Tag Archives: Twitter

Clever use of Twitter by a Florida stop-smoking group.

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QwitterQwitter lets you keep track of how many cigarettes you smoke each day; keep a journal of your thoughts an feelings (“I’d KILL for goddamn cigarette!”); view your progress and follow and support other fiends.

All kidding aside, I can see how this might actually work. If I tweet, “It’s three o’clock and I have not smoked all day” …and my friends George sees that, it might help him hang on.

I could see this working for any number of support groups. “I’ve lost 5 pounds this week and had 3 Ritz crackers for lunch.”

Will Twitter be bigger than Facebook?

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The guys (no gender implied) at AdRants are big fans of Twitter:

“Writing on Entrecard Graham Langdon makes the argument Twitter will be bigger than Facebook. He’s right. Twitter is many things but it lacks the baggage and some of the “creepy” aspects of Facebook. All within 140 characters, Twitter is IM, email, mobile app, chat room, focus group, news source, a wall on which to bounce ideas, a research resource, presence indicator.

It’s usually the simplest of things that have the most value. Facebook is bloated. Twitter is Internet Lite (I refuse to dub it anything with a 2.0 attached). It’s a simple but ever so powerful interface that brings so many things together and functions as a jumping off point to an endless collection of resources and information.

It’s pretty much guaranteed you’ll interpret this as idiotic puffery but until you use Twitter, really use it for a while, you won’t really understand what you’re missing and you don’t realy have the right to comment. Seriously. Give it a try.”

I confess I’ve given up trying to explain Twitter. And it took me more than a year to come around.

NCAA Blogging Policy

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With the NCAA Basketball Championship upon us, the association has released its policy on blogging [Download PDF]:

“The following is the NCAA’s policy for the number of blog posts allowed during a men’s and women’s basketball championship competition or session (i.e., where more than one contest takes place under the same admission ticket): Five times per half, once at halftime and two times per overtime period.”

13 posts in a game that goes one OT. They’re clearly trying to prevent someone “live blogging” every bucket. And the policy is easily enforceable if you are a credentialed reporter. Violate the policy, lose your credentials. A very big deal. But if I’m sitting in the stands with my iPhone, posting to my Twitter page… how do you stop that? And why is that less of a threat to the NCAA?

If anyone comes across examples of the this, let me know.

DISCLOSURE: The company I work for, Learfield Communications, has the marketing rights for a bunch of teams playing in the NCAA championship series.

Twitter growing on me

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It started working for me when I stopped thinking about what I was doing and turned my attention to what my friends are doing. I’m only “following” a few people so far (Jamie, David, Andy, Kevin, Jackie, George). For me, this works a little like the Buddy List in iChat. Knowing that George is attending a conference in California or that Kevin is looking for interns, is useful or –at the very least– interesting.

I’m still getting the hang of Twitter but if you are a Twitter-er, let me know so I can “follow” you. Trust me, it’s not as dip-shitty as it sounds.