I was somewhat amused when local TV station WCAX started using Twitter… I first learned of it when they started following my twitter feed. At first I didn’t follow them in return (purely because I am getting a lot of Twitter followers and I like to check them out before just following them), but yesterday I decided to start following them purely to have another source of local news.

Today, I saw a great example of how Twitter could be used for local alerts:

Now, working in a home office, this doesn’t really impact me, but I did call my wife who was out doing errands and let her know to avoid the highway. Tomorrow, I’ll be heading up to FacebookCamp Montreal and this type of message could help me decide which of the exits I would use to get on the highway.

Nice to see… and now a good reason for me to continue following WCAX’s feed.

There’s also an irony here, in that I don’t watch TV, so this Twitter feed is really my only exposure to WCAX and their brand. (Outside of obviously knowing that they are around.)

Technorati Tags: twitter

Despite many views that Twitter is about conversations, it’s an imperfect conversation tool at best.  Consider two recent exchanges, first via IM with a friend:

Them: dude, can you add me in Twitter?  <URL>
Me: Huh?
Them: Can you follow me in Twitter so we can communicate that way?
Me: Sure, but why given that we can already communicate this way?
Them: Because I’ve replied to several of your tweets but you don’t see them because you don’t follow me. I prefer to reply in the medium in which the question is asked.

(I added him.) And then an exchange with someone asking them why I should add them as a Facebook “friend” when I didn’t think I knew them:

Yes good question . simple Answer . We twitter mostly ( I am <twittername> ) . Also as a subscriber to your blog …<snip>

Well, no, WE don’t “twitter” because I wasn’t following the person.  (I am now.)  And in fact when I looked at their Twitter pages there were indeed several different “@danyork” posts that I have simply never seen.

This is the problem inherent with Twitter “conversations”… you don’t easily know if the other person is seeing your tweets. 

There’s the disparity between people you are following and people who are followers of your twitter stream.  When I look at my twitter page, I can see these stats:

So updates/tweets from 78 people show up in the Twitter stream that I view.  However, feeds for at least 115 people that read my Twitter feed are not being seen by me.  I say “at least” because I know of at least one person I follow who does not follow me.   There may be others.  For those 115+ people, if they put a “@danyork” at the beginning of their tweet… I won’t see it!  And so their contribution to the conversation is ignored.

Now there’s a separate discussion about why I haven’t necessarily added all those followers to the list of those I follow (and I’ll blog about that another time – suffice it to say that it’s mostly an issue of just not having the time yet to check out all the Twitter invites I receive), but for the moment let’s think about the impacts to the conversation.  The person that starts following my feed may feel compelled to answer a question I pose… or to send along a URL they think might be of interest.  Or to pose a question to me. So they do “@danyork” and type away.  I never see it and never reply.

Does the person think I am ignoring them?  Do they think I’m arrogant and don’t view their posts as worthy of responding to?

And how would the Twitter user know?  Unless he/she kept track of all the Twitter notices they received about who was following them… or went to my twitter page and looked to see if they were listed there (I’m suddenly imaging some blog readers and twitterers doing exactly that!)… they have no way to know that I am or am not following them.

So yes, Twitter is about conversations… but many of those conversations may be fractured or disjointed – or disconnected.

I was amused today to have an error connecting to Twitter and see the error message shown on the right.  Now, it wasn’t an LOLcat, but it was, indeed, a cat.

If the service isn’t going to be available, I at least like a site that attempts to put some humor into a bad situation.

Twitter has been labeled many things… but I don’t know that I’ve yet seen anyone talking about it as an outlet for fiction.  However, Scott Sigler is now experimenting with it as exactly that.  This came about because last Friday (iPhone Day, in case you have somehow forgotten), Scott started a series of tweets (first one here) that escalated into what was called the “iPhone War”.  In a series of what looked like posts from an embedded war reporter (albeit one in a dumpster), he rapidly had Canada, Mexico and Russia invading the US to get all of our iPhones, the USA being wiped out and the ultimate collapse of civilization.   (Unfortunately with Twitter in order to see them you’ll need to go back in Scott’s Twitter page to see the posts – you also can get a taste by clicking the graphic on the right to see a larger version and some of the text.)  It was an entertaining diversion to read. (Hat tip to the tweet from C.C. Chapman that clued me in to it.)

C.C. implied that the “iPhone War” storyline was picked up by other Twitterers, i.e. they joined in, but I didn’t see those tweets and unfortunately I don’t know of an easy way to pull that all together.

Scott Sigler is now continuing his experiment with another short story that he put up back on July 2nd.  Not quite as personally compelling to me as the “iPhone War”, but an interesting experiment nonetheless.   Fun to see people trying to use new tools in old ways (telling stories).

What the heck is Twitter good for, anyway?  While many of us use Twitter, I think it’s fair to say that we’re all collectively still experimenting with exactly the best ways to use it.  Certainly it has evolved from being the mundane “Went to lunch. Had a ham sandwich” into being a channel for passing around news.  I’ve certainly found links through the people I follow on Twitter far faster than I would have necessarily come across them through my RSS feeds.  (Mitch Joel has a similar story about the “Twitter News Network”.)

But what does a company do with Twitter?  How can it best be used as a communication vehicle for a company?  Obviously the BBC and others have been using it for news.  ZDNet may provide one other answer – they have a Twitter account, twitter.com/ZDNetBlogs, for following their blog postings. 

Now, you might say, isn’t that the role of an RSS feed?  Certainly.  In fact, if you go to ZDNet’s main blog page, you will see that they do, if fact, have a master RSS feed for all their blog postings (hosted by Feedburner – on a side note, I’m surprised that someone like ZDNet didn’t pay for Feedburner’s service to maintain their brand for their feed).  So the savvy web user could simply subscribe to that feed and be done with it.  I’m sure some people do.

But perhaps the point is that for people who come to use Twitter as a “news network”, this becomes a way that ZDNet can join in that newstream that people watch.  I haven’t spent much time analyzing it, but I do note that the ZDNet twitter stream is a subset of the ZDNet blog RSS feed.  Is it just certain articles they want to highlight?  Or certain blogs within their network of blogs?  I don’t know… but the net is that they are providing yet another way that people can find their way over to ZDNet’s content.    And they can see the results… there are currently 106 “Followers” of the ZDNet Blogs Twitter account.  106 people… many of whom are definitely in the “Early Adopter” camp.  Not a bad audience to get in front of if you are company with “high tech” content!

Kudos to ZDNet for experimenting with Twitter… I hope it works out for them.