Tasha Harrison

The thing that makes Twitter so amazing isn’t Twitter itself, but the users. It is the users of Twitter that have made up many of the rules and multitude of applications.

Here are my top five applications:

1. Tweetdeck
   As a friend of mine put it, ‘So that’s what Twitter should look like’. It enables you to organise your followers into columns, so you no longer view everyone in one large stream. You can also manage multiple accounts, follow a particular hashtag and find and follow new Tweeps. It has the ability to integrate bit.ly, so you can monitor how many people are clicking on your links. (Also see Hootsuite, some people prefer it!)
2. Mr Tweet
   Discover new Tweeters and get new followers. This site sends you a regular update and helps build your network by recommending new people to follow. It also allows you to recommend your favourite Tweeps.
3. TweetEffect
   See your most effective Tweets, which helped you gain followers and which caused you to lose them.
4. WeFollow
   An excellently organised directory. Search by your industry or interest and find the most influencial Tweeps to follow.
5. Twitpic
   The easiest way to share pictures on Twitter. Upload your photo and it Tweets it to all your followers. It is also possible to integrate with Tweetdeck, so you only need to use one application.

When measuring the success of your Tweeting it is important not to simply count the number of followers you have. You need to think about how many potential people are within your network.

For example, let’s imagine you have 200 followers. 2 of those followers retweet your link to their 200 followers. Suddenly you have reached a potential 600 people.

Before Twitter all of our thoughts where focussed into our blog and discussions took place on both our own blogs and other people’s blogs.  You referred to other’s blogs in your own posts and continued the conversation that way.

Now we see a blog post that we find interesting, Tweet it and then continue the conversation on Twitter.  Obviously conversations do still continue on the blog post as it is easier to comment and follow the discussion within that format, but has Twitter diluted the discussion and caused us to blog less?  Instead of sharing our ideas in a well thought out blog post do we simply quickly write them out in 140 characters, possibly losing the essence of what we mean?

As Twitter is evolving I am finding that my blog is still the best place to publish my main ideas, but I’m not sure that this is the case for everyone. It will be interesting to see how blogs evolve and whether micro-blogging is sustainable within the whirlwind of spam that is currently afflicting it.

Last week Rupert Murdoch announced that his newspapers would start charging for online content.  One of the main challenges News Corp will face is that the majority of their competition is offering the same product for free.  All of the big UK newspapers have free content, so the only hope that Murdoch has of making money is that either people are willing to pay for his content, or that his competitors start charging as well.  His belief may be that eventually other newspapers will realise that they have to charge in order to make any money and that his decision will save the industry.

The big problem facing newspapers is that people can read news online for free.  They no longer have to buy a newspaper to find out what’s happening in the world.  The online news is more up to date, sometimes instant.  The way people receive news is changing, the internet offers real time information.  Blogging and micro-blogging are creating a whole new type of journalism, where anyone can report an event almost instantaneously.  Blogs give us the opinions of not only a selected few journalists, but of regular people, not influenced by editors who need stories that sell.

In his book, Flat Earth News, Nick Davies explains how Fleet Street has become increasingly corrupted by the need to make money.  Fewer journalists covering less space has led to a greater reliance on news and PR agencies, which has led to the rapid deterioration of the quality of our news.

The internet has simply highlighted the plight of an industry already struggling.  The same news stories are repeated across all the major news outlets, usually taken from the same copy written by a single journalist at the associated press.  Many people now receive their news through a Google newsfeed on their iGoogle homepage or from a real time micro-blogging feed such as Twitter.  With sites such as the BBC able to offer free news as a public service, online newspapers don’t really stand much of a chance in the longterm. But far from being the fault of the internet, it is simply their inability to react to a fast changing world.

Read “Is Murdoch’s Plan to Charge for Online News Doomed?” for an excellent insight into how the subscription system could work.