Twitter Milestones or how Twitter is not email

Having passed 1,000 followers on twitter this past weekend has gotten me thinking of twitter and how I use it.I use twitter daily for a variety of reasons.  Part IRC chat, part live newswire, part magic 8 ball, twitter is many things to many people.My testimonial for twitter usually goes like this: I'm a news hound. I update all the newsites many times a day to get the latest.Recently when there was an earthquake in California, do you know where I heard about it first? On twitter!  People in California sent messages like 'did you feel that?' and soon there was a groundswell of up to date information on what happened.  When I called my friends in LA to ask about it, they were shocked that I knew because it hadn't made the news yet.  Twitter is as real time as real time gets.Here are some random observations:

    
1. The longer twitter is around the more people will have follower counts in the thousands. This drastically changes how twitter looks and feels.  It looks less like a small log of friends sending notes and more like a live news feed on a variety of topics from people all over the world.  Using search and subscribing to search results is the way to make sense of the overwhelming amount of twitter data.
    
2. New to twitter?  Here's some advice---> One way to think of twitter is how it differs from email.  We are all familiar with email by now aren't we?
   

Email defaults to 1 person to 1 person. You have to do something special to mail a note to more than one person usually by CCing or BCCing or sending to a group email address.

Twitter defaults to 1 person to many people. You have to do something special to send a a twitter message [tweet] to just one person.  How do you send a twitter message to just one person?  By prefacing your message with a D for a direct message [that is truly private] or @ message which is public but directed at one or more people.

It's a very interesting time to be discovering twitter because there is a lot of action in the way of new sites, applications, and interfaces into what twitter does.  For the old timers who have road tested twitter in the real world, twitter has become part our daily information intake.Here's my twitcard as an example of what people are doing with twitter data.

What's your twitter username?  Am I following you yet?

• 21 September 2009
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