Saturday, March 14, 2009
Introducing...Twitter Tactics!
I had a conversation recently with a local friend on Guam who's a fairweather 'netizen, and as such a modest user of social apps. She's happily on Facebook, so when I asked her why I couldn't find her on Twitter, "Oh, I can't do that one...it's way too hard!" was her shocking reply. This galvanized my motivation to start work on a tiered series of services for locals to use the platform.
I want to interactively show people how to REALLY use Twitter. Like in ways you've probably never heard of. Like in ways that would blow your mind. Like in ways that can streamline your operations. Like in ways that can make you money. (Yes, Twitter.)
So Will and I have cobbled together and refined a framework of ideas that we're collectively calling Twitter Tactics. The capstone is an interactive 1-day workshop with distinct tracks for beginners and advanced users, showing you how to get the most out of micromessaging. Here's the premise of our objectives:
- Make Twitter-via-texting work for Guam users. Because Guam's SMS infrastructure and carrier interoperability with web-based services nearly never work as designed (Twitter included), we've taken it upon ourselves to develop a custom gateway to facilitate users posting tweets to their account via text messaging. This would work exactly the same as other international users.
- Offer a downloadable topic track bot for BlackBerry. Because of legal limitations, the iPhone hasn't officially dropped on Guam yet. So with RIM's BlackBerry being the dominant smartphone locally, we're going to hack a mobile service that watches Twitter's stream of messages on your behalf and tracking topics you specify. When matching messages are posted by any other Twitter user - even those you're not following - you get the tweet pushed to your handset...in real-time! It's a really cool way to stay informed of the things that interest you, discover new people and make friends based on shared interests. And because we're open source advocates, the app's free to download with the source code being totally extensible. And despite the fact that these high-end mobile phones are admittedly in pretty small deployment (several hundred at the moment, at best), users with iPod Touches, Internet-aware applicances and/or legacy cellular devices can still interact via SMS, as noted above.
- Host a two-phase workshop. Why would anyone want to attend a training session in informing people of their status? That's precisely the point: the Twitter ecosystem goes way deeper than just telling people what you're doind, and we want to show you. The Beginning Course deals with all activities from signup-to-signin, customizing the UI, Twitter etiquette, growing your followerbase and more. The Advanced Course is for power users who want to take their game to the next level, integrate platforms, build custom micromessaging clients, and really explore the platform. We'll also show businesses, government and organizations how to use micromessaging productively for their operations. The whole session will be 100% interactive, with the facility having totally free Wi-Fi and liveblogging, shooting/streaming video, sharing, texting and crowdsourcing all highly encouraged throughout the event. Because again, that's the nature of social networking.
So that's it. My muse saw fit to slap me upside the head with this gem earlier in the week, and it all came together in about an hour over McNuggets. Building the whole thing out's going to be fun...but not as fun as helping connect people with technology and seeing how they use it for themselves.
We'll both be posting our progress through the phases of the project. Here we go!
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