Kudos to Marshall Kirkpatrick for laying out how he uses Twitter — and no, it’s not for nonsense messages — with his excellent post: Twitter is paying my rent:

Earlier this week I was remarking (on Twitter) about how many of my recent story leads came from Twitter. I counted and at that time 5 of my last 11 stories were based on news I learned first from my friends on Twitter. It was amazing.

I’ve been down on the usefulness of Twitter since it’s launch, but a lightbulb glowed yesterday when Marshall described his real world Twitter usage. A good example of why it’s so important for bloggers to share their customer/user experiences rather than providing only vanilla descriptions. Your individual experiences are vastly more useful to me as a reader than a spec sheet. Fellow blogger readers, please remember this the next time you write about the newest, greatest site/service/product.

Admittedly, I haven’t understood how Twitter was that different from dozens of (often competing) IM services and what was already happening in niche groups like IRC. Marshall’s post caused me to revisit and rethink the passive listener dimension of Twitter and remember that it’s not the service as much as the people using it. One of the things I like about RSS is that I don’t have to go to the news to stay updated, it comes to me while I’m working thanks to bloggers, mainstream media and anybody else who provides site updates via RSS feeds. RSS is a timesaver. With Twitter one can do something similar with one important caveat:

Update notification speed.

There’s more latency involved in RSS than Twitter. The time it takes for the blogger to publish, the time it takes for the ping services to pick it up, time it takes for others to write about it and link to it (if I’m not subscribed to said blogger) and lastly the time in our individual RSS readers to retrieve the new content and the services to update them.

Even if you subscribe to the best sources and cut down on the noise in signal ratio, some amount of latency still remains.

Twitter message speed
Now consider how Twitter latency works.

1. Person leaves message in Twitter. Basically you can just type it and hit enter. There’s very little editing, no HTML, you only have 140 characters. Much faster than blogging and equal to IM and IRC as far as speed and immediacy.
2. Update within minutes in your Twitter client (I’ve been trying all of them to see which I like best, Snitter is shown in the screenshots in this post, just FYI).
3. If you’re already following the person on Twitter, you’ll see it as soon as your Twitter client updates, almost like an instant message, but a little slower. If you’re not following the person, somebody else could leave a message (they call them “Tweets” and I’m desperately trying to avoid that term) replying to that person that you are following.

RSS speed
It might be 15 minutes, 30, 60, maybe even a couple hours before I see something appear in RSS, but in Twitter, if I’m following people who talk about things I’m interested in — and no, I don’t mean only or even primarily the A-list, really anybody who uses their Twitter for good signal (subjective, I know, but so is subscribing to quality RSS feeds) will work — I can see the new site, service and/or news sooner. This gives my aging brain more time to think about it and see if it’s something that motivates me to write about it.

Once I see too many other people blogging about a topic, my energy on the topic usually wanes. If I’m really late to the party, the comments drain my interest in commenting as well. We might discuss this in our IRC channel, but it’s not something I’ll probably write about. The opportunity (for me anyway) to add in a beneficial way to a conversation generally diminishes the longer the topic is out there. Especially when it’s news-related topics. Is this the same for you?

Twitter experimental listening phase begins
I’m still concerned about too much noise and not enough signal, so Sunday 10/14/2007 I warily began following more Twitterers (yes, another corny term). At first less than a dozen, but will begin to expand the list as I become more comfortable with the signal-to-noise ratio and try to integrate into my workflow in the coming weeks. Marshall was among my first new Twitter follows. I added his blog to my RSS reader as well. Marshall used to write for Techcrunch and now writes for Read/Write Web.

I also started following Scoble and Winer who I’ve met previously in person as well as a couple others who seemed like interesting people that I don’t know at all or very well. Interestingly enough, Winer has been the only new Twitter follow that I’ve met in person who hasn’t reciprocated yet (did our meeting at the local blogger meetup in Seattle suck that much, Dave?). I haven’t reciprocated to everybody who follows me, so not meant as a criticism for Dave. Just curious.

How others are using Twitter
Yesterday I noticed Dave Winer replying, comment style, to various posts in Twitter, offering this view of how he uses Twitter (pictured at top right of post). Scoble used Twitter yesterday to point to each of his new posts, and although he says he isn’t using Twitter as a “publicity network” he did that along with comments he didn’t leave on other blogs like these to Allen Stern pictured below:

Since I didn’t see the @ next Allen’s name, it doesn’t appear Scoble was talking directly to Allen on Twitter, rather he was musing in Twitter about Allen’s post, as Winer also was doing yesterday. Fortunately, Scoble also commented on Allen’s blog post, so a brief and apparently positive exchange happened, but I noticed yesterday that this doesn’t always happen.

On these Twitter messages that don’t lead to blog comments, many people won’t see them, perhaps including the parties involved, which is another downside to the service. Twitter creates another channel to watch for feedback. Argh, multiple listen channels are not very efficient, but if you want to receive feedback on what you’re writing, you need to go where the people are talking about it, not expect them to come to you. As much as I’d prefer the latter for convenience and organization, it’s not about only my convenience in a conversation, it’s about the convenience for everybody involved in the conversation. Add to that the fact that I’ll gladly accept genuine feedback on a cocktail napkin, in a podcast, from another blog, mainstream news piece, on a videblog, at a conference in person, and yes, even a Twitter message.

Allen Stern craves one way links?
It’s interesting seeing Allen write this in his post linked above:

“Naturally I am not suggesting that everyone uses these networks in a publicity-oriented manner, but it seems many of the smart marketers are doing so.”

Smart? Hmm, not always. He follows with this:

“As long as the people attached to your account (personal or business) understand that’s the use, then it’s a perfect marketing opportunity.”

Is this is one of those do as I say, not as I do pieces of advice?

I had to ask Allen several times to please stop replying to posts here with links to his posts at Center Networks. It’s one thing if you want to add something intelligent and on topic in the comment area along with a link the signature area — that’s encouraged — but if the substance of your comment is “here’s what I have to say about this at my blog -> insert link” then do that elsewhere. Maybe this isn’t a rule in all comment areas like it is here, but I thought this was common sense netiquette? Yes/no?

In the process of leaving comments elsewhere, I’ve noticed Allen doing the same thing in other comment areas around the web, perhaps most frequently at Techcrunch where apparently Arrington and crew don’t mind this type of blatant marketing. Um, isn’t this what trackbacks are for? Obviously Allen thinks other blog comment areas are his publicity network. He hasn’t left a comment here since I delinked his site so I guess he wasn’t really interested in joining in any conversation here, only interested in using our space as a publicity network for Center Networks. Not cool, but in the scheme of what he ascribed to Scoble and some other “smart” marketers primary use of Twitter, undeniably relevant.

One last thing on using the comments area to point to your own blog posts. I’m not saying you can or should never do this. Just try doing it in a non-selfish way. Summarize your thoughts in your blog posts and then put a link in the signature for others to follow if interested if they don’t allow trackbacks (two-way trackbacks are always preferred). That’s not in your face marketing, which means it won’t get you as many clicks, but it won’t have people remembering these details at some later date and bringing them up like I did in this post.

Feeling a little warmer about Twitter
To date I’ve been using Twitter — sparingly, just check my timeline — to keep track of Twitter-related programs, but heretofore will be using as a notification and listening service to supplement my RSS feed and to catch comments not being left on blogs. As I become more comfortable, I’ll likely start replying to some of the other Twitters of those I’m following. If you have a good signal-to-noise ratio, let me know in the comments below and I’ll start following you.

I’m not doing a complete about face on Twitter and clones like Jaiku that Google just bought, but am now listening more carefully to the stream. Hey, at least a start. Thanks again to Marshall for sharing a real world business use for Twitter. And now I’m off to Twitter what I’m eating for lunch.

(just kidding)

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