PLA Blog

No doubt you’ve heard of Twitter, the real-time social networking messaging service launched in August 2006, even in passing. According to the FAQ in the Twitter Help section:

Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives. Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away. Curious people can make friends. Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool. Developers can use the API to make Twitter tools of their own. Possibilities are endless!

Twitter accounts are free, and you don’t need a mobile phone to use it, you can do it entirely on the web, if you want. Although Twitter can send real-time posted messages, called “Tweets,” to your phone, it can also send them to you via instant messenger (IM). You can post Tweets to your account from your mobile phone by text message, web access on your phone (there’s a special mobile-friendly URL: http://m.twitter.com), or by IM on your computer, if you don’t feel like visiting the web site. As is the way of text messaging, Tweets are limited to 140 characters, including letters, numbers, and punctuation, so you need to choose your words and text shorthand wisely.

A WBUR (an NPR station) broadcast of On Point on April 27, 2007, included Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, as well as several other guests and callers to talk about The World According to Twitter. The episode is a good, easy overview of the Twitter/hyperconnected social networking mindset, as well as different points of view and questions people have about Twitter, along with mentions of other social networking sites (including LibraryThing). Listen to the archive of this broadcast (Listen on Windows Media Player | Listen on RealPlayer), it’s worth the 48 minutes.

There are several Twitter folks who are doing interesting things with their Twitter accounts, which you can read even if you don’t have a Twitter account of your own. Casa Grande Library in Arizona, under the username cglibrary, posts links to catalog records for books in their collection and their various blogs. TwitterLit posts the first two lines of a book, “so you don’t have to,” and includes links to the Amazon page for the book. BBC News and CNN also have Twitter accounts, where short news story summaries are posted with links to full stories on the sites.

Like most technologies on the web, it’s indicative of a user trend. While not every library or librarian can or needs to find an application of the service, or want an account, it’s worth knowing that this is a type of mindset in our diverse constituency, and that these tools exist.

That said, I do encourage you to play with it, even if it’s just to read a specific Twitter feed (you can even subscribe to a feed via RSS, if you want to follow it in a news reader). And if you find yourself with an account and wanting Friends, you can use nifty tools like TwitterSearch to find people you know. You can find me on Twitter under the name andreamercado.

Tags: PLA Blog, social networking, technology, Twitter, web

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 17th, 2007 at 4:13 pm and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.