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(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
- has the service
- has the apps ecosphere, and
- 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
