I think I get twitter! Twitter is another of those social networking sites. It’s a micro-bloggging site. If you’re on facebook, there is a box that you can add what it is that you’re doing at that moment. You can say “I’m watching TV” for instance. That’s all that twitter is! Small (140 character) messages about what you’re doing. They are called “tweets”. And there are lots of them. Last year twitter grew at about 1000% making it one of the fastest growing websites.
http://www.neowin.net/news/main/09/01/22/twitter-traffic-up-974
I didn’t get it first time. I thought who, in their right mind, cares or has the time! But I started to think of it as an extension to my brain. In my brain there is a lot of random neural activity that isn’t consciously important. But out of it emerges ideas, concepts, language and meaning. (you’ll like that stephen!). So I decided to play with Twitter and am still learning. There is a lot of noise, but I let it wash over me and wait for it connect/stimulate/enhance with my own thinking. For instance, someone recently said ” all meeting participants should be limited to 140 character contributions!” It got me thinking about facilitating groups to increase effectiveness. It’s an interesting idea.
So I’m encouraging people to play with it. I believe it will make us smarter! Coincidently, I picked up Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad is Good for You” yesterday. He’s saying the same thing – popular culture is making us smarter.
I’d argue that our world is made up of conversations. The one we have with ourselves (self talk/thinking), the conversations we have with others, and the universe of other conversations that go on around us. The world we live in manifests itself out of those conversations. From a leadership perspective, Twitter is another tool to be part of the conversation.
I’ll leave the merits of twitter to others, and weigh in about the silent conversations we have with ourselves. More than just being self talk, I could argue that these silent conversations are what thinking actually is.
The process of talking to ourselves in silent conversation constitutes our minds.
So the mind, rather than being something mystical that lives inside the head can be seen as a silent conversation we have with ourselves, the singular of the conversations we have with each other.
In this way, mind is actually a social process, rather than an individual activity.
We use tweets an enormous amount across our business; it is at its funniest at around 2am on Saturday morning after a big Friday night, and is basically group texting.
It is a great tool for engaging a social group in a shared experience and for generating ideas out of the ether.
Most of my office use an iPhone based Twitter client, like Tweetie, that optimises the experience and helps to manage followers and conversations i.e. filters out the noise.
Believe it or not, it is a serious business tool, and was used to help shepherd everyone around during the last power cut in the Welly CBD a few weeks back.