Laura Fitton is a Twitter master, and she gave me a whole new perspective on this service, which I had initially dismissed as silly when I saw it last March.
Laura (twitter.com/pistachio) is an independent consultant whose two very young children create some lifestyle choices. Basically, she has to work mostly from home. Twitter has been her business network and support group. Without really trying, she has collected an entourage of nearly 900 followers, and that has led to business, speaking invitations and personal relationships.
Laura Twitters constantly, describing professional and life experiences in 140-character bursts. She supplements her text posts with videos from Seesmic.com, an instant video messaging service that’s still in test phase. It’s a type of journaling called moblogging (mobile blogging) and it has an appeal all its own.
For active mobloggers (Twitter is the preferred medium) blogs are a collection of short bursts that spark mini-conversations. The structured thesis of the type that you’re reading now doesn’t fit this model. Blog entries are a sequence of miniature thoughts and observations, each expressed in the charmingly succinct language of a space-limited medium. People cover hour-long conference keynote speeches as a sequence of Twitter messages. There’s even an emerging style of Twitter language that prompts the greatest possible response. I can’t say I understand it, but it’s a great topic for a follow-up article.
Back to Laura. The other day, she was pondering what to make for breakfast. She Twittered “pancakes or waffles?” to her followers and within two minutes had 10 responses. Today she recorded me talking about my proposal for how Starbucks should be the next great media power (e-mail me for more on this). She posted the video using Seesmic and, within 20 minutes, had a half-dozen comments. Conventional bloggers should be so lucky.
I spent the lunch hour today at a table full of Twitter enthusiasts. It struck me that they are exhilarated by the idea of making connections. To them, Twitter is a lifeline to people they’d never otherwise meet or stay in contact with, and that serendipity is one of the service’s principal attractions.
The chance to find out information provided by those connections is another appeal. One Twitterer proposed that the service is actually a corollary to daily newspapers. In the same sense that newspapers provide guided discovery to information identified by editors, moblogs offer discovery of information identified by trusted sources of any kind. The two approaches fulfill a similar need. They just do it in different ways.
That is a pretty good roundup of both Twitter and Seesmic. I’m a little worried though, because I don’t know exactly what you mean by a way to twitter to fit more in 140 character, so I’m afraid I’m too deep in the rabbit hole.
Nice post though, and I caught your video on Starbucks and newspapers. I think it has merit.
I phrased it badly. I mean that you have to write differently when you’re constrained like that, and that creates its own language. Experienced Twitterers are good at writing their questions to get the most or best responses. It takes skill and experience to do that within the 140-character limit.
Ahh, ok, then yeah, that makes sense. It does take creativity to get the question or comment out.
Lesson number one. You ‘really’ only need one space after a period 🙂
Great post Paul– having been at what I called the rowdy “Kiddy Table” for the lunch discussion and beyond, it was certainly exhilarating to be part of a continued new media experiment, which in the case of Twitter, has been reaping benefits for many of us.
If reader want to sample the daily streams of the people at that table in particular– heavy Twitter users all– please visit:
Laura Fitton
Sarah Wurrey
Scott Monty
Chip Griffin
and, if you don’t mind, me.
Click on the “with Friends” tab to get a taste of what we see when we dip in.
Hi Paul, it was good to talk to you about newspapers and Twitter at the SNCR event. To me at least, the twittering among some of my friends at the event seemed a little too much like passing notes behind the teacher’s back in grade school: heavy on the distraction, light on the substance. Your thoughtful blog post is good evidence that it is indeed possible to share insights after-the-fact. I’m going to sound like a grumpy old man now, but the simple state of being “present” seems to be in danger of extinction. People always seem to be somewhere else (cellphone, laptop, iPod, etc.), and I must admit, it gets under my skin sometimes.