Everybody is twittering about Twitter in Toronto. Like Facebook did in 2007, the online social media service has experienced massive growth. If you don’t tweet, somebody you know or an organization you’re familiar with likely does, typing out messages in 140 characters or less for all to see.
Some techie friends have been tweeting since Twitter first appeared in 2006. Not being a bleeding-edge technology adopter, I waited, only starting in earnest back in September, part of the bandwagon. In the short time since, Twitter has become an integral part of my life because it’s good technology that doesn’t try to change the way I might do something, but rather facilitate what I already want to do.
The simplest way of describing twitter is as a “micro-blog” that works similarly to how Facebook status updates do (short messages about what somebody is up to at that moment), but they’re considerably more powerful. Conversations can erupt, and Twitter shares information, observations and links quickly through what is known as “retweeting,” where others repeat that message, often quickly becoming global. This happened during the Mumbai terror attacks in November, when people inside the Taj Hotel were tweeting to the outside world. People can tweet from the web, but also by mobile phone texts or by software installed on BlackBerrys and iPhones that allow for the sending and receiving of tweets.
Like Facebook, you choose who you follow — or, more accurately, listen to — as you get to curate your own Twitter experience. Many of the people I subscribe to are from Toronto, and throughout the day I get a sense of what’s going on in the city, as if I’m hanging my head out the window, overhearing a slice of it.
To geek out for a moment (it’s apropriate when talking about Twitter), the “sound” of it reminds me of that line Obi-Wan Kenobi said in the first Star Wars, when the Empire destroys Princess Leia’s home planet of Alderaan: “I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.” Last Thursday night I was out for a walk in the dark and frozen Don Valley with friends and checked Twitter on my iPhone and learned about the blackout through tiny stories that were so personal and fast that I felt like my finger was on the west side’s collective pulse even though I was far from it.
You really get a sense of those millions of voices when you follow a hash-tagged thread (putting a # in front of a word allows readers to search and follow any tweet that contains that word). Try searching for #gaza and see how fast it moves. Last week’s blackout was #darkTO while #prorogue was popular in early December.
In Toronto the hash-tag was put to good use in December for a fundraising event called #HoHoTO. What started as a small conversation among a handful of people about doing something for “a good cause” morphed over the course of 13 days into an event at the Mod Club that raised $25,000 for the Daily Bread Food Bank. #HoHoTO happened so quickly and became so big that it’s like the money was raised by magic.
It’s events like these that have people salivating over Twitter. Self-proclaimed “social-marketing experts” arerife and they’re prospecting the social-media landscape the way the oil fields were in boom times. Think of a more BlackBerryish version of Daniel Day-Lewis’ character from There Will Be Blood. People smell money, but nobody knows exactly how they will make it, so they circle and endlessly discuss the medium without giving out any meaningful message. And this leads to one of Twitter’s problems: noise.
Getting a good signal-to-noise ratio is important to making it work the way it should. It’s OK to hear about somebody’s lunch choice on occasion, but if there’s too much of that then the Twitter feed gets clogged up. The navel-gazing speculation from the marketers is the noisiest, so occasional Twitter-feed purges are in order, to remove these people from your list.
Before I tweet, I try to ask myself “Is this observation interesting?” Staying true to that rule is hard because it only takes a moment to fire off a tweet, and everybody is going to make some noise from time to time, especially when waiting for a streetcar that doesn’t come. #ttcrage is so easy to fall into that I’ve banned myself from using Twitter to complain about commuting, but even that ban doesn’t always work, so addictive is the desire to complain in public.
The power of Twitter as a tool is certainly found in events like #HoHoTO, but also in the view it gives me of this city and the world. I follow good people and they tend to share good things so I’ll often pick up a layer of daily news — articles, blog posts, Flickr photos and some gossip — on top of the personal observations. I put some (but not total) trust in the crowd to deliver a certain amount of news every day, and I encounter things I’d not find on my own.
Twitter is currently dominated by the tech community, which is fine, but they have a tendency to move on to the next bleeding edge quickly (declarations like “Facebook is so 2007” is one of the more annoying phenomena) while the marketers could possibly kill it by suffocation. The salvation will be more of everybody else Twittering, adding continued heterogeneity to the text choir. If they’ve got something interesting to say, the people will listen. Tune in for yourself, and hear Toronto’s most interesting channel.
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