Conversation, Community and Connection

This weekend I came across two interesting pieces on Twitter.

The first was an article in the Financial Times entitled Sweet to Tweet.

I found the six secrets to online success interesting:

Immediacy- Real-time flow of comments and adaptability to mobile handsets makes it more immediate than blogging.

Brevity- Limiting messages to 140 characters makes them easier to produce and easier to digest.


‘Pull’, not ‘push’-The ability of users to choose whose tweets they follow makes it less random than e-mail.

Searchability- Messages can be searched, making the content more accessible than the comments on a social network.

Mixing public and personal- A user’s personal contacts are on an equal footing with public figures.

‘Retweeting’- By copying and retransmitting messages, users can turn the network into a giant echo chamber.

I also listened to a piece on NPR called Welcome to the Twitterverse in which Andy Carvin was trying to convince Daniel Schorr to sign up for Twitter.

My key take-away was "Twitter is the new “water cooler” ... where you read the things you have to know but wouldn’t find out otherwise".

I totally agree. Why do you use twitter?