Posts Tagged ‘social networking’

5 Ways I’d Love to Use Twitter

Comments
May 2009

07

Here are some ways I’d love to use Twitter but currently can’t.* It seems like some can be done by individual users through group creation, but unless they receive mass early adoption, it doesn’t seem likely for them to succeed. This is another reason I’d love to see Twitter intervene and help with creation personally. What are some features you’d like to see adopted by Twitter, or some interesting uses that you could find for the popular micro-blogging platform?
*If these ways exist, I don’t know how – so tell me!

 

1.    Live, easily-accessed Q&A results. Though I don’t have all that many followers, it’d be great if someone like @guykawasaki could make a post asking a multiple choice question that will show live results (i.e. how many people chose A, B, C or D). Quick-polls are useful now, but wouldn’t it be great for anyone to see the live results?
2.    Nightlife activity. When going out to restaurants/bars, I’d love to see a geographic look at which places have been tweeted about the most (by the most different users?) in the past, say, hour. Google was working on a similar project (Dodgeball) that got canned. This would be a great use of Twitter’s stream.
3.    Pre-packaged follow groups. If I live in downtown Seattle, I’d love to be able to follow all of the environmental groups that host events, or say all the bars that hold happy hour. Why can’t I click one button and be able to follow the “Seattle Eco-Friendly” group? Some groups/users try to get around it with users that heavily RT, but I still have to search to find what I want. Why not create a number of pre-determined groups by city (Seattle Happy Hour, Seattle Dancing, Seattle Sports) and not only allow people to see what’s going on, but then have a map location of each event posted as well. That way if it’s 2PM on a Saturday afternoon I can see that there’s a baseball game at Safeco, a roller derby match at Key Arena and a pickup softball game in Redmond all going on at the same time. I can choose where I want to go and why.
4.    Product/event ratings. Tweval had an interesting idea – evaluate anything and everything. If I went to SXSW and thought it was great, I could rate it a 10. Or if I think Xbox is a great platform, I can give it a 10. Unfortunately a) there was very little adoption and b) they stored events as static. If I was at SXSW in 2006 and it was great, but 2010 it was terrible, there’s no way to really know when I rated it or to see an aggregated score. Same with Xbox – maybe my 2005 box RROD’d but the one I bought in 2008 has worked fantastically. Products/events change over time.
5.    Deals. Woot.com did a great job of creating the insta-deal with limited availability. Twitter has that same capability. This could also fall into the space of pre-packaged follow groups (above). Take a group of larger retail, wholesale and clearance stores and allow them to post their current deals in a Twitter group. Each item remains up until they’re sold out. It’d be like a Woot-off all day, every day.

 

What other ideas (or API uses) can you think of that would make Twitter even better?

 

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How I use Twitter and Social Networks

Comments
Apr 2009

22

Twitter MySocialButtonsTwitter is a great utility for people to connect with one another on a small microblogging platform. It’s an incredible tool for the expeditious dissemination of information (just ask Amazon). That being said, everyone uses Twitter differently. Some use it for promotion, some use it to help others. Twitter is still in its infancy, and we’re all still learning how to optimize our usage.* Some people have been fired because of Twitter, and some have been called out publicly.
*Full disclosure: My Twitter account is less than six months old and I was extremely skeptical of Twitter for a long time. I believe that the criticism of email (they are brief and devoid of human emotion and interaction – smileys aside =) holds true for Twitter and is even more obvious with a limit on word usage.

 

As someone who was an early adopter of Facebook, and has used AIM and Gmail status updates, Twitter has been an interesting and different experience for me. I think it’s a great service, and is no different than any other type of networking, online or otherwise. As long as you are honest, transparent and mindful of other peoples’ feelings, I don’t think there’s really a “wrong” way to use it unless you spam.

 

To keep transparent about my own motives, I felt it important to create a page documenting how I use Twitter, and how I do not use Twitter. If you would like to follow my updates, you can use the feed on this page, or follow me here.

 

How I use Twitter:

1. New Information. Twitter is one of the tools I use to keep my ear to the ground. I use Twitter in many ways to find out and post about new information.
2. Analysis. Since my Twitter isn’t specific to certain topics (like Techshots), I use it to analyze / look at information about many issues from baseball to gaming.
3. Blog traffic. When I have something new up, I’ll post the link and the topic. If you’re interested, I hope you will take a look.
4. Conversation. If someone is talking about an interesting topic, I like to share my opinions. I make sure not to carry on conversations more than a couple @replies, however.
5. Networking. Social networks make it easy to talk with like-minded people from hundreds or thousands of miles away. I use Twitter to connect with new people.

 

How I don’t use Twitter:

1. Unimportant personal updates. I realize you may be following 10, 100 or 1,000 people. In the interest of your time, I will try not to post small details about my life that may only apply to a few people.
2. Confidential information. I will never use confidential information from any job in which I am working. Any and all information or statistics I use are publicly available.

 

How do you use Twitter? Do you use it in a similar (or vastly different) way? As noted, I’m still new to this and would love to hear your suggestions or other ideas.

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