Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [4]
Although it may seem so, simple technologies like this don’t happen over night. What looks like a story of 1 to 3 years actually has a shadow of over 15 years of work, dumb mistakes, false starts, late-night frenetic insight, and patient distillation. Twitter is a life’s work built around three tenets: minimize thinking around communication, expose trends in local and global circles, and spark interaction. What you’re holding in your hands describes an essence of communication upon which millions will build their own value.
While not everything can be conveyed in under 140 characters, the essence of Twitter can: “Expect the unexpected. Whenever possible, be the unexpected.” I expect you to build something unexpected. Start small, start here.
Jack DorseyInventor, Founder, & Chairman, TwitterSan Francisco, California
Introduction
Have you heard? All the world’s a-twitter!
Twitter is a tool that you can use to send and receive short, 140-character messages from your friends, from the organizations you care about, from the businesses you frequent, from the publications you read, or from complete strangers who share (or don’t share) your interests.
As a user of Twitter, you choose whose updates you want to receive — which people you want to follow. In turn, other users can elect to follow your updates. You can send messages publicly for the entire Twitter community, semi-publicly to users whom you approve to receive your messages, or privately from one user to another. You can view these messages, called updates or tweets, either on the Internet or on your cellphone.
Twitter has changed and enhanced the way that people communicate with each other, with brands and companies, and with social movements and initiatives. Twitter has empowered users to raise money for people in need, coordinate rescue efforts in the wake of a natural disaster, and alert authorities to emergencies and illegal activities both domestic and abroad.
Skeptical of what you can say in 140 characters? The first paragraph of the Introduction weighs in at 41 characters. This paragraph? 137.
You may also find, over time, that you communicate more effectively and that your writing becomes shorter and more to the point. You can say a lot within very little space; and because it takes only a little time to read and update, you may be surprised about how much value you, your friends, and your family can extract from Twitter.
About This Book
We, the authors (Laura, Michael, and Leslie), aren’t employees, representatives, or shareholders in Twitter. The opinions that we give in this book represent what’s worked for us and our networks, but not necessarily the Twitter world at large. We’ve been on Twitter for quite a while, and we have a good sense about how people are using it. But Twitter is a living, breathing, and constantly changing dynamic community. Much of Twitter’s value comes from the ecosystem of tools built by others to work together with Twitter. Hundreds of these new tools launch every month. Twitter itself may change its feature set, its privacy features, or general direction overnight, which changes the way that people use it.
In fact, from the time we started writing this book to the time we’re completing it, about a dozen things have changed on the interface, including one complete layout overhaul. Although the layout and the exact location of everything may change around a bit, the basics of Twitter likely will always be the same. After you understand how the service works, you can pretty easily find any feature that may have moved since the publication of this book. Note: While things change, keep in touch with @dummies or our personal accounts (@pistachio, @gruen, and @geechee_girl) for the latest on our thoughts about Twitter. You can also keep up with the Twitter for Dummies community at www.TwitterForDummies.org.
We wrote this book to help more people understand, try out, and benefit from the incredible results and opportunities that can happen on Twitter. There’s been so much recent