Twitter: What it is, why you need it, and how you can use it to change your world

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a website that lets visitors write short messages (limited to 140 characters) that answer the perennial question: What are you doing?

Twitter began as a way for employees to communicate within organisations, but gradually expanded as a way for friends, colleagues and contacts to share their news, thoughts and interesting discoveries with each other.

If you want to have a conversation online, you might use email or instant messaging. But if you want other people to ‘overhear’ your conversation, allowing them to join in, then Twitter is the perfect medium.

Twitter is becoming an inspirational source of connections, helping like-minded people unite for social change, good causes and business shenanigans.

Why should you use Twitter?

At first glance, Twitter might appear to be a hyperactive torrent of random thoughts. But it’s much more than that. You can use Twitter to do many things, including:

• Let colleagues and clients get to know you as a person
• Open communication channels between your organisation and the public
• Demonstrate your intelligence/wit/charm/(insert good quality here)
• Find new partners, volunteers, members and clients

Why do other people use Twitter?

We asked these questions…

• @leifkendall Asking: Why do YOU use Twitter? Why?! #
• @premasagar Doing a little research… Tell me, why do YOU use Twitter? #

…which very quickly led to these responses (and more):

• @mattlambert Hi Leif – twitter is human moderated search, I get to find stuff I didn’t even know I wanted. Plus, a personal radio #
• @helenbaker I use Twitter in the hope of learning something new! I like the trying-to-be-useful Tweets, not the tells-me-nothing ones. #
• @TraceyDooley First it was curiosity. Then it was an addiction. Now I intend to build good relations (I hope!) with people AND poss clients #
• @ThirdSectorLab I use twitter to learn from all the knowledgable people in the twittersphere and [hopefully] to contribute as well. #
• @eggboxrobin Would love to help, but can’t say why I use Twitter in 140 chars! To stay informed, meet new interesting peeps, feel connected.. #
• @catherinepope I use Twitter in lieu of real colleagues. The virtual variety is much easier to filter out! #
• @theanxy Staying close to people, sharing information easier and faster, discovering new resources from interesting bloggers. #
• @cathyma To keep track of the minds of smart people and to share exciting quirks online #
• @stevebridger It’s like having better brains on tap, and I work alone, so it helps me feel connected – I call it ‘alone together’
• @Robpermeable For tidbits of info, useful urls, and connecting with people in my sector (charity and PR) #
• @jellyslastjam Initially to see what the fuss was about, now I’ve been sucked in and can’t help myself. #

As you can see, people have many personal and commercial reasons for using Twitter – but don’t just take our word for it, the web abounds with useful articles on Twitter (such as this excellent one).

One thing’s for sure – now that Twitter has broken into the mainstream, playing its part in citizen journalism, charity fundraising and Barack Obama’s legendary social media success (he’s by far the most followed Twitterer), it’s not going away any time soon.

So, do YOU use Twitter? Why?

This month, we’re taking great pleasure in helping out both the London and Brighton Twestivals on the 12th of February. We’re donating a mind-expanding, floaty prize to the London Twestival raffle, and we’re a main sponsor for the Brighton Twestival.

Why the sponsorship?

As ever, we’re interested in helping out with events that are run for the community and by the community. This time, we’re extra-enthused because the Twestivals also embody several other passions of ours:

1. We love gatherings where positive, chance meetings happen between like-minded people.
2. We want to support events in aid of charities (all proceeds help Charity:water‘s efforts to bring safe drinking water to the world).
3. We’re excited about events that have been enabled by social media (in this case, the ever-growing community on Twitter), where online communities create events in their very own neighbourhood.

What’s this about Twitterers floating?

At the London Twestival, one lucky raffle winner will win our prize of a year’s supply of float tank sessions.

Sometimes you need a rest from all the hubbub, wittering, twittering and chasing about. At London’s float centre, Floatopia, you’ll find a haven from the mad rush of life in a warm, relaxing, womb-like pool:

Whilst suspended in a dense Epsom salt solution, warmed to skin temperature, one soon gets the illusion of floating in air. The resulting sense of serenity and deep well-being will stay with you for days after your float.

(Warning: You may have to leave your iPhone outside).

Six months of the prize is courtesy of Dharmafly and this has been generously matched with another six months by Floatopia. You can read more about the benefits of floating on the Floatopia site or Wikipedia.

Happy Twestivals! We’d love to hear your experiences if you’re the winner of our floaty prize, and even if you aren’t, drop us a comment below and let us know how the Twestival went for you.

Update: Another prize – Green Hosting

We’re also now offering a prize of one year of our 100% renewable energy web hosting for the Brighton Twestival raffle. Best of luck, raffle peeps!

Twestival unites online friends for charity

Twestival bridges the gap between the off- and online worlds. It provides a chance for communities on Twitter (a web service that allows users to share their thoughts with their peers) to meet in person and to raise money for Charity:water, who provide clean water for people in developing countries.

Dharmafly spoke to Amanda Rose, the enterprising organiser who got the Twestival ball rolling, to find out more about Twestival and why Twitter is suited to this kind of crowd-sourced social action.

Rippling messages through the web

As Amanda noted, Twitter allows for a “ripple effect”, letting messages spread and surge through the web. This gives Twestival instant access to willing participants – people who pass on the message and offer to get involved.

Those who are making Twestival happen are ordinary people, choosing to help a good cause after hearing about it through their Twitter network.

Charity:water has been chosen as Twestival’s beneficiary, partly because they are active Twitter users themselves (such as the charity’s founder, Scott Harrison), using it to spread news of their work and to connect with interested parties.

Twitter steps out of the web

Twitter is sometimes characterised as another way for socially-awkward people to avoid human contact (mainly by people who’ve never used it). Twestival is further evidence that Twitterers want their interactions to make a difference beyond the web.

Twestival: a flash-function

So what exactly is a Twestival? It’s a loose idea, varying in nature from city to city. Each Twestival is a rapid-response flash-event, created almost spontaneously by volunteers.

Some Twestivals are taking the form of an “unconference” (a grassroots conference organised by the participants), some are relaxed social gatherings in cafes and pubs, and some will have entertainment and activities. All Twestivals aim to bring together local Twitter communities to benefit a good cause.

Twestival: raising money for Charity:water

At the heart of every Twestival is Charity:water, a non-profit organisation that brings clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations. 100% of donations go directly to creating sustainable clean water solutions.

The directness of Charity:water’s donation system means that every penny raised by generous Twitterers will help provide clean water to the people who need it most. You can also donate directly on the Twestival page of the Charity:water website.

Twestival in Brighton: @brightwest

Brighton’s Twestival tickets go on sale at 12pm today. If you want to track its progress, follow @twestival and @brightwest on Twitter, and check brighton.twestival.com for more information.

Update: Now sponsoring

Dharmafly is now happily a Twestival sponsor, and we’re giving away some gorgeous raffle prizes.

The Bangladesh River Journey, a BBC World Service project to track climate change, for which we built the interactive mini-site, has recently received two prestigious awards. These awards recognise the innovative way that the project brought social media reporting on important global issues into an engaging user-experience.

Webby Honoree

The Webby Awards are like the Oscars for the Web. From nearly 10,000 entries, the Bangladesh River Journey was declared a Webby Honoree, “in recognition of outstanding work”.

Sony Radio Academy Awards

At the Sony Radio Academy Awards (“the Oscars for Radio”), the Bangladesh Boat Project won the Multiplatform Radio Award. That’s a photo of the award at the top of this post.

The awards body said:

This is a project that from the very outset was designed to make the most of the multiplatform landscape. It embraced everything from podcasts to GPS and Googlemaps to add value to the listener/user experience and met those listeners where they really lived using third party sites such as Flickr.

This is [...] about creativity and using the plethora of multimedia options now available to generate something unique and uniquely valuable. This is absolutely the paradigm for an interactive radio project in the current landscape and is by far the deserved winner.

These awards are testament to the bold, creative approach of the World Service and the well-knit collaboration within their team. It was a really exciting project to be involved with.

URL: goomusic.net

Goo Music are a vibrant, young band management company in London. They manage The Subways, a high-energy band who are currently putting together the final touches to their second album and are about to launch a world tour.

We’ve created a distinctive website for the business, in the style of a one-page fanzine that keeps itself up-to-date with feeds from the Twitter and MySpace profiles of both Goo Music and The Subways.

Photographic

The site design uses a layering of photographic images:

• a pavement from Lancaster
• an old plectrum
• a penny
• a guitar cable, and
• a stapled stack of papers (actually it’s part of a manual for LSL, the scripting language used in Second Life)

We now have browsers that can handle part-transparency in images (since Internet Explorer 6 finally left the scene). So, it has become possible to sculpt this kind of photographic layering into a website, bringing the viewer into a richer visual environment. It can be more laborious to create such a design than with standard techniques, but the results can be impressive.

Semantic

Although we have gone for a highly visual design, we have also given full consideration to accessibility and the usage patterns of different users. For example, the design adapts well to different text sizes in the browser and it is built on a backbone of semantic HTML, for the benefit of screen readers, search engines and the best of the Semantic Web.

The site is constructed from HTML microformats (specifically, hAtom, hCard and xFolk). These are small building blocks of information that can be read by both humans and computers.

We’ve used microformats to build the site’s blog posts, contact information and links, where they allow people to interact with the information in useful ways. For some ideas about how to interact with microformats, see the Bangladesh River Journey post.

Full RSS Feeds from MySpace

To bring in content from MySpace, we had to be a bit sneaky. MySpace, for all its wisdom, doesn’t provide full RSS feeds. For example, the feed for The Subways’ blog shows just the first couple of sentences of each post.

We first tried using the Dapper service, which lets you convert HTML on any website into RSS feeds and more. However, as you’ll see from the Dapper feed we created, and its resultant RSS feed, Dapper doesn’t quite have the sophistication yet to deal with MySpace. So, we took advantage of Scott Reynen’s MySpace Feed Creator web service to create a full RSS feed, which we then convert back into HTML on the Goo Music website.

Road Crew

Full kudos to Aidann for his rough and ready design, Pete for forging the CSS styling and Kaanchan for the back-end piping of feeds. Rock on…

I am afraid it is no exaggeration to say that what we saw was a hellish scene. [source]

It has been a sobering experience to see reports of the Bangladesh cyclone – and to watch them flow through the Bangladesh River Journey site we built for BBC World Service. The project’s original aim was to expose the very real presence of climate change in Bangladesh – a low-lying land of myriad rivers – and the cyclone’s arrival seemed shockingly symbolic.

While news of the cyclone competed for airtime in the general media, the World Service maintained a stream of often very personal and touching accounts from the Bangladeshi people. Their Flickr photos and Twitter texts acted as informal media channels, adding an extra dimension to the more formal reporting on the World Service website and radio.

Social Media News

This year, the World Service are celebrating 75 years of global media broadcasting. They, and the BBC in general, are about to launch a major website redesign and there is a conscious effort to embrace new media techniques, such as microformats, APIs, social networking and open content.

What is the future for news reporting through social media? Is there greater or less authenticity in such reporting? Share your thoughts below…

Further Reading

• Technologies in the Bangladesh River Journey site
• Cyclone Sidr group on Facebook
• Oxfam cyclone group on Facebook
• United Bangladesh Appeal for cyclone donations
• ‘Uncultured Project’ visit to the disaster area
• Rezwan advises on helping victims
• East-west perspectives on climate change
• Helping cyclone victims from overseas