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Twitter and the November 2008 Micro-Messaging Revolution: Communication, Connections, and Immediacy—140 Characters at a Time An O’Reilly Radar Report By Sarah Milstein, with Abdur Chowdhury, Gregor Hochmuth, Ben Lorica, and Roger Magoulas. Foreword by Tim O’Reilly. Contents Foreword ..................................................................................1 Preface .........................................................................................2 Introduction: What is Twitter? ...........................3 The Power of Ambient Awareness ..........................................4 The Attention Economy ........................................................... 16 A New Kind of Communication ............................................. 19 The State of Micro-Messaging ...................... 22 A Micro-History of the Medium ............................................ 22 Micro-Messaging Today ........................................................... 27 Micro-Messaging at Work ................................... 31 Micro-Messaging for External Communications ............ 31 Gathering Market Information .............................................. 35 Micro-Messaging for Internal Communications ............. 36 Make Micro-Messaging a Major Success .............................................................. 38 Best Practices for Micro-Messaging in Business .............. 38 Challenges in Micro-Messaging for Business ................... 40 The Future of Micro-Messaging .................. 43 Conclusions ........................................................................ 47 Acknowledgments ..................................................... 49 Contributors ....................................................................... 49 ©2008 O’Reilly Media, Inc. O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly Media, Inc. Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 80812 Foreword By Tim O’Reilly Like a lot of people, I didn’t think much of Twitter at first. daughter is home visiting from college. I gain a new kind I signed up to check it out, but didn’t find much there for of ambient intimacy with members of my own family. And me. I wasn’t interested in hearing about where people before long, I’m tweeting personal bits too. It’s been a long were having coffee, what they had for dinner, or who day, I’m relaxing and making raspberry jam. “How much they were hanging out with. It seemed like a great appli- sugar do you use?” asks one follower. “However much cation for people with too much time on their hands. you like, if you use Pomona’s Universal Pectin,” I reply. But some months later I was back. Because Twitter lets And so, through the minutia of casual interaction, we anyone “follow” any other user, rather than requesting a see the power of conversational marketing, as ordinary formal declaration of “friendship,” and because I’m a well- people share what they do and what they care about. known person, one day I realized that I had about 5000 And of course, from there, I learn to post teasers about people following me on Twitter, waiting to hear from me. my own company’s products. I share product announce- Huh? I’d better give them something to follow, I thought. ments, ask for advice about what questions to ask panelists So I started posting. But because I’m a serious guy, I’m interviewing on stage at my conferences, confident I tended to post links to what I was reading or writing, that I can reach thousands of my best customers with not what I was eating or drinking. And I noticed that lots a tool so lightweight that it enables conversations that of other people were doing that too. Before long, I found I would never have been able to have otherwise. myself using Twitter as my principal source of news, So, if you wonder whether Twitter matters for busi- forgoing my RSS reader for the more varied and stimulat- ness, remember, if you will, when people new to cell ing flow that comes from people sharing the very best phones used to call each other to report the most trivial things that they’ve read lately. details of where they were and what they were doing; And because I was using Twhirl, a Twitter client that remember how blogs at first were thought of merely as has an easy button for “retweeting”—that is, passing on personal diaries of no interest to anyone in business, and the best tweets from someone you’re following, I soon how they grew up to become the heart of a new media found that I had a great opportunity to bring attention paradigm. For that matter, remember how the personal to insights from people who had fewer followers than computer was dismissed by the titans of the computer I did. All those pieces I read that I couldn’t get around to industry as nothing but a toy. writing a full blog post about could be retweeted in an The future often comes to us in disguise, with toys instant. I’ve now got about 12,000 direct followers, but that grow up to spark a business revolution. calculations by some of the Twitter influence measure- Twitter is like that. Ignore it at your peril. It is already ment sites project that that means I have potential access a powerful tool of competitive advantage for companies to millions of Twitter users, as others retweet my most rel- like O’Reilly Media, Forrester Research, Comcast, and evant comments. What’s more, the network is still young. Zappos. This report introduces Twitter, tells war stories At the same time as I found Twitter a great tool in my from its early practitioners, outlines best practices and the role as an information switchboard for people who care rapidly evolving landscape of third party applications and about new trends in technology, I also came to appreci- other tools that help you make use of the Twitter platform. ate its original promise, as a tool for keeping in touch P.S. I’m @timoreilly on Twitter, just like I’m tim@oreilly. with people’s ordinary lives. I learn from my brother’s com on email. If your name and brand matters to you, tweets that my niece has a new boyfriend, that his other there are advantages to getting on a platform early. 1 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution Preface By Sarah Milstein On a rainy evening in March 2006, my partner, Tony, doing—anywhere I happened to be. And none of it came home after work excited. At the time, he was the sucked up much time because Twttr limited messages director of engineering at Odeo, a podcast startup, and to 140 characters (which keeps each update and the he hadn’t been energized by his days in a while. So I was username that sent it within the 160-character limit of surprised when he rushed in talking about one of the a single SMS, or short message service, the communica- engineers in his group and said, “You’ve gotta try this tions protocol used for mobile-phone texting), and it let thing Jack cooked up. It’s addictive!” me choose whose updates I was going to receive. The URL was www.twttr.com, and the page was white From the first day Twttr launched in private beta, I with just a few words in a plain black font asking for my was hooked. I try a lot of web services, but few have stay- mobile number. It took a few minutes to give Twttr my ing power in my life, and I rarely predict that any will take information and get my phone set up with the service’s off. Twttr, though, struck me right away as interesting SMS code, 40404. And then I started answering the ques- and useful and fun. After five minutes of playing with it, tion Twttr asked: “What are you doing?” I turned to Tony and said, “This is going to be huge, and Right away, that was fun and cool—I could use my people are going to use it in amazing ways we can’t phone or laptop to let other people know what I was up predict right now.” Two and a half years later, I’m shocked to, and they could find out anywhere they happened to have made a dead-accurate call, but I’m not at all to be. But then it got better: I could follow other people surprised that it’s come true.1 on Twttr and learn about what they were thinking and 1. Tony and I have no financial stake in Twitter. 2 : Twitter and the Micro-Messaging Revolution Twitter and the Micro- Messaging Revolution phenomenon as “co-presence,” or the sense of being with Introduction: others.3 Non-academics, when they have a name for it at all, call it “ambient intimacy” or, more commonly in work What is Twitter? situations, “ambient awareness.” Over time, people have begun to share not only status witter2 is a device-agnostic real-time updates on what they’re doing, but also updates on message-routing platform—which is a fancy what they’re reading. So although Twitter asks “What are way of saying that it can send messages to you doing?”, people are increasingly using it to talk about and receive them from a variety of devices what they’re reading, watching, and thinking about. Put Tsimultaneously, at the moment a message is sent. another way, Twitter is more and more becoming a key That’s a powerful communications base. player in the attention economy, distributing comments When you combine it with a short messaging form about what its users are paying attention to, what they that not only lets people quickly create and consume have opinions about, and what they have expertise in. updates, but also lets them choose the people they’ll In this report, we’ll look in detail at ambient aware- receive messages from, Twitter turns out to meet a lot ness and the attention economy, along with other of personal and professional needs. (If you haven’t used emerging aspects of Twitter and similar services. Twitter yet or aren’t familiar with the follower model, the box on page 12 shows you how it works.) At first, people used Twitter to answer the ques- Twitter Company Facts tion it posed: “What are you doing?” People let others Company name: Twitter, Inc.

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