Experience Matters

Stop Being a Hater and Learn to Love Twitter

In under two years, Twitter has gone from curious startup to one of the most talked about services on the web. Twitter’s ubiquity online has people abandoning their blogs for its simplicity and others deleting their Twitter accounts for the sake of their blogs and general productivity.

Despite this popularity there are still people who are either confused by or contemptuous towards Twitter. For the confused, there are dozens of places that can explain the basics, the best of which are Twitter in Plain English and Clive Thompson’s assessment of Twitter as a Social Sixth Sense. But what about all the haters?

I fell in love with Twitter at SXSW 2007. In the confines of the conference it was great. In Austin I could organize an impromptu lunch gathering with other SXSW attendees at a restaurant that came highly recommended by people who went there for lunch the previous day, all with a well-timed “thinking about grabbing some food” on Twitter. Once I returned to Calgary I made fewer and fewer updates, sometimes going a couple days between posts. Then it occurred to me: Twitter wasn’t offering me any value. I was following people I didn’t care about and had followers who didn’t care about me. We were “friends” in name alone. So I purged my list and set some new rules to get more out of my experience.

1. “Friend” Your Friends
Add meatspace friends, co-workers and other acquaintances. These are the people who give you that “sixth sense.” As Thompson noted:

“It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity.

Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.”

The people I follow on Twitter who I also know socially or professionally are the ones I tend to watch more closely. There’s a baseline of understanding and trust that you can’t have with people you’ve never actually met, plus they are more likely to say things that affect you in some way.

2. Go Local
Start with TwitterLocal. Finding people who live in the same city as you connects you to local events and happenings you may not be aware of. It’s also a decent way to meet people and make new friends. I’ve met a couple of people through Twitter now, and have started to realize that Twitter attracts a certain type of person, which means you may find you have other things in common (usually Guitar Hero).

Also, follow the local Twitter memes. Here in Calgary, users tag city-related messages with #YYC so we can track locally without having to follow everyone within 100 miles. And the tagging has spread – during a recent and quite unseasonable snowstorm, Calgary Twitter users were tagging photos on Flickr with twitter#yyc.

3. People You Like
Bloggers love Twitter. If you like reading someone’s blog, chances are you’ll enjoy following them on Twitter. In fact, a lot of people will send dozens of interesting links to their Twitter feeds that never appear in their blog posts (Armano, I’m looking at you).

4. People Like You
I’m a copywriter. I ran a quick search from the Twitter homepage for “copywriter.” This turned up a couple dozen people. Again, it was all about a common interest – these are people who spend at least 40 hours per week doing pretty much the exact same thing I’m doing. Surely we’ll find each other at least moderately interesting.

5. Leave the Browser
If you’re only updating and reading Twitter from Twitter.com, you’re not embracing the experience. Twitter is about what’s happening right now, so logging into your Twitter page once a day probably won’t be of much interest to you. I use Twitterific on my desktop and Twinkle on my iPhone (note: Twinkle is for unlocked iPhones; if your iPhone is still legit, try the Hahlo web app), but there are dozens of ways to access the service.

6. Just Use It
One thing I’ve noticed is that everyone finds their own stride on Twitter. Robert Scoble “follows” over 21,000 people. It’s a number I find both staggering and ridiculous, but it seems to work for him. Me, I like to keep my list at about 100-150, and when I add new people I make a point of removing others who aren’t giving me much of interest (you aren’t bad people, we’ve just grown apart… It’s not you, it’s me).

The important thing is that you make updates and follow other people. Eventually, it becomes as much a part of your day as checking e-mail. Someone mentioned to me they didn’t use it because they felt Facebook was a more complete social application. In some respects this might be true, but Twitter isn’t Facebook. It’s not even the Facebook status update box. Twitter is it’s own thing with it’s own pros and cons. I use a lot of social apps (occupational hazard) and if I could only keep one, it’d probably be Flickr. But if I could keep two, I’d take Twitter over Facebook, MySpace, Vimeo, YouTube, Last.FM, LinkedIn, and Del.icio.us in a second.

Footnote: Post title inspired Alan Sepinwall’s seminal work, Stop Being a Hater and Learn to Love the O.C.