What are you doing?

A couple of days ago Mark wrote about what has become the mothership of social media apps, Facebook, today this is about another powerful application at the other end of the spectrum, something so small and light that it performs only one task; that is to ask, “What are You Doing?”

Plemeljr Saw Prince during soundcheck at loc: TheO2 in Greenwich. Impressive, tonight is going to be a great show. less than 20 seconds ago from web.

Twitter is similar to SMS and restricts text to 140 characters, it’s also seamlessly mobile when linked to your mobile or smart phone, so you can communicate and keep in touch with your contacts via web, SMS and instant message anywhere, that flexibility is it’s real power.

Twitter has been referred to as micro blogging, a presence application and a great waste of time, but as with all social applications it’s the users who determine it’s value and usefulness. Perhaps the best observations to date about Twitter came from Wired writer Clive Thompson, his conclusion? Twitter gave it’s users a social sixth sense.

When I see that my friend Misha is “waiting at Genius Bar to send my MacBook to the shop,” that’s not much information. But when I get such granular updates every day for a month, I know a lot more about her. And when my four closest friends and worldmates send me dozens of updates a week for five months, I begin to develop an almost telepathic awareness of the people most important to me. It’s like proprioception, your body’s ability to know where your limbs are. That subliminal sense of orientation is crucial for coordination: It keeps you from accidentally bumping into objects, and it makes possible amazing feats of balance and dexterity. Twitter and other constant-contact media create social proprioception. They give a group of people a sense of itself, making possible weird, fascinating feats of coordination.

I use Twitter personally, so I thought I’d experiment a bit and use it to nightly live blog the Tour de France broadcast to those who were interested in taking my feed, along the way I managed to pick up 55 followers, drive some much needed traffic (around 2% of my daily total) to my cycling blog and consequently added a few new readers, it’s now become a natural extension to my other blogging efforts.

That practical exercise showed that Twitters lightweight and portable nature can be very useful, especially for time limited projects or events, and I’m not alone in realising it’s potential, there are others out there using Twitter to extend their message and find new audiences.

Politically, Twitter is being used by both the Barack Obama and John Edwards campaigns to reach out to supporters by communicating short messages about campaign news.

Reply to this Twitter to submit your question for me to answer in the post-debate live webcast @ 9:15pm at johnedwards.com 04:59 PM July 23, 2007 from txt.

Environmentally, David E Guggenheim is using it to live blog his adventures aboard the Greenpeace ship, Esperanza.

Just received word that, weather permitting, I’ll be scuba diving tomorrow AM to take some underwater video of the subs being launched. 11:28 PM July 30, 2007 from web.

And commercially the BBC Tweets it’s updates of breaking stories and reports by providing links to follow in the text.

Rolling Stone to pen life story: Rolling Stone Keith Richards will reveal all about his rock and roll lifesty.. http://tinyurl.com/2oy7lf about 1 hour ago from twitterfeed.

Understanding what social media and online networking means or even how can be practically used is still a puzzle, but Twitter may end up proving that it is useful and that less can indeed be more.