeps, and to be honest, I have not met the vast majority, and am hardly acquainted with the non-Twitter online lives of many others. But it's not about the Twitterer, it's about the Twittering. The Tweetchorus. And, of course, the Tweeting of one's own thoughts. The Tweets themselves are almost disposable.

Meanwhile, my Tweetreach is not that great. I'm not about to make an appearance on Twitterposter (see below), that's for sure.

A meta-community driven by the API

One telling tidbit about Twitter's success is that it's not about Twitter.com. Thanks to the accessible Twitter API – which, for those non-technical readers, means documented ways to get, post and update the Twitter data from outside the system – Twittering has migrated across the internet landscape, with tweets heard, indexed, graphed, aggregated, categorized and commented on far away from the home tree.

Tweeter apps

Once you have your Twitter account, the first thing to do is finding and setting up easy ways to tweet. Each of us is different, so we all won't settle on the same solutions.

• Twitter "core" offers the ability to tweet via SMS. However, since most phone plans charge 5-15 cents per txt – incoming and outgoing – that puts a hefty tax on your participation in the Twitter meta-flock.
• On the iPhone, there are two apps available in the newly launched app store that facilitate all you can tweet to your heart's desire, with nary a tweet tax. And these apps are free:
• Twittelator is a nifty little app that gives you pretty much all the Twitter functionality you may need, including search via Summize (see below). One stand-out feature, which you may love or hate, depending upon your dexterity, is the emergency tweet button. If you find yourself being arrested in Egypt, for example, that button could be a beautiful thing.
• Twitterific is an app that comes in both an iPhone and cross-platform desktop version. There is a free version that has occasional ad-tweets, which are not intrusive but to pop up hourly or more right there in your stream. There's a paid version for both desktop and iPhone, but you will have to pay for both separately.
• Twitkit is a Firefox plugin for Twittering right from your browser.
• Twiddict is there for one of the frequent occasions when Twitter is down.

Searching Tweets

• Summize is probably the most elegantly presented Twitter search site. See what BlogHers are Tweeting.
• TwitterSearch is another search website, and it has a pretty hummingbird design by Marlo leading the way. Related is Twist, which tracks trends in keyword mentions.
• Tweet Scan is another search site that has a tag cloud showing what's popular. Like Summize, Tweet Scan has an API that's used by other apps wanting to pull Twitter search capability into their feature set.

Other Tweetables

• Twubble searches who the people you're following are following, and through some sort of algorithm makes recommendations for people you might want to follow, too.
• TweetWheel graphically shows connections between the people you're following. Those of you who remember Spirograph (see the commercial) may appreciate this one! [Watch the commercial!]
• Twitter Friends Network Browser lets you click through on connections and follow them and on and on. Careful: Your screen can get packed very quickly!
• Twitarcs does some pretty graphing of your last 100 tweets.
• Twittervision will show you a dynamic plotting of Tweets on a world map. TwitterSpy is similar.
• Twellow is a Twitter Yellow Pages, where Twitter profiles are scanned and indexed into a directory. You can claim your own profile if you want to update your info.
• And if you're into lists, there's Twitter Poster, which shows Twitterers by popularity. Oh, joy!
• Twitscoop has a living, breathing tag cloud of hot words in current Tweets.
• Twitter Friends Stream presents friends floating upwards or downwards. Try clicking on a name to see her or his latest Tweet.
• And to top it all off, there's TwitterFone. Yes, that's right. You talk, it tweets for you!

Lots more Twitter apps linked here.

Whether for the desktop, handheld or web service, if you're technically minded, you can build your own app.

All Twuttered out?

Twittering can be exhausting, distracting, annoying, addicting. It's not for everyone, at least not all the time. Check out Super Jive's confession here on BlogHer some weeks ago:

With blogging, I could sift through my archives like a diary and see where I was and what I was doing with meaningful context and reflection. Much like a diary, I could see patterns of my successes and failures. I could cringe at awkward phrasing, and laugh at something that I had forgotten I'd written three years before. Since I post pictures, I could also see cute haircuts and fashion disasters, or be horrified that I had posted myself eating bacon cake. What the Hell was I thinking?

I started losing some of these snapshots of my life because the energy needed to create them was being funneled into the Twittersuck. I was blogging much less, and I missed it. I think I realized I was getting to the breaking point with it sometime in February at about two in the morning. I am often sleepless here in Seattle in January and February because of the low levels of light (something, interestingly, I discovered about myself through blogging for several years about cleaning or writing papers at three a.m. in the winter months.) I was having a tweetversaion with this guy in New York who I only knew through Twitter. We were batting one-liners back and forth because he was up very early, I was up very late, and no one else was around. What was the point of all this? Around the same time, I had read about Ariel Meadow Stallings' challenge to spend 52 nights "unplugged," which made me think about doing some unplugging of my own.

I told myself that if I pulled the plug I would lose these new connections I had made to people who were previously unknown, or who I didn't know as well. This was real. I was in the thick of the shiny new world! But I asked myself, what could I say in 140 words that was so REAL? "I ate a peanut butter sandwich." Really? Who cares? I didn't even care. Is this a special memory I would reflect on in a year's time, if I went back through the archives? Would I even go through my archives? I wasn't sure.

For a little perspective, I leave you with two hilarious videos....

Twitter Whore, Part 1:

Part 2:

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BlogHer Tech & Web Contributing Editor Laura Scott's Twitter handle is lauras. She blogs at rare pattern and pingVision.