April 25, 2008
Going viral at Web 2.0
It has been more than a year since we flagged Twitter as the most buzzworthy social application in Silicon Valley. Thirteen months later, the micro-blogging site, which allows users to follow each others’ short online updates, has become an indispensible tool for the online cognoscenti who have gathered at San Francisco’s Moscone Center for this year’s Web 2.0 expo.
Jenn Van Grove, a social media consultant, says Twitter helps her follow the latest online buzz and keep in touch with hard-to-reach people. “If I need to get in touch with someone, Twitter is much faster than email,” she says.
Ryan Kuder, a former Yahoo who is working on a new web startup, assured me that time invested keeping track of contacts on Twitter returns dividends. ”People ask if you can spend too much time on Twitter,” he says. “I say you can’t spend enough.”
Sceptical journalist that I am, I signed up for Twitter in March of last year but never really got into the service. Intrigued, I dug out my Twitter ID and passed it along to Jenn, Ryan and a few other bloggers seated at our table inside the Web 2.0 blogger lounge. I have now been Twittering for all of two hours, and thanks to my new Twitter friends, I’ve managed to attract more than 50 followers. Better late than never, I suppose.
Tags: Digital media, Internet, twitter, web2.0
It’s been fun getting you on Twitter, Kevin! Welcome to Web 2.0.
Posted by: Ryan Kuder | April 25th, 2008 at 1:04 am | Report this commentLike Kevin, I was long sceptical about Twitter. I registered my name but then did nothing. Eventually - after pummeling by online buddies - I activated my account.
After a week of intensive twittering (doesn’t sound very ‘biz’, does it?) I spent a week skiing in Norway and somehow managed to live without any social media.
Back at home I lasted another week without and thought that was it, my experiment was over.
But then somebody gave me a few ‘names’ to follow and that was good advice. There’s a lot of dippy dross on Twitter, but there’s also some hot stuff. Lots of journalistic leads, if you plug into the right people.
Posted by: Carlton Reid | April 25th, 2008 at 1:14 am | Report this commentThe funny thing is that Twitter sometimes get labeled as just noise, but the reality is that Twitter has changed my professional life for the better. Not only can I follow the most brilliant minds in the web/tech space, but I now have a way to converse with them in real-time. Plus it’s really easy to walk up to the internet famous and introduce yourself with the line, “oh hey, I’m following you on Twitter.” You wouldn’t believe how effective it has been in getting people to pay attention to me.
Posted by: Jennifer Van Grove | April 25th, 2008 at 1:17 am | Report this commentI forgot to mention that Twitter has so much power; all public tweets are indexed by Google. I’ve been blogging and tweeting about how Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf needs to get with the social times. They’re not paying attention to me, but Google certainly is. For about a month, one of my tweets about CBTL was the #1 result on Google if you did a search for “cbtl mission valley” (a search for “cbtl twitter” returns a lot of my tweets too).
Posted by: Jennifer Van Grove | April 25th, 2008 at 1:30 am | Report this comment