Inching back to Twitter

A few weeks ago I declared that I was de-Twittering.

As I wrote then: “Basically, there's nothing I'm getting from the Twitter folks I follow that I can't get in person, via e-mail, via RSS or via the good old-fashioned phone.”

Plenty of folks in my business and outside my business begged to differ and, various fora, had some helpful and constructive comments.

My old friend Bill tweaked my nose a bit but his post got me thinking a bit more:

If he didn't get much out of Twitter, it's possible that's because he didn't put much in.

But I think he's right. One needs to focus their time and energy on things that provide the most return. Akin values Facebook, Google Reader and Google Notebook — along with old skool email.

…. I really confesss to shaking my head about how he finds the search capabilities of Twitter lacking when compared to, say, Google.

Bill certainly makes sense when he suggests you don't get much out of a social network if you don't put much in. Good point.

In a listserv I'm on (isn't it quaint that there are still listservs? 🙂 ) Peter Panepento, the Web editor of The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted that Twitter makes good sense from a publisher's perspective:

For the past month, our Twitter feed is our 8th-largest traffic source. Our followers are finding our content interesting and are clicking through to the site — and they’re passing along the most interesting stuff through “re-Tweets”, which means that we’re getting our headlines broadcast to a much larger audience than we reach on our own.

And Aron Pilhofer, who is the editor of interactive news technologies at The New York Times, also chimed in:

If you go into Twitter thinking it will be a scalpel-like one-way magic source/story generation tool, you'll be sorely disappointed.

What I love about Twitter is the serendipity you almost never get online. Think about it: For the most part, community on the web is about grouping people with people who are exactly like they are. Amazon recommends books others just like me liked. Facebook helps me create communities of people just like me. Etc, etc. Twitter is a community in a different way. For a very low price (click follow), and commitment (boy, it is the 140 character limit nice sometimes), you get to eavesdrop on folks — collectively and individually — you might never run into online any other way.

I'm following PR people, companies, UI gurus, academics, friends, family, comedians, filmmakers, programmers … and, yes, journalists.

Twitter is like riding a subway car with a bunch of interesting people all talking on their cell phones at once. Some conversations will be kind of uninteresting or over your head. Most, you'll ignore. Occasionally, you'll hear something that makes you laugh, or you'll get a “hey, did you hear about….” that intrigues you enough to click through or talk back. Sometimes, I'll post something that resonates with other people the same way.

Sometimes, you get a picture of Hartnett's cat.

What I get out of it on the whole far, far exceeds what I put into it. A lot of it is pointless, but a lot of it is kind of interesting or fun.

So all of that discussion was tipping me back towards another look and effort at Twitter when, today, our editor said all of the reporters at Canwest News Service would be serving up a community Twitter feed Thursday when we cover President Barack Obama's first international visit. [Find our tweets at #obamawa]

That prompted me to quickly look at some tools more efficiently monitor and generate tweets. And I'm pleased to say there's lots of tools out there which go a long way to addressing some of my initial signal-to-noise concerns about Twitter.

First, I've been playing with Twitterific (a geek note here: My home machines and my work machines are running either Mac OS X.4.x or .5.x My mobile computing device/phone is a BlackBerry) and I like it. But I really want to monitor “hashtags“. Maybe I'm dumb but I can't figure out how to “follow” hashtags in the same way I'd follow username. I tweeted about this and most replies told me to follow my hashtag subject using RSS. Yeah, yeah. I know that. But I wanted something that would, like e-mail on BBerry, get pushed to me – in real time.

Don't have anything yet for my BlackBerry that does that but I do for the desktop:

• TweetDeck works great in my work environment where I'm running two monitors (TweetDeck is great if you have a second monitor that you can devote to it) running off my OS X.5 Intel Powerbook. TweetDeck needs Adobe's Air platform which you must install first. That's kind of a drag but what the heck. At home, where I've an Intel-based iMac running OS X.4, TweetDeck doesn't seem to want to install the trick is running the install for Adobe Air first and then going back and running the install for TweetDeck. Works great. In any event, TweetDeck is still a beta product so no complaining is allowed.

• Then one of Evil Geniuses who does technology for the Conservative Party messaged me to try out Monitter, a Tweetdeck-like Web app which also looks good. Very nice.

• Other suggestions I've had: Twhirl and Twitterfox.

OK so with these new tools, how has that changed as a journalist?

Well, journalists approach Twitter, I assume, as both publisher and as newsgatherer. As publisher, I want to be quick, I want to post photos, and I want my tool to deal with link length issues. Tweetdeck does all of that. Very nicely. As a newsgatherer, I really don't know, to be honest, who I want to follow. I do know, however, I want to follow certain topics or subjects. So I need a tool that lets me monitor, in real-time if possible, whatever conversations I'm interested in. Again: I come back to Tweetdeck but Monitter is a good backup. RSS feeds of Twitter hashtag conversations is a distant backup only because I need to fire up my RSS reader; hit refresh and even the, I'm not sure the RSS feed is being generated with the immediacy I require.

After all of two days on #obamawa has it made a difference? Not a big one but some little stuff. There's some anecdotes and trivia that I did not know about that might make it into stories I'll be writing tomorrow. Like most reporters, I may not need every factoid I'm given but I'd rather have them than not.

So we'll see how Twitter and its associated apps get road-tested tomorrow. I'm still a little sceptical but I'm curious and I wish the service well.

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