Tweets: The messages of 140 or fewer characters sent via Twitter.
Twitter feed: The stream of messages from a particular sender.
Twitterati: Heavy users of Twitter.
Twitterer: A person who uses Twitter.
Michael Sauers, technology innovation librarian at the Nebraska Library Commission, uses Twitter, a free message-routing and social-networking tool, to communicate with colleagues and spread the word about his organization’s reference service. He encourages others to check out Twitter for themselves — but don’t ask him to describe it.
“People are always asking me to explain it to them, and there really is no good way to do that,” Sauers said.
“My best answer is that it’s a mix between e-mail and chat, where you get the benefits of the group without requiring the group to be there all the time.”
Twitter might be hard to describe, but that hasn’t deterred thousands of people — including a growing number of government officials — from using the microblogging service to quickly and efficiently update others on their activities.
For example, officials at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory use Twitter to send snippets of information about the Phoenix Mars Lander mission to interested parties via the Web, mobile phones and other communications platforms. The Twitter feed broke the news that ice had been discovered on Mars. It has gained the attention of nearly 33,000 loyal followers, which makes it the fifth most popular Twitter channel in the country, according to Twitterholic.com. Presidential candidate Barack Obama is No. 1 with about 60,000 followers.
“We seem to be reaching a different audience than we do with other venues, and it’s an audience that seems tailor-made for the types of information that we’re putting out,” said Veronica McGregor, media relations manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the author of its Twitter feed.
“They’re very much into technology, and as one person said recently, ‘This is exactly the amount of information I want to know per day about a mission,’” she added. “They don’t want to read a big, long article about the mission every few months. They just like these tiny bursts of information that allow them to know exactly what we’re up to today.”
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