1. Twitter: Beyond the Statusphere Jason Salas Interactive Media Director / News Anchor KUAM

2. What is Twitter? A microblogging service  Status updates in 140 characters or less  The canonical question: “What are you doing?”  A chronology of what people are up to A social network  Members subscribe to friends, colleagues, churches, shipmates, celebrities, fans, vendors, customers  All the cool kids are on it A multidevice platform  Web, desktop, e-mail, mobile, game console, interactive TV

3. Microblogging - a revisionist history Weblogs? That’s soooo 2006 People wanted more frequent updates  Speeches, games, conferences, TV shows  Online “reporting” needed to be more responsive  Laborious to write/read tons of compositions Small data chunks work better over a wider variety of digital devices  Easier aggregation

4. Twitter’s meteoric rise The changing Internet  Rise in social networks Friendster, MySpace, Facebook  Uptake in mobile services  The Realtime Web The evolution of “status”  Multimedia, stock prices, traffic control tower state, etc. The celebrity factor 85% of Twitter’s feature set comes from its community Mass media’s dark embrace

5. Twitter-as-development platform The Twitter API  Application Programming Interface  Anyone can build custom services over Twitter’s messaging capabilities & infrastructure  Heaven for us nerds Thank you Jesus, Buddha, Allah, Odin, scientology supreme being…

6. Social network throwdown! vs.

7. Examples

8. Breaking news

9. Using multimedia

10. Events/Announcements

11. Product reviews

12. …and “other stuff”

13. The Big Question So how is Twitter making money?  Advertising Monthly growth: 1,382%

14. Case Studies

15. Twitter on Guam About 400 Tweeters Media companies, car dealerships, restaurants, bands, music stores, military personnel

16. TwitterNeni A Twitter app I co-wrote Empowers users in Guam & the CNMI to tweet via text messaging Most common user demographics  College students  Users with low-end 2G mobile devices http://twitterneni.com

17. Twitter at KUAM Reflects any new updates to KUAM.com News headlines, sports scores, columns, videos, podcasts… All tweets link to their web stories All reporters use Twitter…constantly Quick & easy way of interacting with audience Really fast way to break news Huge reach advantage Mobile audience We use Twitter extensively, but not exclusively http://twitter.com/guamnews_kuam

18. GuamTweetBot My custom re-tweeting service She watches the entire Twitter message stream and harvests any tweets mentioning “Guam” She’s as helpful as she is annoying http://twitter.com/guamtweetbot

19. Drawbacks of Twitter Security  Except for Direct Messages, all posts are public Downtime  No guarantee that service will be available Sloppy storytelling  140 characters does have its limits  Communications, sans context Needle in a haystack  Every Tom, Dick & Barack on Twitter

20. Alternatives to Twitter Open source microblogging platforms allow software developers to write their own messaging systems that federate with other open networks.  Laconi.ca

21. Thank you! :) Download slides of this talk: http://jasonsalas.com/twitter Follow me! http://twitter.com/jasonsalas E-mail: jason@kuam.com