Twitter, What I learnt recently!

I am a late adopter. Noticed it since inception, but it seemed silly to me to pay attention. Oops!
Fast forward to November 2008, almost everyone I know is in Twitter. I decided to setup an account, log in and post a few tweets and accumulate a few followers. Kind of a slow start. Fast forward 6 months, May 30, 2009, Time publishes this seminal article (IMHO) regarding Twitter:

Here is my digest:
A. Twitter has an estimated 32 Million users growing at 50-100% a month. Wow!

B. From Britney Spears to Lance ArmStrong, all celebs are on Twitter. Who am I to resist?

C. Time predicts that it will have a *profound* influence on our life and businesses. From brand marketing, conducting surveys, micropayments, media and government alerts to local businesses Twitter may become the platform to play on. Hmm!

If you want to read the whole thing check it out the Time article.


Now, I am techie type. At least, that is what I think of myself! So hunting around for where I can learn more, I found a Youtube Video by none other than Mr. Tim O’Reilly. Mr. Web 2.0 himself! He has recently co-authored a book on Tips and Tricks of Twitter. I would provide my summary as a list of key questions to you.

Assuming you already have a Twitter account and have done some tweets and friends, do you know?

1. How to ReTweet?
2. How to Search for People, Words, Places and yes Attitudes?
3. How to Track Trends?
4. What is a hashtag? E.g. #wave
5. How to send a direct message using @
6. Do you have desktop tool like Twhirl?
7. Have you setup a way to track links using a service like http://bit.ly/
8. Are you familiar with interesting services like stocktwits or twitpay?
9. How some large businesses are using or thinking of using Twitter?
10. How the entire ecosystem might evolve?

I guess unlike me you are already up to speed. Just in case you are not, you might want to check out the YouTube video

Best regards, Somnath

p.s. Decorated the links auto-magically using Zemanta. Totally cool stuff!!!