Archive for the ‘#twitterisfothebirds’ Category

Twitter is Painful?

People want to be heard Twitter! Read about how the app can improve on the web.

Twitter and Apple

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But, fundamentally, what’s interesting about Twitter is that anyone can follow anyone else (besides for private accounts of course). That’s its magic: Anthony Weiner can send a picture of his crotch to tens of thousands of people from his Blackberry.

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What Makes Software Great (And What Doesn’t)

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Twitter said that news of bin Laden’s death "saw the highest sustained rate of tweets ever".
For more than an hour there were over 3,000 tweets per second about bin Laden, peaking at 5,106 tweets per second as President Obama addressed Americans. #link#

Building Your Own Twitter

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Gentrification, there let it be said. Twitter is useful, but this guy is right on:

There’s some unattractive area - artists move in, then their hipster friends follow the cool, until finally it gets so desirable that the artists, hipsters, and whoever was there in the first place are all replaced by some painfully dull bourgeois types who are now the only people who can afford to live there, and proceed to blandify it to death.  Why does it happen?  Because the squares have the money, so whoever owns the horrible garrets can win big by converting them into lovely condos.  The hipsters whine that they made the neighborhood, but nobody cares, so they have to repeat the cycle somewhere else.

It’s the same with Twitter.  The geeks helped popularize and build it, but now that the Fail Whale has become an endangered species, the landlord has come a-calling.  The condos are really more like ticky-tacky Kim Kardashian and Justin Bieber little boxes, but the principle’s the same.  The only surprise is that anyone’s surprised.  It’s always been this way, and will always be this way.

What is Buffer?

Twitter Lessons From Newark Mayor Cory Booker

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Booker first joined Twitter in 2008 and has tweeted more than 5,000 times since and gained more than a million followers. During the storm and its aftermath, Booker demonstrated these best practices for Twitter.

1. Do more than just push information. If that's all your tweets offer, you might as well just have an anonymous Website. As thisATime article on Booker explains, other city mayors either don't tweet, or their tweeting during the blizzard consisted only of impersonal info. Booker shared information in his feed tooabut that wasn't all.

2. Respond to people. Don't use Twitter like television; use it like instant messaging. The advantage of the tool is its interactivity. A good number of Booker's blizzard-related tweets are responses to others who have tweeted to him or retweets (like forwarding an email) of what others have said to him. This helps demonstrate that he's really behind the account rather than a PR person or intern, and helps to garner trust.

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Twitter Literacy

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Post-Oprah and apres-Ashton, Twittermania is definitely sliding down the backlash slope of the hype cycle. It’s not just the predictable wave of naysaying after the predictable waves of sliced-breadism and bandwagon-chasing. We’re beginning to see some data. Nielsen, the same people who do TV ratings,Arecently noted that more than 60% of new Twitter users fail to return the following month. To me, this represents a perfect example of a media literacy issue: Twitter is one of a growing breed of part-technological, part-social communication media that require some skills to use productively. Sure, Twitter is banal and trivial, full of self-promotion and outright spam. So is the Internet. The difference between seeing Twitter as a waste of time or as a powerful new community amplifier depends entirely on how you look at it - onAknowing how to look at it.

When I started requiringAdigital journalism students to learnAhow to use Twitter, I didn’t haveAthe list of journalistic uses for Twitter that I have compiled by now. So I logged onto the service and broadcast a request. "I have a classroom full of graduate students in journalism who don’t know who to follow. Does anybody have a suggestion?" Within ten minutes, we had a list of journalists to follow, including one who was boarding Air Force One at that moment, joining the White House press corps accompanying the President to Africa.

One of my students asked me online why I use Twitter. I replied off the top of my head. Sometimes, thats better than taking longer to compose something more elaborately thought out (which is one of the reasons I like to Twitter its a great way to start my wordflow for the day with something short and lightweight.

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Yiying Lu Makes Splash with Twitter’s ‘Fail Whale’

Yiying Lu’s most famous illustration thus far is linked with failure - and that has turned out to be a good thing.

The young artist is the bubbly brainchild behind Twitter’s "fail whale," the image that appears when Twitter is overloaded and can’t function. In the picture, a flock of birds carry an enormous, smiling whale over the water.

Through Twitter, the whale has become a sign of the times. This year, the popular San Francisco microblogging service sent an astonishing 25 billion messages of 140 characters or fewer and added 100 million new users.

Though the fail whale doesn’t appear as frequently as it once did on Twitter, it lives on. It has inspired a fan club, two parties and at least one tattoo. Last month, for the premiere of his new show,�Conan O’Brien commissioned Lu to create the "pale whale," which depicts the comedian riding on top of a whale as it is being carried by birds.

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