This will be a quick post. Everybody is talking about twitter so much that I wanted to ask if any one around here twits, and if you people think it can be useful for science, science news, strengthening the science community or anything like that.
There is an article today in the Guardian about that – useful for those who have no clue what it is all about. (and for those who use it, there are lots of nice apps in the end of the story).
I have been twittering for some months now (twitter.com/baxt) – not about science but about the life, the universe and everything.
It can be useful for news, as long as you follow the right people (not as easy as you might think). But it allowed me, for example, to know about an earthquake in Sao Paulo, Brazil, even before it was on the news.
Sounds… hideously creepy! I occasionally put something in the “what are you doing now?” field on Facebook, but I really don’t need everyone to know where I am at all times. Having said that my Mum would probably want to know…
I don’t Twitter, but sort of feel like I should, just to get a better handle on it.
Then again, I normally read about Twitter in ‘the site’s gone down again’ context. It sounds a bit unreliable.
I tried Twitter on the first day it launched, and was subject to the crash and many subsequent. I have been back again a few times since to check it out, mainly because some of the bloggers with whom I regularly interact are very keen on it. But it doesn’t do anything for me.
Attila Csordas has set up a biotech group on Twitter: I posted about it here but there seems to be zero interest. However, you can get links to the Twitter group from my post if you’d like to check it out.
If you want to see what my friend Debra Hamel (nothing to do with science) is doing with it, check out her blog. She invented Twitterlit (every day you get a first sentence of a book and have to try to guess the book), and Kidderlit (yes, a kids’ version)! You can get to those from her blog.
Cath: we had a talk at NPG by a nice young man who is able to track us all via geo devices, CCTV, sat nav etc. (Well, by “all” I mean anyone who joins his website.) Scary stuff!
We’ve played the Babelized version of that.
Cath, you don’t necessarily need to post what you’re doing. Like blogs, twits “evolved” (define “evolution”) to talk about lots of other things (like twitterlit).
(but since you mentioned mums, I don’t know if you read a previous post of mine about Jewish Mums… Why do you think I twit in English? :) My mother only speaks Portuguese, so it’s always useful to have some content online that she can’t read… – like this very blog)
Matt, I think the site is reliable now. I’ve had just a few minor problems with them (like the disapearance of the button “older” for some hours, things like that)
Maxine, thanks a lot for the links. I’m already following twiterlit, now I’ll read her blog and your blog post! (I’ve been thinking of writing fiction on twitter. There are some people doing that, but I don’t know if they had any meaningful results)
Bob, receiving a Babelized version of twitterlit on my mobile in the morning would definitely be too much for my brain :)
Hello again, I was just going through my RSS feeds for the evening, and I saw a post on Ian Hocking’s blog (another good blog I follow), in which he’s using Twitter for his novel. Here’s the link.
I came here with the link for you and saw your reply to my comment—small world.
Bob—ah yest, but Twitterlit was invented well before you played that game. Babelized Twitterlit, the mind boggles.
Another of Debra’s inventions is Sunday Salon, which is much more to my taste (essentially, a reading group linked by RSS - but you read what you like) and which I’ve been in from the start. Again, you can get to it from her blog.
Hi Barbara, there’s quite a lot of biotech/bioinf people now on twitter though a lot of that was drvien through Friendfeed. As you say it depends a lot on who you follow. I don’t actually use Twitter at all per se but it appears through my Friendfeed .
I’ve been experimenting a bit with twits to say I am doing something specific in the lab at a specific time ‘doing PCR’ ‘running gel’ as a way of fixing the time when these are done (as opposed to when they go in my lab book which is not the same thing) but haven’t got very far with it yet. I need a better interface for that where I can choose from a limited number of things.
One of the most interesting things about twitter is that it is very effective at communication by almost any protocol, so it is a great tool on which to build notification systems. One rather amusing one is here
UNSW (and I think Nature did too, a separate one) run a “Day of Science” where scientists logged what they did on one day – and I suggested to colleagues we could use Twitter for something like that – have one day of scientists twittering about their research, which you could browse as one feed. The 140 characters of Twitter suit that kinda thing. Maybe it could be mashed into a Google Maps type thing like WikipediaVision
I also wondered about using it on the day of the book prize ceremony, but am not sure we’d have a continuous enough stream of info to be useful.
Gordon Brown uses Twitter – and he (or his minions listen to you too
I use it, mainly for Facebook, but it’s not working on Facebook at the mo and everyone has been irate about it for the last few days.
Scott, using twitter for the book prize sounds good, but how could it be done? Maybe asking for the judges to twit while they assess the books, or following the authors on the day of the prize (if they twit themselves even better), or twitting during the ceremony, like a minute-to-minute journalistic coverage (I could do this one! :)
Twitting seems to work best when the audience of whatever forum do it. It enables both audience to audience communication and commentary while not necessarily disturbing the speaker. The challenge as a speaker (which I haven’t see anyone rise to effecitvely yet) is incorporating that commentary into what you are saying. See for eg
http://hashtags.org/tag/or08/
for an example at the Open Repositories 08 meeting. Obviously this gets used more by techie types :)
Very interesting discussion. So far I have stayed away from Twitter, as I’m afraid it becomes too addictive and eats up a lot of time.
Martin,
I suppose anything can become “addictive”. I’ve piddled around with Twitter for a few months. I would say that on average, I check it once, maybe twice a day.
A lot of users leave updates from dawn to dusk so I would say it can become addictive if you allow yourself to get that hooked on it.
On the productive front, I find FriendFeed really useful.
A friend did organise a dinner with friends entirely by twitter recently. Which seemed to be a good use.
Barbara: Hmmm… I don’t think I could get the judges to do that (too distracting) but the rest sounds interesting. Hmmm…
I’m with Graham on friendfeed. Twitter is like the office conversation going on around you. Friendfeed is like a conversation that actually connects to stuff. You need to prune a bit to keep that to stuff you want and Friendfeed isn’t so good at that at the moment but lots of interesting things developing.