Tim Collins - The Little Book of Twitter: Get Tweetwise!

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by
Michael OMara Books Limited
9 Lion Yard
Tremadoc Road
London SW4 7NQ

Copyright Michael OMara Books Limited 2009

This electronic edition published in 2012

ISBN: 978-1-84317-829-3 in ePub format

ISBN: 978-1-84317-828-6 in Mobipocket format

ISBN: 978-1-84317-405-9 in paperback print format

Every reasonable effort has been made to acknowledge all copyright holders. Any errors or omissions that may have occurred are inadvertent, and anyone with any copyright queries is invited to write to the publishers, so that a full acknowledgement may be included in subsequent editions of this work.

All rights reserved. You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover design by Allan Sommerville

Design and typesetting by Sailesh Patel

www.mombooks.com

Thanks to Collette Collins, Emily Dent,
Kathryn Partridge, Lindsay Davies,
Kerry Chapple, Ana Sampson and Louise Dixon.

Thanks also to @ljrich for her
helpful Twitter know-how.

For more info, tweet @OMaraBooks or @TheLittleBookOf.

Twitter is a social networking site with a 140-character limit, which means that you dont have to put up with long-winded sentences like th

On Tuesday the 3rd of February 2009, Stephen Fry got stuck in a lift. At first, this might not have seemed like a generation-defining event on a par with the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing. But this is how future generations will probably remember it, because this was the moment when Twitter went mainstream. Tweeting to his followers on his phone, Fry turned a mundane inconvenience into a gripping drama with updates such as Hells teeth and Arse, poo and widdle. The next day, Frys updates, and the responses of his hundreds of thousands of followers, were reported in newspapers and on websites around the world.

It was at this moment that Twitter became the social networking platform we were all supposed to know about. Suddenly, Facebook and MySpace seemed about as fashionable as bright green shellsuits, and admitting that you didnt know what a tweet was was like admitting you didnt know where babies came from.

In a state of panic, we all signed up to Twitter, worried that the zeitgeist train would leave without us and wed be left with less technological relevancy than an old man buying cassettes from a charity shop.

The first reaction of many upon seeing the site was relief. There were no zombie applications, no gifts, no terrible music and no embedded junk to crash our browsers. Instead, there were tweets; mini-updates of no more than 140 characters. Twitter was a site that understood a fundamental truth about our modern online requirements less is more. We live in times of cultural overload, where were all required to be familiar with so many albums, books, movies, blogs, DVD box sets, games, Blu Rays and iPhone apps that its a wonder we have time to sleep. The last thing we need is another essential cultural phenomenon that will eat even further into our waking moments. But updates of about twenty words? Yeah, we can probably fit that in.

Going on Facebook is like attending a school reunion where all the people you used to sit next to in maths poke you and wave embarrassing photos in your face. Going on MySpace is like visiting a hall of residence where every single room is inhabited by douchebags who think that writing tortured acoustic songs will impress the girls. But Twitter is more like a dinner party that you can invite anyone to, from your best friend to the editor of your favourite magazine to Snoop Dogg. Its pretty much the only social networking site youd want to visit in real life.

So, welcome to the twitterverse. Whether youre a twittern00b or a twitterholic, I hope youll find this guide to be a fitting celebration of what is undoubtedly the greatest social networking service in the world. (Until they invent one that restricts updates to ten characters and we all flock to that one instead.)

Twitter makes me smarter, faster and more efficient. I want to do that for millions of people.

Evan Williams, CEO of Twitter

Welcome to The Little Book of Twitter , a short guide to getting the most out of the micro-blogging phenomenon Twitter. If this fast-paced digital age has depleted your attention span so much that even a book of this size seems too long, here are the fundamentals of Twitter boiled down to ten tweets.