“Follow” is to Twitter as the Verb “Friend” is to Facebook

November 20, 2008 in Journalism
Tags: adrian monck, barack obama, facebook, gordon brown, internet, jay rosen, jeff jarvis, Journalism, justin williams, technology, twitter

So it’s official then, of my City coursemates, Ali and I are twice as good as anyone else. It also turns out there’s not much between Matt, Lara, Kat, and Nathan. Coming last is Shona, but that is not much of a surprise.

Now although I wish I was talking about journalistic ability, surprisingly I’m not. I’m talking Twitter.  Or at least I’m talking Twitter Grader, which has worked out our relative power as users through a complex algorithm (I say complex because, well, it’s an algorithm and that has to be complex). Although I initally wanted to use this post as an investigation into the use of Twitter for journalists, I was understandably sidetracked by this wonderful tool. Now for the serious stuff.

I’m sure we all know what Twitter is by now however I think a lot of students are struggling to see how it can be applied usefully to our work. That is not uncommon, here’s new-media guru Jeff Jarvis and his initial impressions:

“When I first used the microblogging platform Twitter I thought it was silly. But then I should confess that when I first used blogs and podcasts, I didn’t fully comprehend their impact either. And I now see it is an important evolutionary step in the rise of blogging.”

I think it’s pretty clear journalists need to know how to use Twitter, and use it well.  Personally, I have Twhirl on my laptop which basically is an incredibly functional instant messenging service with loads of usability. It lets you publish pictures using TwitPic and cuts down links automatically so there’s no more messing about with TinyUrl. It has a powerful search function which can be used for research, I found out that City is no longer running the PGDIP course through it. If you use a Mac then Twitterific should do all the same things. (UPDATE: Adrian Monck pointed out that Twhirl also works on a Mac)

There are so many different applications that have been created to utilise Twitter’s API I wouldnt even attempt to try and give a run down of all of them.  However, perhaps the most useful one to begin with is Twitterfeed.  You can use it to push your Delicious links (or any another RSS feed) onto Twitter, thus publishing in two places at once without any extra effort. It could mean that all your followers are automatically notified when you write a new post for your blog, pretty useful for getting the word out. Here are some more links to useful sites to explore.

Another influential new-media type Mindy McAdams gives some important advice on getting the most from Twitter:

“Twitter is all about whom you are following. If you are following very few people, or uninteresting people, or people who simply do not tweet very much, then Twitter will seem useless to you.

When you are following a set of relatively chatty people who are tuned in to your interest areas, what happens is this: They tip you off. They often point out stuff you will be happy to see or watch or read.”

So it’s clear that we students all need to join and start following each other, after all who else could possibly be as interesting as us?! I’ve a few suggestions.

From journalists like Justin Williams and Jemima Kiss, to academics like Jeff Jarvis and Jay Rosen (who uses the service for ‘mindcasting not lifecasting’).  From political bloggers like Guido Fawkes and Iain Dale, to political parties like Labour and the Lib Dems (who wants to follow the Tories?!).  From newspapers like the Guardian and the New York Times, to newsblogs like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos.  All of them use Twitter.  Come on, even Gordon Brown and Barack Obama do!

It seems that Twitter is what you make of it, and the only way to figure this all out is to start using it, so I’d like links to your new accounts in the comments please.

Oh, by the way, City’s very own Adrian Monck scores almost twice as highly on Twitter Grader than any of his eager students.  Git.