Twitter for Dummies – Part 2: Twitter, the social community tool

In the previous post, I elaborated what I use Twitter for, both at work and for my personal sites.
So what is this “Twitter”-thingie then, hey? How can I explain Twitter as a social community tool rather than a blogging tool…? Well try these approaches:

How to explain Twitter? Think of Skype, but different!

You know instant messengers (IM) like Skype or MSN messenger? Then you know how with instant messengers, you can look for friends, add them to your address book and then type messages online.
At its best, you can add several friends into a conversation, type away and have some fun. All your “chats” remain private between those within that conversation.
Twitter is a similar tool, but all text messages are “broadcasted”: they are public messages with a maximum of 140 characters. I don’t have to be in a conversation with one or more people like in Skype. I broadcast. And millions of others are broadcasting just like me, resulting in a mega-stream of thousands public text messages per minute (currently about 10,000 to 15,000 per minute). Any of my “broadcasts” can be searched for, replied to, or rebroadcasted by any other Twitter user.
If people find the stuff I broadcast interesting, they tag me (or become a “follower” in Twitter-lingo). If people “follow me”, they will automatically filter my updates out of the mega stream of a zillion Twitter messages. They will do so for all their followers, effectively creating a message filter for stuff they like and people they are interested in.
In the following example, I “follow” Karim, Ann and John. Out of the millions of other broadcasts, I filter their messages, so will only see the Tweets they broadcast and no others.

Turning it around: I don’t only broadcast, I also listen (not enough, my wife would say, but that is another issue.. ). I look for friends, or broader, people who are interested in the same stuff I am, and “follow” them.
This interaction between ‘broadcasting’ and ‘listening’, results in each Twitter user building a social community of “followers”… People follow me, find my updates interesting, and stay tuned. Friends of friends (or “followers” of those who “follow me”) see interactions with me, check my broadcasts, and become my followers… Gradually, the group grows. The larger the group, the more effective Twitter becomes as a social community for me.
And Twitter communities grow organically. Using the same example, but showing a broader view of the communities around me:

Karim, Ann, John and me follow each other, this is my social community, as it is centered around “who follows me”. Likewise, Ann, Andy and me are the social community centered around Karim.
Twitter has made it easy to find out “who follows who”, and following new people is done “by a click”, so social communities grow very quickly and organically. Just like “friends of my friends” might become “my friends” in real life:
In the above example, do you see the chain of John-Roman-Suzy-Roanna-Mary? Roman follows both John and Suzy, but Suzy and John don’t follow each other.
Suzy will see Roman interact with John via Twitter, and as they have a common “friend” with John, I bet you Suzy will start following John, as there is a good chance they have common interests.

How do I explain Twitter to someone? Think of TV.

As you flip that dial on your satellite TV, you can find hundreds of stations. If you are interested in music, and news, you will put those stations you like in your pre-select channels: CNN, Al-Jazeera and MTV.
Twitter is the same. You scan for those users you like, and you put them in your pre-select channels by “following” them.
Except that you will watch to all your pre-selected channels at the same time, like some of those mosaic features some TVs have… “Listening on Twitter” is like watching that mosaic picture

How do I explain Twitter to someone? Think of CB radio.

Remember in the 70-ies, many of us had this little black box with a microphone, and a hidden antenna on the roof. Well at least I did! I would be one of those getting up in the morning, and shout out “Breaker, breaker, this is Rubberduck, gooooood morning to everyone!”…
In the beginning, nobody would ever come back to me, but as I started to interact with other CB-ers, we started to tune into each other’s channels, and I started to get replies to my “good morning” shouts. Later on, we picked one channel where we could always find each other, and interacted day and night…
A social community was built. How it was used, was up to the participants… Some of us, only used it to keep us company in lonely hours. Some used CB to have fun and joke around. Others used it to get traffic information, finding out where the “bears” were with their speed cameras. Other teens used it to work on projects for school, and there were people who organised fundraising parties for charity…
Twitter is the same. With one additional feature: I can record what others were talking about, and re-broadcast it on my CB channel.

Visualizing your social community

TwitNest, a cool Twitter network visualisation tool, shows exactly what I mean with ‘social networks’.
Here is a part of my Twitter network, centered around my @TheRoadTo, my personal Twitter username, showing a small icon for each of the people I follow, and a line connecting who is following who:

As you can see, this network, is centered around me:

Twitter user “@fighthunger” is part of my community. Here are the people within my community they follow, the followers we have in common:

And here are the users “@ithorpe”, one of my followers,… euh… follows..

Play with Twitnest, it is interesting as it also “groups” people, based on ‘who is following who’…
Sociologists would have a real go at trying to figure out how people are grouped, how social communities are formed and grow organically.
In my community for instance, I can clearly see different groups popping up, dependent on the common interest my followers have. Some of them are ‘aidworkers’. Other groups I recognize, are ‘IT people’, ‘those interested in social media’, ‘news stations’ and ‘nonprofit organisations’…

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