Webdesign - defunkt.nu User friendly webdesign

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  Twitter’s gets it name from the noise of birds. A message is called a tweet.

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  The Sporza.be Twitter news block.

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  Nambu, one of the programs to follow your Tweets.

The latest Tour De France made it really clear. Twitter is being used a lot and the content that appears on it is spread around the web with ease. On Sporza.be (Belgian sports site), had constant news updates in a Twitter Tour De France block. The news block was populated by a list of Twitter users that Sporza deemed important for the Tour De France. They also could have built a list of Twitter users that put #tdf in their message. That code is a hashtag. A topic that gets a lot of Twitter messages usualy also gets a specific code that makes it easy to tag and find messages about the subject. So, the hashtag for all Tour De France news is #tdf.

On Twitter, it’s easy to choose who’s messages you want to follow. More interestingly, you don’t have to follow a specific person. You can follow everyone who talks about Apple Stock, massage techniques, badminton… You can also respond to anything that is being said. This makes Twitter a really powerful way of communicating. It becomes even more important when you have a well known brand or product. You really should follow up on what people are saying about you. And where necessary, join in on the conversation. If you don’t have a well known brand (yet), you can read and write messages that concern your companies activities. Does your company work with horses? Why not follow Twitter messages about horse racing, horse stables,…

It’s a way to easily communicate with people within your line of work and (potential) customers. You can read these messages (also called Tweets) on the site of Twitter (www.twitter.com) or with a special application (like TweetDeck). Another possibility is to feed your own Tweets (or Tweets of a list of Twitter users, or Tweets about a specific topic) to your website.

Tweets are small pieces of information that really capture what people all around the world are saying about a subject. With the huge amount of software and other ways to share them, the opportunities to dive into the Twitter stream are virtually limitless. A nice example of how far you can take this is FlipBoard. This application for the Apple iPad harvests all links from Tweets (and FaceBook messages) of people you follow and builds a magazine of articles from them:

Twitter’s base concept is really simple: a 140 characters message that you can share with friends. The ways people are using it are limitless. Some people enjoy the 140 character limit as a challenge akin to poetry. Tweets are also used for informal get-togethers. In Belgium, Twunches (Twitter users that go out to eat lunch together) and Twoozes (the same, but in a bar) are already well-known.

Want to find out if your company can benefit from Twitter? Contact me.