First, whatever you do, use a link shortening service like bit.ly that gives you stats about people clicking your links, so you can track that, and measure the effects of your experiments.
Second, the biggest difference between twitter and all the other services you mention (Facebook, LJ, LinkedIn) is that all of them are heavily dependent on the graph of connections - who friends who, basically. Communication flows mainly through that graph. Twitter has "following" so you may be deceived into thinking it works that way too, but it doesn't. Twitter allows for rapid ad-hoc reorganization of the flow of information without pre-existing connections, because everything is completely public, search is easy, and hashtags and trending topics encourage people to follow conversations on whatever's interesting at the moment, without knowing or caring whether the people involved are their followers or followees.
Consider this story, which happened last year IIRC: One of the major back-end credit card processing services went down on a weekend. People started posting about it to twitter. They searched to see if anyone else was, found a hashtag, and started using it. Someone from the company, which had no twitter presence at all, noticed this, so they started a twitter account, followed the hash tag, and began replying with status updates. Everyone else searching for what was going on, or following that hash tag, immediately saw that, and within a matter of hours the community of service provider, customers, and people affected by the outage, had all coalesced around one conversation where everyone could see what was going on. Other social media do not reorganize nearly so quickly, because they're so much more oriented towards pre-existing connections between people.
If Google or Netflix or Wikipedia is acting weird, and you wonder if they're having a problem or if it's just you, twitter is the first place to look. If a big site like that has a problem, people will be posting to twitter in droves within a minute, so just do a twitter search and you'll see. And because lots of other people do the same, even subtle problems will get puzzled out fairly quickly, if they affect a large number of people.
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Date: 2011-05-20 04:19 am (UTC)Second, the biggest difference between twitter and all the other services you mention (Facebook, LJ, LinkedIn) is that all of them are heavily dependent on the graph of connections - who friends who, basically. Communication flows mainly through that graph. Twitter has "following" so you may be deceived into thinking it works that way too, but it doesn't. Twitter allows for rapid ad-hoc reorganization of the flow of information without pre-existing connections, because everything is completely public, search is easy, and hashtags and trending topics encourage people to follow conversations on whatever's interesting at the moment, without knowing or caring whether the people involved are their followers or followees.
Consider this story, which happened last year IIRC: One of the major back-end credit card processing services went down on a weekend. People started posting about it to twitter. They searched to see if anyone else was, found a hashtag, and started using it. Someone from the company, which had no twitter presence at all, noticed this, so they started a twitter account, followed the hash tag, and began replying with status updates. Everyone else searching for what was going on, or following that hash tag, immediately saw that, and within a matter of hours the community of service provider, customers, and people affected by the outage, had all coalesced around one conversation where everyone could see what was going on. Other social media do not reorganize nearly so quickly, because they're so much more oriented towards pre-existing connections between people.
If Google or Netflix or Wikipedia is acting weird, and you wonder if they're having a problem or if it's just you, twitter is the first place to look. If a big site like that has a problem, people will be posting to twitter in droves within a minute, so just do a twitter search and you'll see. And because lots of other people do the same, even subtle problems will get puzzled out fairly quickly, if they affect a large number of people.