This is a short presentation I did for my class IST 561 Internet and Information Access @SUNY Albany. I was talking to a room of graduate students (Information Science). Not one of which uses Twitter. My goal was to introduce the utility of Twitter in Academia and Librarianship. Thanks to Max Wilson and Joe Murphy for being my exemplar examples.

1. TWITTER:
To Tweet or Not
to Tweet…
By Catherine L. Dumas
IST 561 SUNY Albany 11/10/2010

2. WHAT IS TWITTER?
 Social networking and micro-blogging service
 Founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone & Evan
Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July
2006)
o Allows users to post their latest updates - limited
by 140 characters
 Updates are posted through web form, text
message, or instant message.
 Over 190 billion visitors monthly - FB 500 million
active users
 Twitter: "a short burst of inconsequential
information," & "chirps from birds." Jack Dorsey

3. TERMINOLOGY
 Following: you follow people you are
interested in
 Tweet: an individual message
 @username: start a message with this - link
to the person you want to tweet to
 DM, or direct message: Private tweets no one
else can read but you
 RT, or retweet: share cool ideas, shout-out to
people you respect
 Trending Topics: Most mentioned terms on
Twitter at that moment – break news ahead of
mainstream media

4.  Hashtag (#): fields created by users to
categorize messages (eg #ASIST2010) –
ALA -hashtags
 Tweetup: in-person gathering
organized via Twitter – spontaneous
 Shortened URLs: Twitter automatically
shortens long URL’s - so they fit 
Yeah, so how does Twitter work?

5. o Twitter in Plain English
@Cathy2cool
Tweetdeck

6. CATHY2COOL’S “TWEETDECK”

7. WHAT DO PEOPLE TWEET?
Content of Tweets according to
Pear Analytics
■ News
■ Spam
■ Self-promotion
■ Pointless babble
■ Conversational
■ Pass-along value

8. Dr. MAX WILSON, Prof, Swansea Univ. UK
TWITTER IN ACADEMIA
o Why Max Tweets
o “To engage with my international research community”
 “To bounce ideas, or things that are too small to blog about
yet”
 “To share new publications of mine, as they get accepted”
 “To keep up with buzzes in my research areas
Max’s Advice for New Tweeter’s
 Start seeing who the major peeps in your research area are
tweeting, see what they are tweeting about
 Start responding to them with intelligent
comments/questions
 Start tweeting intelligent, research oriented things yourself
and hopefully have them comment on you.

9. THE INNOVATIVE LIBRARIAN I MET
AT ALA THIS SUMMER, WHO GOT ME
INTERESTED IN TWITTER
Joe Murphy, Science Librarian

10. So, to Tweet or Not to
Tweet?
Are there any other questions?
The End

11. REFERENCES
 http://commoncraft.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddO9idmax0o
 http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/learning
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Content_of_Tweets.svg
 http://twitter.com/gingdottwit
 http://twitter.com/@cathy2cool
 http://joemurphylibraryfuture.com/326/