What is Twitter?

More information about this episode here: Tech Talk Radio Episode 13/2008

By Lid 

The first time I took a look at Twitter was about six months ago. I joined up and started watching what was happening on the main Twitter page, which is called the Public Timeline, and all I saw were hundreds of tweets that meant absolutely nothing to me.

Things like:

I spent about an hour refreshing the page, another couple of hours playing on the site; trying desperately to work out what everyone thought was so great about it. In the end, I decided it was the biggest waste of my time.

A couple of months ago, someone that I like and respect said to me, “the quickest way to get me is on Twitter.” Given that this person was amazingly kind to me, and I wanted to stay in contact, I went back to Twitter and “followed” my first Twitter friend. He promptly followed me back, and I found it was indeed a great place to ask a quick question, and get a quick answer.

I started looking at the people he was following and came across more people that I like and respect on the Web. I followed them, went to their Twitter page, found more people I like and followed them too. Soon, people started following me back.

An interesting thing: when you sign up, follow people, and have people following you, you no longer get that messy Public Timeline. You get to choose who you follow, and only see tweets that they send.

So what is Twitter?

According to Twitter:

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Twitter is a communication tool. It lets you socialize with others that with similar interests, so it’s also a social networking tool. Another term applied to Twitter is micro-blogging because you are limited to 140 characters for any update, or ‘tweet’.

It lets you get to know people better, and lets others get to know you.

As a communication tool, Twitter beats everything else hands down. You can send and receive tweets from a browser, e-mail, IM, SMS and any of the multitude of Twitter applications now available – like Twirl – so that you can stay in touch no matter where you are.

But what is the point of Twitter?

Well, according to Twitter:

“Your best friend is probably interested in knowing if you’re loving the new Radiohead album. Your mom may want to know if you’re skipping breakfast in favor of a latte. You might want to know if your significant other feels like taking a roadtrip.”

But here’s my take:

I follow Reuters headlines because I don’t want to waste the precious little time I have on watching/reading/listening to news. If something interests me, I follow the link and read the story. It keeps me up to date with the news that interests me, I ignore the rest.

I follow Search and Social Media folk because they share resources and I want to keep up to date with these industries.

I follow Big Girls Don’t Cry because Kat is my way cute cousin and I want to know what’s she’s doing right now in the land down under.

So, for me, Twitter is the easiest way to keep up to date with things that are important to me. It helps me make better use of my time.

How do other people use Twitter?

Robert Scoble, tech geek blogger, and interviewer extraordinaire uses Twitter to create a bridge between conversations.

Before and during an interview, you can tweet a question to him for the interviewee. If the question fits, he’ll use it.

If you don’t know who Robert Scoble is, he’s the guy that starts each interview out with “Who are you?”

Some of the people he’s put the question to are Bill Gates, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web, Doug Engelbart, the inventor the mouse, and Marc Andreesen, the guy that started Netscape.

In fact, what better way to involve the Tech Talk Radio audience than to let them participate in real time – ask questions, offer answers… 😉

How does Twitter Work?

When you sign up, you’re presented with the question “What are you doing?” and given a box to type your answers into; answers can be no longer than 140 characters and are sent to everyone that is following you, immediately.

Problem is, when you join, no one will be following you. While you can tweet updates, the only people that are likely to see them are the people watching the public timeline, and that really is not useful.

There are applications like Twitter Adder that adds 20 random friends to your account, but I don’t really see the point in this unless all you are doing it for is to gather a huge following. My recommendation is to find people you are interested in following and you’ll find most of them will follow you back.

Of course, you should invite your friends, and let people know that you are available on Twitter by including your Twitter name with your contact details.

The other problem of course, is how do you decide who to follow?

One way to find people to follow is to search on names, e-mail addresses, cities, countries, brands (like Apple) or niches (like tech radio). Twitter search is still in baby form so you’ll have to bear with them while they work on it, but it’s a good place to start. The results you are served are collected from information provided in profiles across Twitter.

So, if you search for Melbourne, you’ll find there are over 1200 people on Twitter that have used the word “Melbourne” in their profile. This does not necessarily mean that there are 1200 people from Melbourne on Twitter, because some people don’t include a location in their profile, others may have names that include the word Melbourne.

Also, use of spaces in search does not always work so you should try both. Try typing Tech Talk Radio with spaces, then type Techtalkradio without spaces and you’ll see what I mean.

Another way is to start following someone you know, then looking at who they follow and following anyone of interest.

Once you start following people, you’ll find most will follow you back. For me, the idea is to build up a select group that I follow and learn with. I firmly believe you should not follow blindly.

Tweet Basics

• Given you have only 140 characters to play with you need to use your words well.

• Don’t worry too much if you want to include a long link; Twitter uses TinyURL to shorten them – this is automatic, just type your link in and Twitter does the rest.

• Only use plain text – no HTML.

• You can follow anyone that has a public profile, but you need to request permission to follow those that keep their tweets private.

• Anyone can follow you unless you choose to block that person.

• You can send messages to anyone, even if they are not following you by putting the @ symbol before their name – e.g. @MadLid – but don’t forget, these messages are still public.

• You can send private messages, known as direct messages (DM) only to people that follow you.

I’ve compiled a list of some of the more common news and blog sites that twitter, you can find them on the tech talk blog if you’re interested in giving Twitter a shot.

Interesting people/sites to follow on Twitter

News:

Reuters
ABC News
BBC News
CNN
New York Times
Wall Street Journal

Blogs

Lifehacker
Boing Boing
Wired news
ProBlogger
Dosh Dosh

And, of course, don’t forget to follow me 🙂 MadLid

If you liked this post, consider subscribing to my feed at BlogWell

Tech Talk Radio Episode 13/2008

Episode 13/2008 TX: March 31, 2008 Ep: 173

Download the podcast here

Download the full show here

On Today’s show:

English, and what it means today

Lidija tells us about Twitter – see transcript here What is Twitter?

Adam measures up ABC Playback!

Telstra denies liability for weekend furor

Mozilla Firefox 3 is go for launch, with a backhand stab at Microsoft’s IE

New South Wales citizens turn into cyber cops!

The following links were of interest to us this week:

• The 10 most disruptive technology combinations
• Australian Green IT regulations could arrive this year
• Get ready for these 6 game-changing technologies
• The Web’s best free stuff
• Google in trouble over data security
• Standards-based IE8 shows ‘new Microsoft’
• AMD faces tough battle against Intel
• Microsoft offers free support for Vista SP1 installs
• Digital TV to cost Canberra $38m

If you’re interested in finding out what’s coming up on Tech Talk Radio, then subscribe to our “What’s on” newsletter!

All About Delicious

Transcript of Delicious report by Lid for Episode 12/2008 

How many times have you bookmarked a site, or put it in your favorite’s folder at work, only to get home and think: “oh no…bugger!”

This is where social bookmarking comes in really handy.

The coolest thing about social bookmarking is that you can access your bookmarks (Firefox People), or your favorites (IE People), from anywhere; home, work or a friend’s computer.

It is pretty much an online home for your favorite’s folder.

The other nice thing about social bookmarking sites is that they allow you to share your favorite sites and pages with friends, family, and colleagues – if you want to – or, you can mark your bookmarks as private.

Delicious is considered the original social bookmarking site, and this is the one I wanted to focus on today.

It was created in 2003 by Joshua Schachter as an informal way to share Web pages between his friends. From there it pretty much took off, and in December 2005, Yahoo! acquired Delicious for some huge amount of money that has never been disclosed.

Now, it has more than 3 million users and 100 million bookmarked URL’s.

But why should you use Delicious?

Well, let’s say you’re a Web developer who uses the Web to find specifications, or converters, or sites that offer snippets of code. There are so many out there, it gets tricky keeping up.

If you bookmark or favorite it in your browser, you’d usually file it under one category.  For instance, let’s say you find a great color palette site. On your computer, it goes under Tools; on Delicious, you can tag it Tools, CSS, Colors, Palettes – you get the idea. Whatever key words or tags will help you find it later on. – Delicious makes finding your saved stuff a lot easier

To sign up, first go to Delicious and sign up for a free account. Don’t worry about the strange spelling of delicious that you may have seen; originally the URL was del.icio.us, nowadays you can just type in delicious.com and you’ll be redirected.

While you’re signing up, you’ll see a couple of toolbar buttons to add to your browser, grab them, they’re useful. The nice thing about Delicious is that it doesn’t put yet another toolbar in your browser, just the two buttons.

The first one “My delicious” will take you, once you’ve signed up, to your page on delicious so you can get to your bookmarks with one click from your browser.

The second button “tag this” is how you add new bookmarks to your delicious page. Whenever you come across a Web page you want to save, hit the tag button. This opens up a new window that automatically shows the URL of the page you are on, and the page title. You can add a description if you like, but the most important thing is to add the tags. These tags will help you find your bookmarks later.

On delicious, tags are separated by a space, no comma; in the tag section, type in as many tags as you need and it is saved to your delicious page. One word on tags though, they need to be single words – that is, they can’t contain spaces.

The beauty of this type of system especially for those of us who are useless at filing, is that it makes filing really, really easy.

Imagine hunting for a site you came across 6 months ago if you keep your bookmarks in your browser, you know that it was about colors, but you can’t remember whether you filed it under CSS, Palette’s, Color, or the one you’ve forgotten, tools. If you’re anything like me, you can end up spending ten minutes wading through the chaos you call your bookmarks and possibly not finding it anyway. This doesn’t happen with Delicious. Go to CSS or go to color, even Tools – and voila there it is, under each tag.

This is why tags are so important.

The social aspect of social bookmarking allows you to share your bookmarks, and to view the pages that have been bookmarked by others under specific tags.

So let’s go back to the Web developer example; you can search tags for CSS and see what others are saying. It will show the pages that have most recently been tagged, but you can sort the information by popularity, meaning the number of people who have bookmarked that page.

While social sites such as Digg, Stumbleupon, and Mixx allow for dialogue among members, Delicious does not. Nor do you vote, review or comment on other people’s submissions. All you are doing is saving a site as a favorite.

However, Delicious does have a “hotlist.” The hotlist can be found on the home page of delicious and it consists of the most recently bookmarked pages on the Web; pages that have been bookmarked by many individuals at that current point in time.

If you have a website or blog, you may find it interesting to go and search for your keywords – for instance tech talk radio – no spaces remember – and see if it has been bookmarked, and by how many.

So today’s lesson is, tying your bookmarks to only one computer is no longer the most efficient way to work, neither is hoarding them for yourself.

Put your favorites on the web, share them with friends and peers, and have access to your favorite pages anytime and anywhere, and don’t forget to go and check whether you’ve been delicioused.

If you have any questions, send me an e-mail – lid at techtalkradio dot com dot au – or just chat to me on Twitter – http://twitter.com/MadLid.

Over and out!

Episode 12/2008 – TX: March 24th 2008 (Ep 172)

Today on Tech Talk

Download the podcast here

Download the full two hour show here

Upgrade your phone to no contractInternet addiction a mental illness?

Apple patches

Safari for XP

Google and Perth meet on the bus

Adam looks at HDTV Nine style

Lidija Davis joins us from Silicon Valley to tell us about delicious

Dr. Ron tells us about the perils of the laptop service man

Infected Australian computers fetch top dollar

Melbourne IT try new anti spam technology

StumbleUpon

Transcript of Lid‘s report from Tech Talk Episode 11/2008  

I’ve been having a chat with a few people recently about StumbleUpon, and most people seem to think that it’s a bookmarking site.  While it can be used to store and tag your favorite sites and pages – much like the original bookmarking site del.icio.us – it can be so much more than just being a place to dump all the junk from your favorite’s folder.

StumbleUpon is a social network; a website that gives its users a new way to experience the Web; one that is largely based on a recommendation system.

I’m sure you’ve seen the ‘stumble’ button at the bottom of blog posts, usually alongside the Digg and Reddit buttons.

When you ‘Stumble’ a post, you are adding it to the StumbleUpon database.  By giving it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, you are telling the StumbleUpon community what you really think about that post or website.

When you thumb something up it is automatically added to your StumbleUpon list of ‘liked’ pages and this is why a lot of people use it a bookmarking tool.

But, adding content is only one way to use StumbleUpon; the other is to receive content.

Instead of searching for specific topics using search engines, Stumble Upon users tag the subjects they are interested in and then surf that topic ‘channel’ of the web.

Stumbleupon makes it easy by providing a browser plugin for both Internet Explorer and Firefox that, randomly takes you, with a click of the Stumble button, to sites that fall under your selected tags.

So, why should you give StumbleUpon a go?

Because StumbleUpon is known for its ability to send massive amounts of traffic, from all over the world, to websites; it is an incredibly powerful tool if you are trying to establish a following for your blog, website, brand or product.

Once your content is in there, other stumblers will – well – stumble across it, and it if is good enough, useful enough, they’ll thumb it up and link to it. It’s a gentle traffic pusher, consistent and continuous, sending hundreds or thousands of visitors a day.  And continuous is important, because while hitting front page of Digg can send you tens if not hundreds of thousands of visitors over a few days, and cause your server to crash under the load, it is a short lived spike that does not continue to send you traffic.

How many visitors can I get from Stumble Upon?

I’ve been stumbling for nearly a year, but originally I used it as a bookmarking site, without knowing about its other cool features.  More recently though, I’ve begun adding friends, stumbling other peoples sites, and other people have stumbled my posts.  In the last month, two posts on blogwell were stumbled, and they now bring in between 100 – 6000 unique visitors daily – over the past 30 days, blogwell has had 97,000 visitors from StumbleUpon alone.

So if you’re interested in getting to know StumbleUpon, visit the site, join and download the toolbar, which is available for both IE and Firefox, install it and start setting up your StumbleUpon homepage.

Before you add your site, go to the reviews page to see whether it’s already been listed – you never know, someone may have stumbled some of your stuff.  If not, start by going to your sites homepage and clicking the blue ‘thumbs up’ symbol that has ‘I like it!’ next to it – it’ll turn green, to show that you have now stumbled.

This should open up a panel that allows you to write a short description about your site and tag it with specific keywords – and this is part of the trick – make sure that you tag each page well so that StumbleUpon sends other stumblers that have similar tags to visit you.

While it is not considered good practice to stumble your own material, if you’ve created a great post that just begs to be promoted, ask a friend to submit it for you, or if you’ve been thumbing up other people’s content and contributing to the StumbleUpon community for a while, it’s okay to stumble your own post on occasion.

If you truly want to benefit from StumbleUpon, take Muhammad’s advice from a few weeks ago.  Get to know the community, check out and join the groups that most interest you, tag your favorite subjects, and make sure you click the thumbs up button in your toolbar every time you come across an amazing site, it only takes a few seconds.

If you want a more in depth guide to StumbleUpon, check out: A Comprehensive Guide to StumbleUpon on Dosh Dosh

If you enjoyed hearing about StumbleUpon, or have any other social media questions, please e-mail lid at techtalkradio dot com dot au – and I’ll do my best to hunt down the answer

Episode 11/2008 – TX: March 17th 2008 (Ep 171)

This week on Tech Talk

Download the podcast here

Download the full show here

Plasma vs LCD TV’sThe High Definition transition

Windows Server 2008

Chat with Martin Gregory, Director of Server, Tools and Platform Strategy from Microsoft Australia.

Lidija Davis joins us from Silicon Valley to tell us about StumbleUpon.

It’s sex and more sex in the Asian domain name scramble

The ACCC to expose fake excuses for broadband delays

More iPod copies hit the marketplace

Adam Turner talks about online backups

Three Apple stores in Australia later this year

Episode 10/2008 – TX: March 10th 2008 (Ep 170)

Today on Tech Talk:

Download the podcast here

Downlaod the full two hour show here

High Court of Australia rules against Telstra

Microsoft launch Server 2008.

Bill Gates falls on Forbes Rich List

Microsoft launch IE8

Telstra seeks indemnity on network

Google removes maps at the pentagons asking

Adam Turner turns his attention to journalistic plagiarism in IT Media

Microsoft take the knife to Vista pricing

Episode 09/2008 – TX: March 3rd 2008 (Ep 169)

Download podcast here.

Download full show (2 hours) here

Today on Tech Talk

In Studio Guest: Jason Stirling on Voice Recognition and IVR’s

Social Networking with Muhammad Saleem (Transcript available on Lid’s blog)

Conroy and Telstra go head to head over the Rudd Government’s ultimatum to hand over detailed plans of its entire network operations to rivals hoping to bid against it in a tender for the $8 billion national broadband scheme,

Apple started shipping its first-ever wireless storage appliance, dubbed Time Capsule

We’ll give you a few reasons to upgrade your wireless technology to the new 802.11n standard, and

Adam Turner turns his attention to Apple’s iPod Touch, the iPhone to have when you don’t have a mobile phone network to support it, and

Youtube off air globally last weekend!

Episode 08/2008 – TX: February 25th 2008 (Ep 168)

Download the podcast here

Download the full two hour show here

This week on Tech Talk

HD DVD RIP?

What happens now after Toshiba’s unceremonious exit from the HD DVD arena?

Dodo complaint handling triggers ACMA investigation

BC boosts mobile offering

Scammers dressing up as Telstra workers and

Telstra ‘needlessly denied consumers on ADSL2+’

Episode 07/2008 – TX: February 18th 2008 (Ep 167)

Download the podcast here

Download the full show here

This week on Tech Talk

What are kids doing online and are they safe?

Georgia Simmons form the Telstra Foundation joins us to talk about the $2m allocated to grants to protect people online

Note: We promoted Susan McClean from Victoria Police coming in to the studio, but unfortunately she is unable to attend this week.

Apple patches Leopard… for the second time.

The latest security updates fix 11 bugs in the Mac Operating system

Toshiba to give up on HD DVD, says Reuters

The format war for next-generation DVDs may be over: Blu-ray is the winner.

Firefox Beta 3 R3

BlackBerry’s future lies in social networking

Telstra gets AU$1 billion ‘secret documents’ wish

Mobile data cash set to eclipse voice

Victorian man avoids ‘Facebook’ defamation

Underbelly online a hit in Vic

Adam Turner sells the virtues of a good backup system