Commoncraft.com made a great little video that explains in plain English what Twitter is. This video explains some of the basics of Twitter better than lots of text.

Enjoy!

Now that you’re on Twitter and start to follow interesting people to connect with, all of a sudden a limit pops up. The last several days I’ve met quite some that ran into a 2000 follow limit. What’s going on here?

Official response from twitter on Twitter Blog: Follow Spam

What is “Follow Spam?”

Follow spam is the act of following mass numbers of people, not because you’re actually interested in their tweets, but simply to gain attention, get views of your profile (and possibly clicks on URLs therein), or (ideally) to get followed back. Many people who are seeking to get attention in this way have even created programs to do the following on their behalf, which enable them to follow thousands of people at the blink of any eye.

As you can imagine, this is a problem. In extreme cases, these automated accounts have followed so many people they’ve threatened the performance of the entire system. In less-extreme cases, they simply annoy thousands of legitimate users who get an email about this new follower only to find out their interest may not be entirely…sincere. On rare occasions we may see a person who is mass following and actually cares about every tweet—there is an opportunity for us to learn more about this use case and work to provide a better experience.

Actually, I really agree with this. It makes sense. There must be a ratio close to 1:1 to make communications work. It is supposed to be a mutual thing. It doesn’t make sense to follow thousands of people and nobody is following you back. It is annoying however that you cannot follow back new followers.

These are a couple of things you can do when you are stopped by the 2000 limit:

1. Go through your list of follows and clean it up. Do you really want to follow all 2000 of them?
2. Engage in good conversation with your followers. Help them and they may retweet some of the things you help them with. This could lead to new people starting to follow you.
3. Stop worrying about this limit and keep using twitter what it’s meant for: good conversation with other people.

Some sources mention a difference of 180 between follows and followers but I could not verify the source of that information. So let’s open the discussion: anyone found out what the rules really are on twitter’s soundbarrier at 2000?

Did you break the soundbarrier? If yes, what did you do (if anything)?

Feel free to post your comments and let’s find out.

Hopefully after reading this post some of my facebookfriends (or others that landed here through web’s mysterious ways) you will attempt to setup a twitter account just to try it out.

In the beginning, everything is just like facebook. Nothing new. Same problems: WTF do I have to do here? This is a critical moment. Just start to follow some people, do a ’search’ (in the bottom menu of the web application) on a keyword that has your interest (french horn or so :-) and you’ll see tweets in a timeline from people that used that keyword, newest on top. Follow a couple and learn from what they do. Look who they follow, explore… this is a whole new world, yours to discover! (Geez, sounds like I have shares in this stuff…)

You’ll discover people that share so much good things and wisdom. Quite amazing. Just as an example: @PhilBaumann said (about an hour ago as I write this) Twitter is to brains what Google is to servers. If you want portals into those brains, get on Twitter. The future has arrived. Ready to fly?

This is a great comparison. If you use Twitter wisely and explore to find amazing people, you can learn TONS from them. Besides, if you don’t like what someone tweets you can always decide to unfollow them. It’s your party!

Now that you started to follow a group of people, feel free to share your thoughts. That’s what it’s all about in the first place. You may have something to say that is of interest to others. Who knows… Only one way to find out…

As more and more tweets per minute start to come in, it is a good idea to use a ‘twitter organizer’ like for instance TweetDeck. This keeps your tweets more organized and keeps them coming in near real time. If you want to know what keywords are being used NOW (what’s buzzing now) take a look at TwitScoop, this site indexes the most frequent used keywords and changes the fontsize accordingly. You see straight away what’s going on in the world. Take a look at this and you’ll see what was happening that very moment. You get the picture.

So now it’s up to you. Some will catch on to this and may even become addicted (I’m proud I am :-)

If not: your loss… If you have more questions: shoot!

Cheers, Hans.

This post is especially for my Facebook friends, that still “don’t get it” when it comes to Twitter… This is to explain Twitter to Facebookers.

Ever since my facebook status started to get updated from twitter, I started suspecting that it is probably not a good thing to have these two applications talk to eachother.

There is a distinct difference between the two communities and mixing them up seems to cause confusion.

The biggest difference is in the way people connect. Facebook, to me, is a connection of people I already know, it is usually a more ‘local’ network. Closer to home if you like. Twitter, on the other hand, uses a slightly different model for people to connect. Friends in Facebook are Followers in Twitter. Most Twitter users have their profile open to the world, anyone interested can start following them. No ‘Friend-request’ needed in that case. Because of this people you don’t know yet can start to follow you, if you connect to them and interact with them you may develop whole new friendships. It is a great way to meet like-minded people, or learn from people you follow just because they have interesting things to say.

Twitter uses short messages of 140 characters max, the idea behind this is to be compatible with text messaging service on mobile phones. You can update your twitterstatus from virtually everywhere where there’s a connection (cellphone or web) making it a fast medium. Usually breaking news travels the globe faster on Twitter than anything else.

Twitter users have a username, preceded by the @ sign. In my case @hlooman. If you want to say something to the ‘twitter aether’ (timeline) in general, just type the message and send it. If someone wants to tweet (send a message) specifically to another user, they start the message with @theotherusername. The message is sent to the public timeline, but will be picked up by the other user, provided they follow you. If not, you can only hope they find it by doing a search on their username. A private message can be sent starting your message with the capital D (of Direct Message) E.G.  D username This is for your eyes only

Another interesting phenomenon you won’t find in Facebook, but is common in Twitter is the ‘Retweet’. Compare this to what people do if they receive a great email, that you want to share with everyone. The email gets copied to everyone in your addressbook that you think may enjoy the message. In Twitter you retweet the message, and give credit to the original sender by inserting them in the beginning of the copied message: RT @username I want to share this to all my followers!

That is one of the great features of Twitter, imagine what happens if you send a brilliant tweet to your say 100 followers. If some of them retweet it to their followers this spreads like wildfire. You never know, but could create a viral message that gets seen by millions of twitter users…

Twitter is a great example of ‘permission based’ messaging. If someone you follow sends messages that are spammy or that you don’t like, you simply choose to unfollow them to solve that problem. You can fix your own spamproblems, isn’t that great? If only email was that way…

To share a website with your followers, you insert the link to that website and it will automagically create a short url (short link) to that site. This saves on characters, remember a tweet can only be 140 characters. If the long url doesn’t fit you have to manually shorten the url first (this is a bit of a quirk of the twitter web application) by using a short url service, for instance http://2ip.ca This is where all these cryptical links come from, my friends!

So now that you understand a bit more about Twitter, I invite you to try it out for yourselves and find a whole new world open to explore! http://twitter.com

If you have any questions, send me a message @hlooman