Twitter:Beyond the Statusphere

Jason Salas

Interactive Media Director / News Anchor

KUAM

What is Twitter? A microblogging service

Status updates in 140 characters or less

The canonical question: “What are you doing?”

A chronology of what people are up to

A social network

Members subscribe to friends, colleagues, churches, shipmates, celebrities, fans, vendors, customers

All the cool kids are on it

A multidevice platform

Web, desktop, e-mail, mobile, game console, interactive TV

Microblogging - a revisionist history

Weblogs? That’s soooo 2006 People wanted more frequent updates

Speeches, games, conferences, TV shows Online “reporting” needed to be more

responsive Laborious to write/read tons of compositions

Small data chunks work better over a wider variety of digital devices Easier aggregation

Twitter’s meteoric rise The changing Internet

Rise in social networks

Friendster, MySpace, Facebook

Uptake in mobile services

The Realtime Web

The evolution of “status”

Multimedia, stock prices, traffic control tower state, etc.

The celebrity factor

85% of Twitter’s feature set comes from its community

Mass media’s dark embrace

Twitter-as-development platform

The Twitter API Application Programming Interface Anyone can build custom services over

Twitter’s messaging capabilities & infrastructure

Heaven for us nerds Thank you Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Odin,

scientology supreme being…

Social network throwdown!

vsvs..

Examples

Breaking news

Using multimedia

Events/Announcements

Product reviews

…and “other stuff”

The Big Question So how is Twitter making money?

Advertising Monthly growth: 1,382%

Case Studies

Twitter on Guam About 400 Tweeters Media companies, car dealerships,

restaurants, bands, music stores, military personnel

TwitterNeni A Twitter app I co-wrote Empowers users in Guam & the

CNMI to tweet via text messaging Most common user demographics

College students Users with low-end 2G mobile devices

http://twitterneni.com

Twitter at KUAM Reflects any new updates to KUAM.com

News headlines, sports scores, columns, videos, podcasts…

All tweets link to their web stories

All reporters use Twitter…constantly

Quick & easy way of interacting with audience

Really fast way to break news

Huge reach advantage

Mobile audience

We use Twitter extensively, but not exclusively

http://twitter.com/guamnews_kuam

GuamTweetBot My custom re-tweeting service She watches the entire Twitter message

stream and harvests any tweets mentioning “Guam”

She’s as helpful as she is annoying http://twitter.com/guamtweetbot

Drawbacks of Twitter Security

Except for Direct Messages, all posts are public

Downtime No guarantee that service will be available

Sloppy storytelling 140 characters does have its limits

Communications, sans context

Needle in a haystack Every Tom, Dick & Barack on Twitter

Alternatives to Twitter Open source microblogging

platforms allow software developers to write their own messaging systems that federate with other open networks. Laconi.ca

Thank you! :)

Download slides of this talk:http://jasonsalas.com/twitter

Follow me!http://twitter.com/jasonsalas

E-mail:jason@kuam.com