News on Twitter

Join the Twitterati

February 12, 2009
LiveWire, The Age,

It's the latest next big thing on the internet and there's still time to get in on the ground floor. Nick Ross reports.


MY FACEBOOK page is feeling a touch neglected. So many friends and acquaintances have joined that the tsunami of information updates, requests and notifications has become rather unmanageable and even a little daunting.

Twitter has been going for a few years now and is experiencing an explosion in popularity akin to Facebook. If you're already familiar with Facebook, then Twitter is a "status update only" version of that: easily digestible, bite-size blogs that are limited to 140 characters and track what people are doing, reading, viewing and talking about throughout the day. You can't post pictures but you can link to them via twitpics.com, and much of the most interesting content is gleaned from posted weblinks.

Some news organisations believe it's the fastest way of gleaning news. The first anyone heard of US Airways Flight 1549 ditching in the Hudson River was when Janis Krums, on one of the nearby ships, took a picture on an iPhone and posted it on Twitpics. "There's a plane in the Hudson. I'm on the ferry going to pick up the people. Crazy" went the "tweet".

In the early days of the website MySpace, celebrities and bands wrote their own MySpace pages. However, as popularity and complexity grew, pretty soon they were all being farmed out to agents. Few celebrities embraced Facebookstrangers, but Twitter is new again.

British author and performer Stephen Fry is a major Twitter advocate, to the point where he has become a willing, unofficial spokesman. He also responds to his followers although he says it's getting trickier as the numbers grow.

He freely admits that much of what he writes should be of little interest, but it's more of an open diary and many of his "on set" filming posts are intriguing. Not so long ago he celebrated having 50,000 followers. Less than a fortnight later it was 100,000 (it's probably much higher now). Only Barack Obama has more followers (a quarter of a million at the time of writing).

The minimal effort involved in tweeting, tied with the potentially huge rewards from having a massive attentive audience on your virtual doorstep, can be invaluable when it comes to doing something like writing a book or calling on people to vote. Reliance on PR and publicists diminishes as personalities can remain in the spotlight, or take a break from it at their leisure, and yet always return to a potentially huge targeted audience.

Basketballer Shaquille O'Neal recently tweeted, "Don't believe crappy websites such as mediatakeout.com. If it doesn't come from me verbally or twitter wise, disregard. The horse has spoken" (sic). We think he's taking it seriously.

Australian twitterers lag behind in adoption. At the time of writing only Tourism Queensland had scraped together 1000 followers. Sky News was the largest media organisation with fewer than 500 followers, while The Age was the largest newspaper at 250. KevinRuddPM has a presence with almost 6000 followers, but updates are posted by an aide rather than the man himself.

Many businesses will try to block it, as with other social networking sites, but there are few better ways of keeping in touch with customers, colleagues and clients. The absence of pictures and videos (and the newness of the whole thing) will hopefully let it slip under the radar of anxious network administrators.

Things will doubtless change as popularity grows, and it's a given that many will choose to abuse its power by spamming and selling products. While existing Twitter aficionados might disagree about its future, Twitter is still at the ground floor and about to grow into something massive.