How to Twitter - WSJ.Com

How to Twitter - WSJ.com http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638550095558381.html?mo...

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1 of 9 2 of 9 3 of 9 TOP STORIES IN How to Twitter Breaking Apple's Music Publisher Fails in Former Qwest CEO Seeks New Technology Grip on the iPhone Royalty Bid Trial

THE DECODER MARCH 7, 2009 How to Twitter By JULIA ANGWIN The social rules and tips for gaining 'followers'; why opinionated people win

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When I first joined Twitter, I felt like I was in a noisy bar where everyone was shouting and nobody was listening.

Soon, I began to decode its many mysteries: Read More how to find a flock of followers, how to talk to (Not Quite) Earning a Living on Twitter them in a medium that blasts to lots of people Actress Fran Drescher's Take on Twitter at once and how to be witty in very tiny Twitter Applications doses. There are thousands of third-party applications built to enhance the Twitter experience -- these Twitter is a mass text-messaging service that are just a few of the popular ones. allows you to send short 140-character Twitpic: Post a photo on Twitpic, and then share updates -- or "tweets" -- to a bunch of people the Twitpic link via Twitter. at once. They are your "followers." It was Twhirl: Desktop software to help you manage designed to be read on a cellphone, though your Twitter account, find your @replies and many people read it online, too. shorten URLs so they can be shared on Twitter. Email Newsletters and Alerts Tipjoy: A service that lets you send small Suddenly a lot of non-tweeters are starting to amounts of cash across Twitter, and then tweet The latest news and analysis delivered to your in-box. Check the about your donation. feel left out. On "The Daily Show" this week, boxes below to sign up. host Jon Stewart reported on Twitter with a Twibs: A list of businesses on Twitter with links to their Twitter accounts. wink (or was it a twink?) at the narcissism of RTE Newsletter News Alert the personal broadcasting system. It has a TweetDeck: Desktop software that lets people SIGN UP split their tweets into columns, such as @replies, world-wide audience of six million unique direct messages, groups and keyword searches. visitors a month, up from 1.2 million a year New! To sign up for Keyword or To view or change all of your Twitterholic: Ranks Twitter users by number of ago, according to ComScore Media Metrix. Symbol Alerts click here. email settings, visit the Email followers. Setup Center. Twitturly: Tracks which URLs are most popular on But I have to admit I didn't understand the Twitter, based on how many times they've been appeal of Twitter when I joined, at the shared by Twitter users. prodding of friends, in November. One Recent Columns Monitter: An easy way to keep tabs on multiple answer that explains its popularity: It's not searches on Twitter at the same time. How to Twitter about chatting with your friends -- it's about Recipe for a Successful Viral Video promoting yourself. A Makeover for Your Google Results My name was available, so I set up a profile at twitter.com/JuliaAngwin. On Twitter, however, you do not exist without followers, who subscribe to receive your messages. So I set out to follow some people in the hope that they would follow me. About Julia Angwin

I had to learn the crucial distinction between a "follower" and a "friend." On Facebook, if I'm your Julia Angwin is WSJ.com's senior technology editor. She has been friend, you're my friend, and we can read all about each other. Relationships on Twitter are not a leading national technology reporter for more than a decade. She reciprocal: People you follow do not have to follow you or give you permission to follow them. started her career writing about technology for the San Francisco You just sign up and start following them. It's a bit like stalking. Heather Gold, a comedian and Chronicle and joined the Journal in 2000 to cover the convergence Twitter devotee, points out that for all its flaws, the term follower "is more honest than friend." of technology and media. She shared in a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting in 2003. She most recently covered MySpace At first, I was the loneliest of social creatures -- a leader without followers. I tried searching for and News Corp. for the Media and Marketing bureau in New York. Her book, "Stealing MySpace", will be published by Random House

1 of 4 3/8/09 4:01 PM How to Twitter - WSJ.com http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638550095558381.html?mo...

my actual real-world friends using Twitter's "Find People" function, but it was down the day I in March. joined. (Twitter is growing so fast that short outages are not unusual.) People Who Viewed This Also Viewed... So I asked a few colleagues for their Twitter addresses and began following them. I also searched their public lists of followers and who they followed. On WSJ.com In My Network

Eventually, I cobbled together a mix of people I could follow: media colleagues, friends, bloggers Actress Fran Drescher's Take on Twitter

and various people who are known as great "tweeters," such as the chief executive of online (Not Quite) Earning a Living on Twitter retailer Zappos.com, Tony Hsieh, who has written quite movingly on his blog about how Twitter has changed his life. He says that being forced to bear witness to his life in 140-character bursts Breaking Apple's Grip on the iPhone

of prose has made him more grateful for the good moments and more amused by the bad 10 Ways to Save Money Ordering Wine moments. Did Reagan Try to Convert Gorbachev? I discovered that a better way to get followers Celebrity Tweeting was to tweet. Every time I tweeted, I got a Video Twitter is gaining popularity as a way to reach surge of followers. fans, plug new projects and act like BFFs. Some recent updates from high-profile Twitter users: Where were they coming from? The likely answer illuminates Twitter's greatest strength:

It's easily searchable. U.S. Secretary of Deadly Attack in A Look Inside During the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in State Clinton Visits Pakistan China's NPC Turkey 2:40 3:45 November, people scoured Twitter for 3:35 postings from eye witnesses. When US Airways Flight 1549 landed in the Hudson River, one of the first pictures was posted as More in Personal Technology a link on Twitter. Breaking Apple's Grip on the iPhone Similar news items may have appeared on other social networks, but they were not as Most Popular easy to discover. On Facebook, most people's information is viewable only by their approved friends. MySpace profile pages are searchable, but not its blogs or status updates, and it is hard Read Emailed Video Commented to find anyone you know because most people obscure their real names. 1. Breaking Apple's Grip On The IPhone Now, a gaggle of unknown followers were finding something in my tweets -- and following me! 2. The GOP's Limbaugh Dilemma I quickly found that my general musings about life such as -- "thank god they have wifi on jury 3. Opinion: Obama Channels Cheney duty" -- fell like a dead weight, eliciting no response. A larger problem was that it was hard to How To Twitter tweet when I didn't know whom I was tweeting to. Unlike Facebook, where I know each and 4. every one of my 287 friends, I have never met or heard of the majority of the 221 people 5. Opinion: Michael J. Boskin: Obama's Radicalism Is following me on Twitter. Killing The Dow

To understand the medium, I studied others' tweets. Former Time magazine writer Ana Marie Most Read Articles Feed Cox's tweets are a poetic mix of moments like this: "Afternoon walk. Beautiful day, I now see."

And she included wry political commentary. Latest Headlines Forwarding a tweet from Sen. John McCain during the presidential election, she wrote: Town Offers Glimpse Into Jobs Woes "See, if only he had sent this a year earlier... More Headlines RT@senjohnmccain "YEs!! I am twittering on my blackberry but not without a little help!"

I spent a surprising amount of time trying out Adult Learners Deserve Top-notch tweets in my head before tweeting. I aimed to Online Universities tweet once a day, but often came up short. I found it difficult to fit in both news and The Secrets to Successful eBay opinion. Without a point of view, though, my Selling updates were pretty boring. So, for instance, I changed "eating strawberries during a Stuart Bradford snowstorm." Into "eating strawberries during Raise Your 2009 Credit Score Now a snowstorm. not carbon efficient but lovely."

Another trick: including a short link to a Web site, or my own stories (using link-shrinking services like TinyURL), let me use most of the rest of the 140 characters to compose a thought.

I found a good way to get followers was to get "retweeted" -- meaning that someone would pick up my tweet and send it to their followers preceded by the code "RT @juliaangwin." When I tweeted about being interviewed by Wired.com recently, two colleagues retweeted my tweet. Seven of their followers then retweeted it. As a result, I gained 22 new followers.

People also seem eager to answer questions on Twitter. I came across 25-year-old Justin

2 of 4 3/8/09 4:01 PM How to Twitter - WSJ.com http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123638550095558381.html?mo...

Rockwell, who was spending so much time answering people's tweets about how to build better Web pages that he says he decided to try it as a business. He now makes about $350 a week scouring Twitter for people tweeting about their problems building Web pages. Using the Twitter ID ThatCSSGuy (which refers to a Web program called CSS), he offers to help solve their problems and asks for a tip in return.

But I found it difficult to acknowledge answers I received on Twitter. Twitter's reply features felt clumsy. The easiest way to reply to a tweet is to hit the @reply icon which broadcasts your answer to all your followers, essentially Twitter's equivalent of the "reply all" email function. As a result, I often didn't reply because I didn't want to spam everyone with a bunch of "thanks for your feedback" messages. So I was silent -- which made me feel even more antisocial.

Twitter wasn't designed for these kinds of social interaction or conversations. As Twitter co-founder Biz Stone told me, "Twitter is fundamentally a broadcast system." The messaging features were add-ons.

Twitter is useful precisely because so many people are talking about different things at once. When he was president of Sling Media, for instance, Jason Hirschhorn constantly monitored the keyword "sling" on Twitter. "It's an up-to-the minute temperature of what people are saying about your brand," he said. He left the consumer electronics company last month.

There are more than 2,000 Twitter applications made by other people to help you sort through all the tweets. One of my favorites is Twitturly.com, which tracks the most popular URLs (or Web links) being shared across Twitter. Others such as Tweetdeck and Twhirl, help you manage and organize your tweets.

Still, the beauty of Twitter is that you don't have to commit to it; no one expects you to read all the tweets rolling in. As a result, Twitter makes for very good people watching -- even if you don't go home with anyone you meet there.

Write to Julia Angwin at [email protected]

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