What is Twitter?

Now seems like a good time to pause and review what Twitter is. 

1. It’s a network of users, with one kind of relationship: following. I can follow you, and you can follow me. Or I can follow you and you don’t follow me. Or you can follow me, and I don’t follow you. Or neither of us follow each other. Pretty simple. Just arrows at either or both ends of the line, or no line at all. There are no labels on the arcs.  

2. It’s a micro-blogging system. Posts are limited to 140 characters. Enough for a bit of text and a link. This is a powerful idea, but not a new one. If you read Scripting News before February of this year, it was partially a micro-blogging system. When it started in April 1997, it was all micro-blogging. The earliest websites, from TBL, NCSA and Netscape were also micro-blogging systems.  

An aside, I gave a talk on Sunday at the WordPress users conference. One of the things we talked about was micro-blogging. I asked the people if they would like it if the only way you could create a WordPress site was on wordpress.com. They agreed that would not be good. Analogously, if micro-blogging is to become a real art, there will have to be many ways to create a micro-blog, and lots of RSS to tie them together.  

3. A relatively open identity system. I’ve said it before, Twitter or something like it, could be the holy grail of open identity. While the engineers of the tech industry have been, imho, looking at the problem the wrong way by trying to glue together the huge namespaces controlled by powerful companies who don’t want to give up control. Twitter, with it’s ultra-thin user interface, and light feature set, and simple API (more on that in a bit) and the nothing-to-lose attitude of its management, may be the breakthrough. Or it could be Facebook, with it’s much larger user base and a management that also likes to roll the dice. The key is lots of users, a growing user base, and an API with no dead-ends.  

4. An ecosystem. Twitter’s API is very simple. It covers the entire functionality, leaves nothing out. You could implement the Twitter user interface using the API. That’s a key thing. Compare it to Apple, who reserves for itself and a few partners, under terms we don’t know, the right to develop rich apps for the iPhone. Twitter takes the traditional PC industry approach, give everyone equal power, make it a level playing field and let the chips fall where they may. This means that if the people at Twitter miss an opportunity, the rest of us have a shot at providing it for ourselves and others.

So what do all these parts add up to? Users and relationships between users, their ideas, and an ecosystem. It’s probably the basis for some pretty hot apps. Will it be possible to monetize them? Without a doubt. People who say that Twitter hasn’t figured out how to make money don’t understand the role technology companies play in the much larger media and communication ecosystem. Ideas gestate here, grow up, find users, and then find customers. In a way Twitter is a mega-enterprise product, and by using it, we’re helping them prove it. Their customer is likely to be a telco or an entertainment network. But it’s way too early to cash it out, they all took the right approach, seed it with some more capital to add more bandwidth, solidify the back-end, add a bit more functionality, and wait to see what the users and developers do with it. 

Twitter is still a very interesting service, and as long as it remains as open as it is, we can all learn from and alongside them.  

Twitterfeed is Growing

Twitterfeed has grown pretty fast since its early side project days. There are now 350,000 publishers from the White House to CNN to John Cleese pumping out almost 600,000 feeds and generating around 5,500,000 clicks to your sites every day.

Faster, more reliable publishing

Dealing with such a flood of traffic on a service meant that Twitterfeed has had reliability issues; at times the system would simply get overwhelmed. Over the last few months we’ve been building a completely new architecture designed to handle the millions of posts we publish to Twitter and beyond each day.

We’re starting to roll out this new architecture today and this means that Twitterfeed should be able to publish feeds much faster than before. It will take a few days for us to move all the feeds over safely, but the result will be your posts reaching your audience when you want them to.

Pubsubhubbub real-time feed publishing

Twitterfeed now works with Pubsubhubbub. This means that sites enabled with Pubsubhubbub, like Typepad and Blogger sites, will be able to see their posts published in real time! We’ll shortly be announcing support for RSScloud too, so that wordpress sites can also be published in real time. You can find out more about pubsubhubbub here.

Publish to Facebook!

You can now automatically publish to Facebook from Twitterfeed. What’s more, you’ll see statistics for each post showing you just how many people clicked on posts from Facebook vs those from Twitter. You’ll be able to better understand just where your social media strategy is working.

Google Analytics Integration

Twitterfeed now adds special ‘UTM’ tags to each post that it publishes. Google Analytics can read these tags and integrate the information into its reporting. You’ll be able to understand how people clicking on your posts from Facebook differ from those clicking from Twitter and track the complete path of their visit to your site.

We hope you like the improvements and new features; you should log in and see how Twitterfeed can help your content spread across the social web!

Very best,

Mario, Tony and the Twitterfeed team

The TWEET Method

The TWEET Method: Think, Write, Edit, Eyeball, Tweet

Twitter forces us to apply a discipline to our writing that we should actually apply to everything we write professionally. Let’s call it The TWEET Method – Think, Write, Edit, Eyeball, Tweet.

Think.

What am I really trying to say? What is my core message? Someone just Tweeted me asking how I was today. How do I respond? Do I want to keep it light and talk about the weather? Do I want to convey my innermost feelings? Comment on my breakfast? My plans for the day? I can’t squeeze The Morning of Brad into 140 characters. Therefore, I have to do one of two things – be brief about a few ideas or go deep on one big idea.

Write.

I’ve decided to go deep on one idea. Now I write a first draft of my Tweet -

Heading out to drive into Chicago for a client meeting to discuss several content issues for a new blog for a product launch. What are you up to today?

Edit.

No surprise, I’ve written clumsily and too much. After a little editing, I boil it down to this.

Driving to Chicago – major content strategy session with client for they’re new blog. What’s new with you?

That seems to convey the gist of it, plus I added the concept of major, which I neglected to mention in my first draft. To top it off, I inserted an important keyword phrase, content strategy. And … 34 characters to spare.

Eyeball.

Being a stickler for grammar and boring stuff like that, I like to give my Tweets a once over before pulling the trigger. To my horror I notice I’ve written they’re instead of their, sure to make me look the buffoon and inspire the wrong kind of retweeting. I correct the error – another bullet dodged.

Tweet.

Now that I’ve followed my TWEET discipline I can fire off my message with confidence.

Does this system take too much time? I think not. Once a discipline becomes routine, reflexive, it saves time. When you’re reinventing the creative wheel with every Tweet … now that takes time.

Over to You

What are your Twitter composition secrets? How do you balance time and quality in your Tweets?