The Power of Twitter - Part 2

Flickr: Baddog_

Twitter continues to grow not just as a social network where you can speak to friends and colleagues, but as a global phenomenon where people from across the world can connect and discuss issues that affect us all.

It’s now a primary news source as I found out when the BBC reported today that ‘Associated Press has reprimanded some of its journalists for breaking news on Twitter before posting it on the wires.’ (source – BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15772243)

Twitter is now a place to go for news, celebrity gossip, film reviews, music reviews and just the latest ‘must knows’ across the web.

The number of users continues to grow at a pretty fast pace. After meeting people for the first time, you then feel like you can add them as a ‘friend’ on Facebook. With Twitter, you can comfortably follow someone without ever meeting them, and you most likely never will. Twitter is about building a connection through your computer screen, and if that connection doesn’t come, it just takes one click for them to disappear from your life.

Twitter has recently tried to take similar ideas to Facebook, and trying to give it even more of a 'community feel'. Meaning that their new 'activity' tab allows you to see who people are now following, as well as what they have favourited and retweeted. You can continue to keep up to date with the people you follow in every way. But that's not what Twitter is for, and I doubt it ever will be. Most people will stick to Facebook if they want to continue tracking all aspects of their friends lives.

One difficult now, is for people to keep a balance with the number of people they decide to follow. You can either follow hundreds of people, in which case you get a very lively twitter feed with constant updates(usually mutliple tweets a minute) and you get a wide variety of opinions and viewpoints. The downside being that you perhaps recieve too many tweets, and it's hard to keep track or establish a connection with a select few. One way around this can be the use of twitters 'list' feature which allows you to split your favourite 'tweeters' into seperate feeds to you can track them more easily. But even this can be hard to manage, depending on how many people you intend on following.

Alternatively, you can follower a smaller amount of people(usually around 100 or less). Which means you get less updates (maybe one tweet every 1 or 2 minutes during the day), but it's a lot more manageable. It also means that you can have easier conversations with the people you follow because you can quickly learn what they like and what theri opinions are, therefore you know if the chat is going to go well or not. This also means you have created your own personal community, arguably what Twitter is for.
But the downside to this is the limits of diverse opinion, your only getting a small sample of the millions and millions that use twitter everyday. And your Twitter may have slow days where you read hardly anything interesting. You may also find that you could recieve news slower. Obviously the more you follow, the better chances of seeing the latest news quicker.

What Twitter can do

The Prince of Wales' private office had created a Twitter account so that it could announce the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

After this tweet, @Leighfazzina was saved after getting lost in a 300-acre forest, and then crashing her bike while trying to complete a mini-triathlon. Unable to walk, she tried to call somebody, but couldn't get a connection, fortunately she was able to tweet for help. And with over 1,000 followers, atleast half a dozen called for her aid. Within minutes of her sending the tweet, an ambulance was on its way.
Generally, in areas such as large parks, where signal isn't usually very good, it's not unusual for people to be able to send instant messages or 140-character tweets when they can't make phonecalls.

To read 'The Power of Twitter - Part 1' click here.

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Journalists on Twitter

A number of Journalists now use twitter, it has become a great way of releasing stories as well as discovering stories.
Through things like hashtags(#) and 'trending topics' it can be easy to locate opinions on certain topics and news stories.
Thier are a number of top journalists and bloggers from a number of newspapers, news broadcasters and more on Twitter.

I have spent some time locating some of the top journalistic tweeters and have composed a list that will show all of thier tweets as soon as they are posted.
This is accessible to anyone at this link - http://twitter.com/#!/danielmackrell/journalists

Here you can read all the very up-to-date postings of some of the professions top reporters and get updates on thier latest posts, comments and links to the newest news stories.
It doesn't require you to sign up to Twitter to access and read the tweets, although if you are a member of twitter, you can follow the list, and all journalist tweets would be added directly to your twitter feed.
I will continue to add more and more top journalists when I find them, and if you know of any, then let me know and I will include them.

What the list includes
It has a variety of journalists. Ranging from sports, technology, politics, and economic experts, as well as editors, presenters, sports presenters and bloggers. Thier are also links to the latest online news reports and alerts from the likes of Sky News, The Mirror, The Telegraph. And thier is also a useful Tweeter that reports the latest journalism jobs available.

It currently features just over 100 tweeters, but only has currently 3 'followers' but one of those is Chris Choi who is a consumer editor for ITV news and has worked on Radio 4, Watchdog and Five Live.

I hope this will be useful to some of you.

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The Power of Twitter - Part 1

I recently made a post regarding Facebook, and a comment made that if it was a country, it would be the third biggest one in the world. And it got me thinking as too how it might work out if Facebook really did become a country.
Well in this post i'm going to take a look at Twitter and question what sort of country it would form.

Before I go into Twitter as a country, i'd just like to give you an idea into it's current popularity.
Thier are around 2-300 Million twitter accounts, which isn't quite as much as Facebooks 500 Million active accounts, but it's still a pretty large number and almost reaches the same amount as America's population of around 311 Million.
Twitter’s lead on Application Services - Raffi Krikorian mde a presentation in March of this year and raised a number of interesting statistics (courtesy of 'Fresh Networks' Hamrid Sirhan).

- The current rate of tweeting is 1,200 Tweets per second (tps)
- There are currently 110 million tweets per day

These two statistics alone highlight the now huge popularity and activity that Twitter has. It has become very trendy amongst celebrities and athletes to promote themselves and anyting hey're invovled in. It has also broken down barriers that were once in place between celebrities and 'regular people'. It's introduced a new level of fan interaction. It has also become a way for businesses to promote thier products, and even for 'twitter celebrities' to emerge, becoming popular simply through thier 140 character tweets.

Trending topics has also become popular, and has enabled tweeters to view other opinions in a matter of seconds regarding big world events and announcements. It has become a perfect example of 'citizen journalism'.

Making 'The United Nations of Twitter'
Much like Facebook, the flag would surely be the logo. But this time maybe not of the word 'Twitter', but of the bird or maybe the 'failwhale' that we see so often.

In terms of the type of government, I think a democracy would work quite well. It would enable everyone to have a voice (nobody can exeed 140 characters in twitter - nobody!). With this Democracy could also come 'Popular Sovereignty', which is based on the idea that a state is 'created by the will and consent of its people'. This is also similairly linked with The Social Contract which comes from philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau and Hobbes. This is the idea that the population would agree to obide common rules and protect each other from harm etc...

This would very much be a united nation. Generally the people i have encountered have been friendly and just happy to express thier views to those that will read them. It is also filled with a diverse mixture of nationalities, age groups, and careers. Thier are doctors, actors, singers, plumbers, presidents, journalists, sales assistants, I'm sure every profession is covered somewhere on twitter.

In part two I will be analysing exactl what would make Twitter a dominant and powerful country.
In my Facebook post, I included a world map which highlighted the popularity of the social networking site. Well here is Twitters own version -

Twitter around the world

You can read 'The Power of Facebook - Part 1' by clicking here.

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