Part 2 – twitter-o-mania

PART  2 – My notes on twitter-o-mania…. The social networking phenomena

Part – 1 link

Time to start with the theory class -

• One important point brought to my notice by my cousin was the relations twitter uses. In a way a follower relation is always one – to –many. We have a famous person and many people follow them. But in twitter even the person you are following can follow you. In this way it blurs away the line between being a follower and a friend

• I tweet just anything which comes across my minds could be a sudden emotion, thought or a URL I found worth a mention. Two important things out of this one is Its letting me just hang around second I am creating my own data store.(More on this in the later parts)

• I can reply to anyone’s tweet even people I don’t follow. Interesting facility because you may be following someone unidirectionally and you can reply to one of their tweets and who knows the relation may become bidirectional. More freedom to connect.You can connect to someone with a single click by following them no waiting for confirmation which seems like a perfectly valid way in the follower relationship.

• Hats off to people who update their statuses on twitter from the web. There are very few rest all use desktop apps or apis. Gives rise to a huge quantum of applications twitterfox(Firefox plugin), tweetdeck, seesmic (both windows AIR desktop apps), twitterfic(only for Mac) and tonnes of others. Now it is interesting that although I like twitter so much I just go there to follow or block someone. I tweet through one of these apps.Because initially I was a pretty lame user of twitter updating through web. I found it very unfair that for a 140 character tweet you have to visit a URL. Untill ofcourse I hit on with seesmic and later twitter-sly-fox (as I like to call twitterfox). It was “the utility” I was looking for. Opens a small pop-up window in the right corner of my firefox winodow where I can see recent tweets as well as tweet on my own.Plus its interface is the one I fell in love with even more then the twitter interface itself.Not just this it makes it a hell lot easier to save a link online … because for tweeting a link all have to do is a click and I can even add comment to it. This opens up a whole lot of possibilities of sharing data(More on this in the later parts).

• The twitter vertical (put in industry terms) has given rise to a whole spectrum of sites which again is a obvious outcome when so many people socialize. Its like a informal conference of people. One which has no planned agenda. So we have tweetscoop( what people are tweeting about ) , twitter trends – revolutionized by the use of another important property of digital text called #hashtags, we-follow – a directory of interesting twitter accounts, twitt(url)y – my personal favorite, twubble – the newest one which came to my knowledge helps to expand the followers circle and loads of others. If we try relating them to the way we socialize we will be able to see some clear parallels.

To be contd…