My view about life is that if something is good enough for the DalaiLama, it's good enough for me. Thus my recent interest in Twitter.
Some time back, a hoax account purporting to be the Dalai Lama appeared on Twitter and was exposed. But now we have the real deal, an account @DalaiLama which has been confirmed to be authentic. Thus we have such tweets as this: "Oh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness." Now that's the real deal.
Well, who knows who actually sends these tweets for the Dalai Lama, but they do come from an account associated with him. His interest, like mine, may have been tweaked by Twitter's growth. It now gets 50 million non-spam messages a day, which might seem like a lot until you compare it to the true social networking giants. YouTube, for example, serves up a billion videos daily, while Facebook racks up 8 billion minutes spent on the site every day and, on a busy day, 1.2 million photos served up to users every second.
Twitter, then, although it's growing nicely, is still a baby compared to the competition, and I can see why. I ran down this service mercilessly when it first appeared, seeing little value in popping 140 characters of text or less up on people's smartphones.
Then the streets of Iran filled up with courageous protesters who got the word out about their brutal regime on Twitter. More or less at the same time a friend in the aerospace business challenged me to use Twitter for a month.
"Go on," he said. "I guarantee you won't be able to live without it."
Despite the exaggeration, I've indeed found Twitter to be, well, indispensable.
The breakthrough came after about a week of use with the silly Web interface, www.twitter.com, where I despaired of doing anything useful, when in frustration I downloaded Tweetdeck, a third-party Twitter manager, www.tweetdeck.com.
The free Tweetdeck can handle other forms of social media such as Facebook, so you can aggregate your networking in a single place. For me it was a gateway to learning how to maximize Twitter for my own use.
So if, like me, you're baffled by this service, consider this. Twitter operates on a model that lets you "follow" anyone you wish, which is how I now connect with the Dalai Lama. But much more usefully, it's entirely searchable.
Using Tweetdeck, I found I could easily pop a search term into the mix and in return, I would get a constantly updating stream of tweets in which that topic was mentioned. The tweets briefly appear in a pop-up window and are then added to Tweetdeck's multiple-column interface for easy reference.
When the attempted Christmas Day bombing was all over the news, I plugged in "detroit" and wound up with a steady stream of tweets from the airport itself as people passed along what they were seeing while the airplane was still sitting on the tarmac. So Twitter becomes a quick way to get breaking news not from edited sources but from whoever happens to be on the spot, a feature I've turned to for stories momentous as well as trivial.
Heavenly hashtags
The search function can be tweaked in useful ways. Recently I was looking for information about the American Astronomical Society's meeting in Washington. I discovered that by using so-called hashtags, I could quickly pull quality material. It turned out that people attending the conference were using "#aas" to identify all their tweets from its various sessions. It's now common practice for gatherings like this to be identified by a hashtag identifier, so that setting it up as your keyword allows highly precise updates.
You'll find that Twitter can be a terrifically useful tool. When Apple introduced the iPad, the #ipad hashtag popped up quick reactions to the product introduction. Play around with hashtags and you can let your imagination roam, for Twitter is a stream of interesting material if you know how to look.
You would think with all this tweeting going on, Twitter would be a big moneymaker, but like Facebook, it faces the challenge of monetizing social media, an issue which is more problematic than it might appear.
The inevitable ads
How to make money without alienating your user base? We may learn soon, for the buzz is that Twitter is about to release some kind of advertising platform, one that may turn up within the next few weeks. Evidently tweets from advertisers will be clearly marked, but I must say I dread their introduction. I doubt they'll do anything but turn existing Twitter users off, and would be astounded if anyone makes serious money from tweets. We'll see, but my guess is that Twitter's utility is balanced by a serious inability to generate revenues.
