Twitter - Thomas Petersen - 2009 06 08

How a small bird ended up on the cover of Time Magazine hailed as the new GM

By Thomas Petersen

Setting the scene

Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes.

A better procedure is to pretend that those books already exist and to offer a summary, a commentary.

– Jorge Luis Borges

SMS on Steroids

The Twittersphere

The place that people are tweeting is called the twittersphereIt launched with 1000 people all connected in 2006. By 2009 it had more than 6 million users and is currently increasing with 1030% a month

Asynchronous, you follow me

Say hello in 140 characters

Once you start tweeting everyone who follows you will receive your broadcast. They can then choose to just read it or reply on it or re-tweet it. Re-tweets is the currency of the twittersphere because it shows your name and thus make more people follow you.

Symbols mean different thing # @ $

Twitter have expanded beyond what the original creators wanted it to do. You can tag your tweets with a hashtag (#) witch allows for people to search for everything related to that specific tag. You can also use @ if you want to address or refer to other twitter users in your tweet.

Mashing up private and professional

Celebs who use twitter

Multiple Uses

Barack Obama embraces Twitter

”Arrested”

Social Media Coming of age in 2008

During the 2008 Mumbai attacks, eyewitnesses sent an estimated 80 tweets every five seconds as the tragedy unfolded. The use of Twitter by victims, bystanders, and the public to gather news and coordinate responses to the November 2008 Mumbai siege led CNN to call it "the day that social media appeared to come of age.”

News before the News at Hudson

Hack Education (#hackedu)

Inviting everyone to participate

Hello at Roskilde Festival

Community developed services

Most interesting is the fact that it’s the twitter community that have pushed new features and products through the public API. Hundreds of new products and services have been developed. Purely by the community and twitter have become a great tool for research.

Multiple layers of Communication

A Global Brain?

That is how a small bird ended up on the cover of Time