Mini-bloging giant Twitter is continuing to gain momentum in the social media realm.  Are you tweeting, retweeting, following, being followed, on someone’s list, contributing with a hashtag,  direct messaging, shorting URL’s, or attending tweetups?  If You just skipped over that last sentence because you were lost with the Twitter terminology, you are not necessarily alone.  Twitter has made some sense of all the lingo with a simple Twitter101 tutorial and you can find it here: http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/learning.

So now that you know what Twitter is, ask yourself how can you use it to fit in your portfolio of social media tools.  Here is a short video from the Common Craft Show (@commoncraft) that might spark some ideas about how you can use Twitter.

Twitter for the Masses

I attended the 2009 O’reilly Web2.0 Expo conference in NYC and Twitter was used and accepted as a major form of communication among conference attendees.  On of the ways they used Twitter was with a Twitter wall.  Basically how this worked was when someone tweeted with the hashtag #w2e it would show up in a search and displayed on the screen in front of a couple 1000 people.  Also with the use of the hashtag #w2e people would share quotes from the sessions they were attending, plans they were making with others, and a number of other uses…all within 140 characters or less.  If you would like to see the #w2e hashtag in a twitter search, you can find it here: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23w2e.  Remember to leave a little room in your tweet for folks to share (re-tweet) your tweet with others.

Make it Easier – With Tools

Sometimes http://twitter.com can become over loaded and not let you log in to tweet your “super important tweet”…What to do?  Use a 3rd-Party tool.  On the desktop, my fav. is Tweetdeck.  Tweetdeck also has an iPhone app for when you are on the go!  So why use Tweetdeck?  You can tweet, retweet, follow, direct message, shorten urls, and the best part, the search feature.  You can set up several columns to search hashtags, or terms and see the results in almost real-time.  One last thing, you can also connect with your Facebook, Google Buzz, Myspace, Linkedin, and Foursquare accounts.

RSS to Twitter

Want to feed your Twitter account with your RSS feed?  I recommend Twitterfeed to accomplish this very thing.  Without getting in to the inner workings of Twitterfeed, you can push your RSS feed items to several services including  Twitter, Facebook, and a few others.

Your 140 Characters

I hope this post has given you some understanding as to what Twitter is and sparked some ideas about how you can use it in your personal and business life.  So sign up for a Twitter account and get started!  What will your 140 characters be?  Let me know how you are using Twitter or if you have any questions.

Follow Me!

You can find me on Twitter here: @leeyount

Sarah Milstein (TechWeb), Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Media, Inc.) on stage.

How to Tummel: Conversational Mechanics Heather Gold @Heathr (the Heather Gold Show) on stage.

• 1 to many can be intimidating…no participation
• Twitter lets you see many points and interests in the world at the same time.
• Don’t build on conflict…it will have some energy for a while, but then lose steam after a while.
• Difference is good; it is how people get interested and excited.
• Don’t stand back and be quite, engage…but it does not always have to be a conflict.
• Everyone is different but you do not need to please everyone and cater to everyone.
• http://www.unpresenting.com

A Conversation with Beth Noveck Tim O’Reilly @timoreilly (O’Reilly Media, Inc.), Beth Noveck (Executive Office of the President/OSTP) @whitehouse @opengov on stage.

• Talking about Government
• “President Obama is 100% committed to bringing innovation to government”
• President Obama signed memorandum for government transparency as first thing on first day in office.
• “How do we do our work in more open ways?”
• Ask people what the policy should be BEFORE implementing a program.
• Involve people that are the line workers, the people that are involved in using the ideas.
• The White House is closing the revolving door to lobbyist. Lobbyists are not serving on federal advisory committees.
• Noveck worked with Expert Labs (@expertlabs) before White House.
• We need expertise from the people that know. Social media is a good tool to connect with people rather than with committees and think tanks.
• Create do-tanks rather than think-tanks.
• There is an ecosystem of transparency that includes Federal, State, and Local Government.
• Need “machine readable data” from government in open formats that is accessible to developers to build apps on top of.
• “Technological Federalism”
• Innovation Gallery from the White House – showcasing innovation from the white house stage
• We don’t need thirty different platforms for collaboration, we need one.
• http://www.apps.gov – free software applications
• http://www.apps.dc.gov
• “Make a better applications that will make citizen lives better.” -Noveck
• http://public.resource.org
• Creating a culture where transparency is the norm
• http://www.manorlabs.org/ – polling citizens how to make their town better…awards points to citizens for certain things. Mannor TX.
   

Foursquare and dodgeball creator Dennis Crowley

• Foursquare uses badges to award people for certain activity.
• People are awarded points for doing more things…things that they haven’t done before.
• There is also a place to submit reviews of places and things.
• Helps you find places that you visited when you are there next time.
• Makes people feel motivated to go out and try new things.
• “Changing habits one user at a time.”
• Foursquare API: http://api.foursquare.com

Publics, Flow, Phatic, Tummeling and Out-groups – New Words You Need to Know to Understand the Web

• Kevin Marks @kevinmarks – British Telecom
• FLOW – thinking about how everything is connected
• FACES – lets people connect with other people when we see a photo
• Phatic – has social meaning
• Following – get a feeling for what people are up to w/o people knowing
• Publics – there are many public spaces that we are serving and listening to.
• Mutual Media – We are all filtering information and then sending it back out.
• Small World Networks
• “The social web is a sea of different countries”
• Tummling = Democratization

    What’s a Friend Worth? – Knowing Your Social Capital Ching-Yung Lin (IBM Research)

• What is a Friend Worth?
• 25% of IT spends their time on email
• The more diverse your network is, the more money you will make.

Cloud Computing Goes From Personal to Business Yousef Khalidi (Microsoft)

• Platform that allows you to write code across multiple platforms
• Pay as you go platform
• 3 components – Windows Azure, SQL Azure, .NET Services
• Can be called (and charged for) separately.
• http://www.Azure.com – visual studio tool
• http://www.Windowsazure4e.com PHP tool
• http://www.Windowsazure4j.com Java tool
• Been available for a year via tech preview…all features are now available to everyone.

Designing Web 2.0: Here Come The Anthropologists Gentry Underwood (IDEO)

• Facebook the first global social network Approaching ~400mil users
• Showed video: http://bit.ly/eL7k1
• When designing social networks we need to think about design, human interaction, thinking through how people are using the product.
• HCD – Human Center Design – how human needs are expressed and design for this.
• How do different cultures react to the same system?
• http://Labs.ideo.com Touch Screen
• http://blog.sxdsalon.org

• Needed for a way for servers to talk to other servers…decentralized social networks
• Instant syndication
• Data for mash-ups – real time
• Requirements: easy to deploy, topic-oriented, high-throughput, enables new use-cases
• Not trying to solve client/server
• Wave vs PubSubHubbub: wave is a reinvention of collaboration on the web
  PubSubHubbub bootstraps the web for real-time
• Publish subscribe hub = PubSubHubbub
• The Hub is the intermediary between the publisher and subscriber
• http://code.google.com/p/pubsubhubbub/

• “Use social media to communicate with, not market to, your customers.”
• Document all your choices (names, content, sites, and credentials)
• Search your company on Linkedin
• Addict-o-matic – http://www.addictomatic.com/
• Google Alerts – http://www.google.com/alerts
• Samepoint – http://www.samepoint.com/
• Does the company own content that is updated during company time?
• Need a unified voice so that there is a consistent style of content.
• “Social Media is not going away, it will only grow”
• “Many people are using tools to access twitter and completely by-passing we web”