Beginner's Guide To Using Twitter

Since we started twittering our blog posts a couple of months ago, several of you have asked about Twitter, how it works and how to use it. So I decided to put together this quick guide. I would also like to thank Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos.com for his contribution to this guide.

What is Twitter?
Twitter is a service that enables you to stay in touch and keep up with friends no matter where you are.

What is Twittering?
Twittering is similar to sending SMS text messages from your cell phone. However instead of it being from one to one it is from one to many. Any message sent on Twitter is public.

What is Twitter Used For?
Twitter is commonly used for instant updates. On the WebGuild site we use Twitter to send an instant alert when a new post is made. The Los Angeles Fire Department uses Twitter to keep the community apprised of fire emergences (LAFD). Mostly it is used to notify friends and family of what you are doing at any given moment.

Examples of Tweets
Here is an example of some Tweets (messages sent via Twitter) and the messages that you send have to be short, 140 characters or less. If you messages are over 140 characters it will get cut off.

Having drinks at the Horseshoe Bar with my co-workers.

zappos 2 minutes ago

--------------------- OR ----------------------

Yahoo Takeover Imminent http://tinyurl.com/3e6806

webguild Jan 13, 2008

Anyone Can Follow You On Twitter
You send an SMS text message to Twitter with your note, and your message will be automatically broadcast (like CB radio) to whoever is choosing to follow you (your friends). If people don't care what you're doing, they won't follow you, so don't worry about sending out trivial messages. Twitter is free, however depending on plan your phone carrier might charge you for sending and receiving tweets (similar to text messages).

So here's an example where Twitter came in handy for Tony. He was at a bar and he twittered. "I'm at bar X" and the message was broadcast to his Twitter network. A couple of his friends happened to be close by, so they stopped by and they all had a drink. Pretty cool!

Here's another example: I was flying in to the Vegas airport, and I twittered "Just landed in Vegas airport." I would have never texted anyone that message, but in the Twitter culture, that's exactly what you're supposed to do. It just so happened that someone on my Twitter network was about to fly out of Vegas, so we met up at the airport bar and had a drink. I would have never known otherwise that this person was at the airport, nor would I have ever sent him a text message or called him that I had just landed.

Setting Up Twitter
1. Go to twitter.com and click on "Join"
2. Create a username, password etc. and click “Create my account”.
3. Click on "Skip" at the bottom of the next page, don't worry about signing up your friends yet.
4. Click on "Settings" at the top of the next page
5. Update your name (first name only is fine), Time Zone, and Location and click "Save". You can fill out the rest later. Do not choose "Protect my updates" for now. You can always change your mind later, but to really understand the full power of Twitter, you should go for the first 2 weeks doing what most people on Twitter do, which is have everything be public.
6. Click on the Devices tab, enter your phone number, check the box under your phone number and hit "Save".
7. You will be given a 6 letter code.
8. On your cell phone, create a new address book entry called "Twitter", and use 40404 as the phone number (for those in the United States).
9. Send a text message to Twitter on your cell phone with the 6 letter code that you saw on the web site. You should get a confirmation text message back from Twitter.
10. Your account is set up! Now you just need to follow some people and have people follow you. Let your friends know what your username on Twitter is and tell them to follow you. If you have friends already on Twitter, you can follow them. To follow someone, just send a text message to twitter in the following format: follow username

Add & Remove Twitter Followers
To follow our blog updates simply type follow webguild. So send a text message to Twitter: follow username.Then, anytime I send a message to Twitter or post a blog, then my message will show up in your cell phone.

And to start following our blog send a text message to Twitter: follow webguild

And to stop following our blog send a text message to Twitter: leave username

Tracking Keywords
One really cool feature that Twitter has is the "track" feature. Basically, it allows you to track any keyword or phrase, and anytime anyone in the world twitters something using that phrase, you will see it on your cell phone (remember, Twitter broadcasts are public). So it's a great way to overhear conversations. I use it to track what other people in the world are saying about WebGuild. To use the track feature, simply text message: track keyword

And to start tracking a keyword, text message Twitter: track webguild

And to stop tracking a keyword, text message Twitter: untrack keyword

If you need help or forget the Twitter commands, text message Twitter: help

That's it for getting started! I recommend you track something you're interested in when you first start so that you can get an idea of what the Twitter culture is like and how other people are using it. For example, if you love clowns, then text "track clowns" and also text "track clown". You can untrack them at anytime or once you get the hang of it.

Twitter & Marketing
Twitter is now being recognized as a valuable marketing tool and I will cover some in a follow-up post. If you would like to share your ideas or experience please twitter webguild (there is a way to send direct messages on Twitter) or email webguild.

It's 3am: Is Your Social Network Up?

Pingdom.com has a nice chart showing the major social networking sites and their uptime percentages for the first Quarter of 2008. The graph is here.

There has been a lot of talk about Twitter's uptime challenges and this graph does indicate that Twitter is down a lot more than the other networks, yet with a 98.72% uptime it would hardly appear that many users are experiences major problems with Twitter downtimes. It's certainly frustrating to log on expecting something and have no access, but I'd suggest this is hardly the same issue as ISP uptime which is a very reasonable requirement for a robust internet to thrive.

However for some users and businesses that have begun to rely on Twitter as an internal communications tool or for social networking architects like Dave Winer, Twitter downtime has become such a critical issue that a Twitter rebellion appears to be brewing, where the insurgents are suggesting that Twitter's infrastructure is simply not up to the standards that should be required by the community.

Ruby On Rails For Major Sites - Scalable or Not?

When the Twitter folks used Ruby On Rails as a development platform Ruby gained a lot of recognition as a major and growing player in the big time online space. However as scaling issues started to plague Twitter during its explosive growth last year, some started blaming Ruby on Rails, suggesting it was not appropriate for an application of this size that had a major need for speed and stability.

Today TechCrunch is insisting that Twitter is in the process of completely abandoning Ruby On Rails while eWeek's detailed article is insisting they are not, quoting senior Twitter Engineer Britt Selvitelle regarding Twitter moving to another platform:

"Not true in any sense. We use Ruby as our primary language. We have plenty
of back-end architecture in other languages. Especially prototypes. We still
use Rails and have no plans to discontinue this in the future"

Losing Twitter could be a major blow to Ruby on Rails sterling reputation for easy and powerful development tool from small to enterprise level online environments, but based on the story so far it looks like the rumors of Ruby's death have been greatly exaggerated.

Journalism, Politics, and Social Media Converge In An Egyptian Jail

The intersection of politics, journalism, and social media became even more striking over the past few days as student journalist James Karl Buck was arrested along with Mohammed Maree, an Egyptian friend who was helping him report on political unrest in Egypt.

In large part thanks to a Twitter post after his arrest, legions of onliners came to his virtual rescue, contacting the US Embassy and the University of California which quickly dispatched an attorney to Egypt to meet with authorities. Buck was soon on a plane out of Egypt, but his friend Maree's whereabouts still appear to be unknown after a second detention by police.

Details of this remarkable and still very active story are at Buck's blog. Maree's wherabouts are still unknown as of this writing at 10:30 am Saturday.

The Twitter Scaling Storm

Twitter quickly moved from internet obscurity to one of a handful of key online social media players. Past concerns over Twitter's infrastructure and reliability came to a head this week as key Twitter IT architect Blain Cook has left the company amid a swirl of blog commentary and criticism over his performance at the company.

As Matt Ingram notes in his reasonable take on things, it is ironic that Cook will be speaking soon at a Web 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley about how to scale up large online applications.

I'm a big fan of Twitter but unlike many of my tech friends I am not obsessed with it. I think many Twitter critics have really overreacted to the downtime and slowness because ... overreacting to modest tech defects is what tech people love to do.

My take is that people are not reasonably factoring profitability issues into the Twitter equation. Cook is getting more blame than he deserves because he probably was tasked with keeping things going less than the budget you'd have with a more profitable enterprise.

Twitter has been wildly successful in terms of traffic and adoption, but it has not been monetizing that success. Scaling up to an extremely robust infrastructure could be throwing good money after ... no money. Many bubble companies developed huge and robust architectures to handle trivial traffic and thus I am not at all convinced Twitter is wrong to set their priorities as they appear to have done - a great service with a second class infrastructure until they figure out how to turn a buck from all the Twitterers.

Life in Real Time

Ryan Kuder twittered his last day at Yahoo! as they gave him the boot. You get a play-by-play update of this day from getting the news to backing up his files to getting his phone confiscated.

What's interesting about this is how real-time every aspect of our lives can be. Every meeting, every event, every conversation could be documented in seconds with the quick movement of one's thumbs across the keyboard on their phones. A private conversation with a customer or a meeting with an analyst can be 'Twittered' at anytime and posted for the world to see. This illustrates yet another way Web 2.0 is changing the way we communicate.

For marketing professionals the only thing scarier than someone twittering something negative about one of our campaigns is no one twittering anything at all.

Google + Twitter = Super Tuesday

Super Tuesday was super cool with Google and Twitter showing real-time tweets from voters, pollsters, pundits and analysts. Wow! how the web is changing society so fast. I am sure the candidates or their deputies were watching all this excitement unfold right before their eyes. Click here to view real-time tweets. To add this widget (gadget) to your website click here>>