Twitter for Dummies (34 page)

So, what does all this connectedness have to do with you? If you listen to longtime Twitter users talk about it, you may start to feel like there are a whole lot of shared memories and assumptions that you’re not a part of. Don’t worry: New people are joining Twitter all the time. From the period of November 2008 until the final touches were put on this book, Twitter doubled at least three times. That means pretty much everyone is new, and you shouldn’t feel shy about what came before. We’re just filling you in on it so that you have some idea how these past feel-good moments apply to you.

For one thing, Twitter’s past has established the underlying tone, lexicon, and conventions on Twitter. Also, the camaraderie among Twitter users is based on trust, and if you want people to trust you on Twitter (just like if you want people to trust you in any other circumstance), you really ought to give as much (or more) than you get back. To be effective, you really need to add value to the Twitter streams of others and act in a way that inspires trust. You will be rewarded with interesting new connections, ideas, and even lifelong (virtual and real life) friends.

Figure 12-1:
The Fail Whale appears when Twitter’s traffic exceeds their server capacity.

Making New Friends

In life, the word
friend
can have a number of different meanings. But on Twitter (and on most of the Internet), a friend is someone with whom you share a connection. Many Twitter users naturally follow people they know and trust; over time, however, many people start interacting with strangers. It’s therefore not unusual to hear about the friends and real-life connections that people make on Twitter.

At first, you might have trouble believing it. Most people start out feeling like the stranger at a cocktail party, and existing Twitter users might not start a meaningful interaction with you right away. But most people will say hello and expect you to respond to them and tell them a bit about you — just as they would in a real conversation. Well, it
is
a real conversation.

Making friends on Twitter is much like making friends in the real world: If two people have things in common (for example, coming from the same home town), share a common interest (such as politics), or simply find each other fascinating, they may become friends. In fact, Twitter’s interface makes it pretty easy to figure out if someone is worth following — just look at the person’s Twitter Profile page, read her bio, check out her timeline, and follow her if she seems interesting.

Twitter users tend to share something unique or telling about themselves in their Twitter Profile page, either inside their biographies or URLs — or both. So, if you receive a flurry of tweets welcoming you to the service, take a look through those people’s Profile pages and URLs to get a better feel for who they are, and whether you’d want to strike up a conversation with them . . . and then do so, if you want!

If you express interest in other people and what they say or do, they tend to reciprocate. In general, people love to know that you’re interested in what they have to say, in real life and on Twitter.

You can find people with whom you want to start conversations through the public timeline, but if you want to look for individuals who share your interests, you can quickly and easily find those people by using Twitter Search (see Chapter 9) to see who’s already talking about your interests. Laura frequently challenges new users to search for the most obscure keywords around their work or their favorite hobbies, to find people they have something special in common with.

You may find sending that first tweet to a potential Twitter connection a bit daunting. After all, what do you say to a total stranger? How do you say it? As a general rule, think of Twitter as a giant cocktail party. (In a perfect world, this party has cupcakes.) If you’re the type of person who carefully chooses her conversations, Twitter gives you a lot of ammunition: Take a look at people’s bios, their Web sites, and the things that they’ve tweeted so you can pick your conversations carefully. If you tend to be the life of the party, have at it! Go ahead and start @replying to people and stir up a conversation. You decide what approach you want to take, as there’s no single right way to tweet. You’ll ultimately find that your own personal style for meeting people in real life translates pretty similarly to Twitter.

Searching for topics of interest

Conversations crop up all the time on Twitter, so if you want to see what people are saying about something you’re interested in, search for it.

Say that you’re a huge cupcake fan and want to connect with other pastry buffs, so you want to see what people are saying. You can do this simply by running a Twitter Search for
cupcakes
. (We cover Twitter Search in detail in Chapter 9.)

Figure 12-2 shows a sample search for cupcakes. A recent search result, “about to bake cupcakes!<3<3” depicts a woman who seems excited at the prospect of making her cupcakes (those <3 characters are meant to be little sideways hearts showing how she loves cupcakes). By way of starting a conversation, you @reply to her, “I’m about to make cupcakes as well! What’s your favorite recipe?” The two of you can go from there and may happen to start a relationship about your mutual love for baking cupcakes. The fancy name for this is
social object theory
— the idea that two people who discover a common interest are more likely to form some kind of direct connection to one another because of their connection to (and feelings for) the shared interest. Put differently, a whole lot of what goes on on Twitter is about “What do we have in common?” more than it is about “What are you doing?”

Or maybe you find the prospect of maple cupcakes intriguing. That user seems like a great person to ask for a recipe if you want to make them, too!

While you’re going through the public timeline or the search results to find people who have information you want or people with whom you want to interact, you might feel tempted to try to direct message them. However, direct messaging works only if the person is following you. And because, in all likelihood, you haven’t talked to them yet, they’re probably not following you. Start a conversation by replying to them directly, for example: “@AliciaSue8 hey! Hey you! Maple cupcakes sound fantastic! Where’d you find that recipe?”

On Twitter, you‘ll find yourself getting to know people a lot better than you expected. Because Twitter profiles link to other resources and relevant information on their profile owners, you can get a pretty good sense of who people are. So, Twitter-based relationships often transition into relationships in real life. (Or, as some techies abbreviate it, IRL.)

Figure 12-2:
Searching for cupcakes.

Twitter-based events

Through conversations on Twitter, many smaller communities have cropped up. The Twitter-based community occasionally organizes meet-ups in real life — the common thread being that they’re all part of a community from Twitter. As with nearly every term relating to Twitter, it should come as no surprise that these meet-ups are sometimes referred to as
tweetups.

Because Twitter is just another medium by which people connect, and because the medium allows you to easily build relationships, you may not see meeting offline as such a stretch. In our experience, because Twitter connections are based on trust within a community (which you can measure by seeing who people talk to, what they say, and what they’re like), meeting people offline doesn’t feel as taboo as it used to.

In fact, because Twitter makes reaching out to new people so easy, some people have had great success in meeting people in the most random of places — for example, in between flights during a layover.

Say that you’re traveling from New Jersey to Colorado with a layover in Texas. You might send an update to Twitter: “Flying EWR to DIA, via IAH. Anyone care for a game of Scrabble during my 2-hour layover?” A fellow traveler might be, out of curiosity or boredom, searching Twitter for new people to meet and might take you up on your offer.

So, if you happen to be in a new town on business, or visiting friends or relatives (and need to get away), you might be able to find people in that city to meet for coffee or drinks. Twitter is another avenue by which you can find people; and, having the ability to figure out who they are before agreeing to meet them certainly benefits you. Not only can you look for common interests to talk about before meeting people (which certainly jumpstarts the awkward early phases of any conversation), you can also make such meetings safer by screening people before meeting up with them. Your mom was partially right about not talking to strangers, of course, but by meeting in public and by finding people you actually know in common, you can be a bit safer in making the jump to an offline connection.

In addition to impromptu tweetups, the digital-media folk on Twitter (the
Twitterati
) have organized and promoted a number of charity events through Twitter; two popular charity events, as of this writing, are
@SM4SC
(Social Media for Social Change;
www.sm4sc.com
), shown in Figure 12-3, and
@Twestival
(
www.twestival.com
). In just a few short weeks,
@Twestival
jumped to international consciousness — and headlines the world over — by drawing out 10,000 Twitterers to 200+ events in cities around the world. When all was said and done, a massive series of tweetups on February 12, 2009 raised $250,000 for charity: water (
www.charitywater.org
) to build safe, clean drinking water wells in developing nations. In April 2009 the main
@twestival
organizer Amanda Rose (
@amanda
) traveled to Ethiopia with charity: water founder Scott Harrison (
@scottharrison
), Twitter investor Chris Sacca (
@sacca
) and others to film and dedicate the first
@twestival
well drilled.