Are you tweeting?
Angela Saini
Wednesday, 03 June 2009 17:50 UTC
I read recently that, unlike Facebook and MySpace, young people are not the ones using Twitter – it’s the oldies. And, according to the American Journalism Review, tweeting is vital for journalists who want to keep ahead of the competition.
Me, I can’t bear to add another thing to do to my day, which means I’ve avoided it… So what do fellow science writers think? Have you been you aided by Twitter?
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I’m with you Angela. I’m already suffering information overload and the thought of adding even more to the pile is a bit much at this point so I’ve avoided it.
I’m yet to be convinced it’s much more useful than the “status update” line on Facebook. I’d be happy for someone to change my mind though.
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I’ve been using Twitter a bit to advertise Second Life events and it seems to be working pretty well – at the last one, over half the audience had read about the event on mine or Grace’s Twitter feed. But, the topic was about digital marketing, so I guess that’s not surprising – I don’t know if anyone is coming to our more scientific events from Twitter.
I do think it’s better than FB for that kind of thing, though, because it is so easy to pass information on. I tweet and then people re-tweet, and suddenly hundreds more people see it, which doesn’t seem easy on FB. Also FB is a weird mix of personal and professional: I feel better following someone I vaguely know on Twitter than I would asking them to be my FB friend, because you never know their FB “friends” policy.
In terms of reading it, though, I just feel overwhelmed – there is so much (genuinely really interesting) information on there, but I just can’t keep up with all of it, and because it’s not “essential”, I often don’t get a chance to visit for a few days, by which time I’ve missed thousands of comments. Maybe I should filter more and just follow that.
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Hi All,
Excuse me for my ignorance bur though i have heard the term many times, but what exactly is twitter if it’s not something like, orkut/facebook/hi5 etc.
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Amit – Twitter is essentially microblogging – it’s broadcasting a short (140 characters max) message to the world.
This is what makes it different and more useful than Facebook for science communication. For example, the Planck satellite has a Twitter feed which kept people up to date with what was happening as it went through the countdown etc.
Facebook is a semi-closed system – both parties have to agree to be friends before information flows. Twitter is open – so anyone can follow you.
If you can build the right network, Twitter is a useful way to spot interesting science items etc. But to use it this way (rather than chatting to a few friends) you probably need to use a (free) app like Tweetdeck (www.tweetdeck.com) rather than relying on Twitter’s very basic web interface.
Oh, and if anyone’s interested, I’m @brianclegg
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Here’s a good example of the value of being on Twitter – I just picked up this interesting post on the rights and wrongs of conference blogging/twittering from Twitter.
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I’ve only very recently joined (@Stephen_Curry). Am still nervous about the potential for distraction but it has been very good for keeping track of breaking stories. I’ve used it to keep abreast of the Simon Singh case (follow tweets tagged with #singhbca).
Also helps in stumbling upon enjoyable ephemera, such as Carpool…
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There has been some chatter about twitter over on the ABSW-L list. It seems to divide folks into zealots and sceptics.
For example, Natasha Loder, science correspondent on The Economist, is a new convert who recently extolled the use of Twitter to follow: #Bonn #climate talks. (That’s arcane Twitter jargon for newcomers.) On the other hand, she said that she found Twitter “useless for swine flu, too many people twittering about whether the burrito they ate last night was going to kill them”.
The people who Twitter also seem to come in two flavours: those who do tell you what they eat; and those who use it to dr5aw attention to something interesting.
I follow some of each. Lord Drayson, for example, is worth following given his position, and the fact that he does not pump it out by the ream. Another nameless IT journalist seems to be determined to bore the world to death with a minute by minute account of stuff that has not much to do with his beat as a journalist.
Other articles about Twitter have suggested that it has a very low retention rate. People sign up, try it for a few days and then give up.
ABSW members might like to know that it has a very low volume Twitter feed, mostly consuming material from the association’s blogspot.
I also use it to Hoover up and broadcast feeds from places where I write for a living.
Most magazines now seem to use the service. New Scientist, for example, see,ms reasonably restrained in its stream. The New York Times is more profligate, probably understandable for a daily.
We will probably know the true impact of Twitter a year from now.
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Twitter is interesting for that opens the possibilities to open to the world, to know new approaches and projected (probably).
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I like to follow people who tweet sparingly about interesting, narrowly focused topics and link to more content for those who want. I tweet @Greengotham about green/business/New York topics. I think of Twitter as a rolling conference where you choose the speakers. You can’t attend all the breakout sessions but you can be inspired and enlightened. I don’t spend much time (less than 15 min/day) at it and feel that it’s a good value for time spent. Rather than randomly reading the feed at a given moment, sometimes I search for specific people/orgs if I’m curious to know what they’re thinking about. I follow/am followed by almost no personal friends on Twitter. In contrast, I use Facebook almost exclusively to keep up with people I actually know, such as old friends in far-flung cities.
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Jennifer Freeman sums up for me what is good practice in Twitter.
- tweet sparingly
- narrowly focused
- link to more content
My idea of sparingly is no more than three or four tweets a day. And narrowly focused means sticking to something that the reader expects you to know about. For example, political observations from an IT writer are of no interest to me.
A fellow writer who also happens to be a ‘folk singer’ has gone so far as to set up two Twitter accounts, one for each area of interest. This seams to me to be a good idea.
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