“People, organizations, and businesses quickly began leveraging the open nature of the network to share anything they wanted, completely ignoring the original question,” writes co-founder Biz Stone. Users were “seemingly on a quest to both ask and answer a different, more immediate question, ‘What’s happening?’ A simple text input field limited to 140 characters of text was all it took for creativity and ingenuity to thrive.”

Sure, someone in San Francisco may be answering “What are you doing?” with “Enjoying an excellent cup of coffee,” at this very moment. However, a birds-eye view of Twitter reveals that it’s not exclusively about these personal musings. Between those cups of coffee, people are witnessing accidents, organizing events, sharing links, breaking news, reporting stuff their dad says, and so much more.

The fundamentally open model of Twitter created a new kind of information network and it has long outgrown the concept of personal status updates. Twitter helps you share and discover what’s happening now among all the things, people, and events you care about. “What are you doing?” isn’t the right question anymore—starting today, we’ve shortened it by two characters. Twitter now asks, “What’s happening?”

In a post discussing the change, social web genius Brian Solis elaborates on how we have grown to use Twitter: “Our updates on Twitter symbolize so much more than we may realize. If, for but a moment, we can catch a fleeting glimpse of our personal significance right here, right now, we would recognize our instrumental role in the complete transformation in how information is reported, discovered, broadcast, and consumed. Perhaps most significantly, Twitter represents a collective collaboration that manifests our ability to unconsciously connect kindred voices through the experiences that move us. As such, Twitter is a human seismograph. Through it, we feel everything that moves us.”

Yes, but this has always been the case for most of us. What does the change actually mean?

“We don’t expect this to change how anyone uses Twitter,” said Stone. “But maybe it’ll make it easier to explain to your dad.”

Remember the days we used Twitter to answer the question “What are you doing?” I still do on occasion, but over time, Twitter has become much more than that. Now it’s a conversation, a sounding board, a think tank, and a place to broadcast my work.

There is no question that Twitter is a powerful tool. And as with most powerful tools, over time we have figured out what works and what doesn’t. Over at Social Media Today, Sherry Main has drafted a Twitter style-guide to summarize some key things we’ve discovered about using Twitter most effectively:

1. Observe proper spelling, grammar and case. “Typing in all lower case doesn’t gain you any extra characters,” writes Main. “Unless you’re fighting for space, use proper grammar.”
2. Links are great, but take the time to give a good description of what you’re sharing. “Think of it as a movie trailer,” Main says. “Don’t just post a link.” And please remember to mention whether something is work safe or not. A lot of people are using Twitter for business purposes and checking from their offices and they deserve the right to know what’s hiding inside that bit.ly.
3. Don’t just retweet everything that people are asking you to retweet, or assume that you know what a link is about without clicking through yourself. Take the time to make sure that what you’re putting out there has value–for your audience.
   
4. When you’re retweeting, keep the list of names short. You don’t have to link all the people it took for you to get a link, listing the person you source is enough. “If someone is interested in seeing who the original source is, they can click on to the person you retweeted, or do a Twitter Search of the phrase or link,” says Main. “Too many @usernames in a single tweet just becomes name-dropping.” And takes up the space people could use to retweet.
5. Don’t retweet everything. Change it up a bit–offer your own summary or take on a link and include a “via @username” at the end. That format still gives credit but allows you to share your own words so you’re not just parroting content in your stream. Your own ideas keep your stream original, even if you are passing a link that other people have already tweeted.
6. “Use hashtags (#) appropriately, and sparingly,” writes Main. Hashtags enable other Twitter users to search topics and engage in open conversation around them using Twitter Search. The danger of hashtags is that they can clutter your messages, so choose wisely.
7. Leave room for people to retweet you. The standard is 20 characters. I’ve worked with less and personally, I prefer to rewrite than simply retweet, but a lot of people don’t have that kind of time. Be good to them. Leave them some room.

I have a few more to add to this, and it’s about conversation. Twitter is a conversation, yes. But that doesn’t mean it should be used regularly as an instant messaging platform. If you feel some conversations fit your brand and the general discussion is useful to your followers, they should be had publicly. But if the subject matter isn’t a topic you think will benefit your users, the best option is to take it to direct message.

Messages like “LOL!” and “that’s interesting,” definitely fit into that category.

MORE
10 Basic Rules Of Twitter (And How To Avoid Being A Twanker) by Rohit Bhargava

Social Media isn’t going away, either get on the bus, or get left behind by MackCollier

Four-Step Plan for Getting Started in Social Media by David B. Thomas

Image credit: Lee Bennett

Every once in a while conversation will erupt around a certain practice–should we follow everyone who follows us? Are “thanks for following me! Here’s a link to my site!” auto-DMs nice or spammy? Should we block bots who follow us or let them pump up our follower counts?–and the dialog that follows will help define yet another code for Twitter users.

This week, the topic is Follow Friday, otherwise known among Twitter users as #followfriday (or #ff). According to Sean Percival, founder of lalawag, the LA tech and entertainment gossip blog, #followfriday is ruining Twitter. For those not in the know, #followfriday is the Friday tradition of naming Twitter users whom you believe are worth following. Since the tradition began in January, it’s exploded and now many users, including Percival, have raised concerns about its tendency to become useless spam:

I actually think Follow Friday is a fine idea, but with any good idea it usually becomes warped and stupid. Truth is most of you are doing it wrong. Sometimes I get included in #FF post and click through to see who gave me a mention. There I find a dump of their other #FF tweets, blasting out some 20 names at a time with no context what-so-ever. Why should I follow them? Because you said so? Just do me a favor, click through here to read about Follow Friday from its creator, and learn how to do it right.

According to the creator of the massively popular movement, Micah Baldwin, #followfriday is about making one or two recommendations and giving a short explanation for these, not jam-packing as many people as possible into a single tweet–or worse, a series of tweets.

Solutions?

Usually on #followfriday, I select a theme, then offer users worth following according to my theme. The last time I did a #followfriday, I mentioned a group of empowered women in tech about whom I’d been tweeting using the hashtag #fempire. To give my followers an overview of this group of fantastic women, I involved them in my #followfriday in the following way:

An example of a themed #followfriday.

It’s occurred to me that this may not be enough. In a world where more and more people are joining Twitter and looking for quality content, it is our responsibility, when providing our followers with suggestions, to offer more tangible reasons to follow people whose content we enjoy. I would much rather offer one or two users in my #followfriday tweets with a good reason than spam them with all my best friends over and over.

How do compose a #followfriday tweet? Do you ever click through your friends’ #followfriday recommendations when no other information is given?

MORE FROM AROUND THE WEB

The Follow Friday (#followfriday) Manifesto by Grant McDonald (@chichiri) and Kay Ballard (@KayBallard)

His outburst touches on several issues Feldman has with the 140 Conference, in particular comments made yesterday by Fred Wilson, a venture capitalist and principal of Union Square Ventures who talked about the power of Twitter in getting links out.

The 140 Character Conference (#140conf) focused on how Twitter is changing the way individuals and industries do a lot of things. From the use of Twitter in diplomacy to breaking news, from personal relationships to connecting with our favorite stars, the world is no longer what it once was and the 140 Conference sought to explore that.

Whether or not the conference is essential or even beneficial, I don’t know, because I did not attend. What I can say is that Twitter is a great tool. Yes, you can use it for links, but the key word here is not “links,” it’s “use.” Twitter is a tool. You can create a spam farm or you can create conversation. You can follow people who primarily communicate with links, or you can connect with people who generate discussions. You can command an audience within your industry or network with friends.

It’s entirely up to you.

So if you wake up and one morning and find yourself buried in horsesh*t, well, baby, I guess you’re a horse.

It’s five in the morning and I’m exhausted but I can’t get offline. The reason? A Twitter-based game called Spymaster, much like the Mafia Wars app on Facebook.

Mafia Wars never spoke to me, but Spymaster, with its espionage-based tasks and activities, had an immediate draw. Using OAuth, the game is directly linked to your Twitter account, so there is no need to create another profile to play. You simply click through from an invite on Twitter and begin.

You can pick from a selection of intelligence agencies including the British M16, the American CIA and the Russian FSB. For doing tasks like collecting dead drops or assassinating an ambassador, you get experience points and money–in the currency of the agency you have chosen. This money helps you buy weapons on the black market to increase your attack and defense sums.

Because this is a social game, your attack and defense sums are also related to how many followers you have on Twitter and how many of them you can get in the game.

The more tweeps you bring on board, the stronger you are and the less desirous other players will be of committing an assassination attempt on you. (If they do try and win, they can take a lot of your assets. If they fail, they lose assets to you.)

The game has spread in popularity because of the use of notifications on Twitter, which bear a link to the game and the hashtag #spymaster. Players have the option of turning these notifications on or off, though leaving them on makes a player more money every time he or she does anything. Savvier users turned most off, but many more did not, causing #spymaster to trend quickly, drawing the attention of even more Twitter users.

As of this posting, 140 of my Twitter followers are playing the game. This number includes programmers, graphic designers, CEOs, journalists–all of us deep in our agencies and assassinations ploys, playing at work and long into the night.

How did it come about?

“We all sat around one day, and decided we wanted to do something really fun on Twitter,” says Chris Abad, CEO at iList, the company that created Spymaster. “Eston Bond has been obsessed with the whole spy genre, so we took all that obsession and random knowledge and ran with it.”

iList has developing Twitter-related technology for the past year, but this game didn’t come into being until a couple of months ago, Abad tells me.

“We all kind of knew people were going to like Spymaster,” he says. “As we played in-house, we found ourselves becoming pretty addicted (which subsequently made it a little difficult to stay focused and developing). However, I don’t think anyone predicted the ridiculous levels of growth we’ve seen since the past few days.”

They started sending invites outside the company late on Thursday of last week. Since then, the game has exploded.

What drive in us does it so deeply satisfy that we can’t put it down? I contacted a friend of mine at the University of Melbourne, Darshana Jayemanne, whose studies on social theory and recent work exploring the video game as a form of art are incredibly relevant to the topic:

How has social media changed the way we play?

Games used to have a ritual or ceremonial character, in which a community could reaffirm its sense of cohesiveness and perhaps correct for traumatic events (think of Hektor’s funeral games in The Iliad).

So many of our collective behaviors are affected by technology, it kind of takes the place of ceremonial forms in traditional societies. So it’s small wonder that we observe play-behaviors accumulating around these supposedly utilitarian devices.

Why is Spymaster gaining so much popularity?

The game is similar to some other stuff that’s going around on other sites, and there’s a lot that could be said in general about why these games work. In particular though, I think the sync between the espionage theme and Twitter in particular works very well–Twitter itself feels kind of clandestine, like you’re immersed in these minutiae of other people’s lives as well as sharing select bits of information yourself.

The Twitterverse exists parallel to the mundane
world, a bit like Mail Art or the Trystero in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. The stress of just how much to share is central to the spy thriller genre in which various bait-and-switches, mirroring and foreshadowing techniques are similar to the feeling you get piecing together someone’s life from a stream of terse messages.

An unexamined life is not worth spying on.

The other thing is that we all tend to carry around more devices than any ’60s supervillain anyway. And we love to use them for fun as well as business, to use our devices in support of our vices. It’s a quasi-fetishistic activity, in fact, what Walter Benjamin would have called “the sex appeal of the inorganic.”

What drive does it satisfy?

It’s all in the design. Games are set up to organize desires around reward structures. So the design sets up the drive. Once you’re hooked to the reward structures, and can compare your success or failure to others (through points or money or what have you), it’s a self-sustaining process. Or so the designers hope. The “become a vampire/werewolf/zombie/banker/whatever” game apps on Facebook got old quickly–their scope was too limited.

Spymaster, on the other hand, is constantly developing.

“As the game unfolds at higher levels, the storyline will become more intricate and involved and there will be surprises along the way,” Abad tells me. “We really want to push more real-world cooperation and collaboration between players. Especially the experienced players who’ve mastered the basics and really want to get creative.”

Creating a successful game, Jayemanne tells me, “involves carefully gauging the resources you’re asking the player to invest among other things. With Spymaster, for example, they may have got the balance right for their platform. Unlike a video game where you have these huge overheads in terms of time spent playing, equipment investment, social ostracization and so on, Spymaster keeps it simple.”

It’s what he calls an “‘interstitial game’ which appears in the cracks between work and life situations rather than requiring the undivided attention implied in Huizinga’s ‘magic circle’ theory.”

“With mobile devices becoming smarter and ever-more pervasive, these games will come into their own,” Jayemanne says.

Abad is aware of the importance of mobile technology. So far Spymaster can only be played on a browser. He tells me that one of the comments they most often hear (other than “can I play?”) is whether they have an iPhone app out yet. It’s in the works.

Now you can really kiss all your productivity bye-bye.

Comments by Chris Abad were appended on June 2, 2009.

Three Things You Didn’t Know

1. There will be more awesome games like Spymaster. iList has built a platform around this technology and, according to Abad, “intend to aggressively pursue this direction.”
2. Usually players are wounded in assassination attempts. But they can be killed. Killing them takes them completely out of the game for 15 minutes.
3. You can’t buy the title of Agency Director in the game with n00dz. According to Abad, only the product team get that title. You’re welcome to send them to me, however. If I like them, you can even come play at my safe house.

Of possible interest:
The Spymaster Backlash Begins by MG Siegler at TechCrunch

SPIELRAUM: Games, Art and Cyberspace by Darshana Jayemanne at the University of Melbourne

Photo montage features an image of me by Derek Overbey and an image of a steam pipe explosion in New York by Peter Foley

“I enjoyed it,” he says in his blog. “I thought that if anybody cared enough to follow me I should also follow them back in return and read my ‘personal firehose’ when I had some free time, instead of watching TV for example. Actually I never watch TV but you get the idea! I learnt a lot by following all my community and it has been a really enjoyable experience.”

But auto-respond tools, which send out generic “thanks for following! I can’t wait to tweet with you! Come to my site!” direct messages started to get on Le Meur’s nerves. As the popularity of these tools increased, it became nearly impossible for Le Meur to use his direct messages effectively.

Le Meur calls it “heavy robot attack,” and it sounds dramatic until you imagine the blitzkrieg resulting from the number of followers continuously added to his following list.

These auto-direct messages are not new. But they do seem to be becoming more popular. The reasoning for using them is beyond me. An automated message immediately says to me, “I’m too lazy to really get to know you.”

I’ll admit that I have 552 pending requests from people following me on Twitter right now. But I would rather browse their profiles as time allows and, if I send them a note, personalizing it based on their bio and recent tweets. Twitter is about community after all, and getting to know one another. Why should you look at my website if I didn’t even bother to personalize a message to you?

It’s spamming and I can’t think of a worse way to start a relationship.

But was that the only thing that prompted Le Meur to unfollow almost everyone?

“Following or friending thousands of friends or everybody is so 2009 [sic] and @scobleizer -ish,” Le Meur said in a tweet late last night in response to talk about his massive unfollowing on Twitter. “In 2009, we want quality not quantity.”

It goes back to the discussion that seems to have taken over in many social media circles in the past couple of months.

Blogger and tech evangelist Robert Scoble, who follows 69,304 people on Twitter, did not miss the shot at him, either. He immediately joined the discussion.

“I use tools so that I can follow both small groups and big groups,” Scoble told Le Meur in a tweet. “Friendfeed’s lists, for instance, or TweetDeck’s groups. Try it!”

But even the grouping feature of TweetDeck, a microblogging platform that competes with Seesmic’s Twhirl wasn’t enough for Le Meur to keep up with his 23,000 followers.

“I used to believe what you said,” Le Meur responded. “I was autofollowing too, this is all bullshit and you know it.”

He pointed out that Scoble himself had stopped using the auto-follow script on Twitter.

“You need to reboot yourself,” Le Meur added. “10,000s of ‘real’ following and friends are so 2008. Get over it, it is just passe, over, finished.”

He and Scoble took the discussion to the telephone. Suddenly, Scoble wasn’t so sure about his tens of thousands of followers anymore. He commented in a tweet: “On the phone @loic makes a lot of sense. Following doesn’t matter now that we have search.twitter.com and friendfeed.”

And so the “unfollow everyone” movement was born. It’s a misnomer—Loic Le Meur is still following 161 people. But you get the picture.

Scoble immediately opened up the discussion on FriendFeed, which allows for lengthier responses than the standard 140 characters of Twitter.

During the discussion, which received nearly 200 comments, artist and blogger Pete Gilbert brought up a good point about Twhirl: “Loic’s company makes a Twitter client. Surely he should build tools into that client to make the overload problem more manageable and certainly not try to set a trend of ‘hey it’s cool to unfollow lots of people now.’ That sort of sends the wrong message to people about your company and it’s thinking.”

He’s right, as mentioned, Le Meur uses the desktop microblogging client Twhirl, which was acquired by Seesmic in early 2008. How his actions will affect user perception of Twhirl remains to be seen.

For what it’s worth, in his blog post about his decision to unfollow people, Le Meur made a commitment to figuring out a way to solve the DM spam problem for Twhirl users. He also assured followers Twhirl was working hard on the filter function in a tweet.

“I am confident we will find a solution,” he says. “Until then, I will remain with a small following list that I will grow one by one daily and remove anybody attacking me again with a robot.”

As of the publishing of this post, Robert Scoble has not followed suit in unfollowing everyone.

What do you think–is massive unfollowing the way to solve the problem?

Fitton, head of Pistachio Consulting and author of Twitter for Dummies was on The Federal Drive with Tom Temin and Jane Norris talking about Twitter this morning.

“I have seen first hand what this can do for people’s lives and what kind of value it can build and I’m a huge fan,” Fitton told listeners after clarifying she’s in no way affiliated with Twitter.

“The thing that’s most worthwhile is to step back and kind of forget that it’s a publishing environment,” she said. “People talk about it being microblogging and, you know, OK, we’re just pushing stuff out there–we’re really having a conversation and what it amounts to is a massive, massive flow of information between all these overlapping networks of loosely connected people all over the globe. And so there is tons of news flowing in there all the time, there’s tons of consumer data, here is tons personality, friends being made, there’s relationships being struck up.”

Fitton has always talked about Twitter as a village. Early this year, she developed the notion on her blog:

For me, connecting on Twitter with someone I’ve just met in person is inviting them to live in “my village.” Follow-up won’t be limited to the “nice meeting you” email cul-de-sac. On Twitter, we’ll cross paths incidentally and without pressure. I may bump into them “around town” for maybe a word or two at the “coffee shop” or “post office.” Over time we may discover common interests (aka social objects) in each others’ tweets, and connect more deeply as neighbors or friends.

For a contrived, weird and techy way to communicate, Twitter’s “passive conversation” fosters very natural, gradual relationship-building. I explained about the village to Dan Bricklin, who immediately connected it to the chapter on “taming” and the Fox in The Little Prince.

“You go back to sociological research on what’s called reciprocity,” Fitton told listeners of Federal News Radio today. “Even all the way back to the 70s–reciprocity is someone’s willingness to engage and help someone else. If you just had a little casual contact with someone, you’re much more likely to step up and engage with them. So we’re all having all this casual contact, constantly on Twitter and it’s really making people engage. And we saw people engage last week during the horror in Mumbai. People really were stepping up trying to help, spreading words, doing what they could–it’s an amazing environment.”

Yet many people still wonder about the usefulness of Twitter. Those of us who have been doing it for a while grasp the immediacy of news, the wealth of consumer data, the vast reach of information, and, above all, the power of connection. I have met more amazing people on Twitter than I have at any other place or through any other thing. But Fitton is right–to go from a ridiculous to amazing, it takes a village, “a critical mass of interesting people–to read and write to.”

“When my brain started to connect with the brains (and hearts) of others, it got really, REALLY cool for me,” Fitton writes on her blog. “You may be looking for like minds, or you may want to be totally shaken up by new ideas. Both work. One day I suddenly realized this was, for me, tribe-finding. For arguably the first time in my life I didn’t feel as weird and different.”

Image of Laura Fitton used with permission. Copyright @wmmarc 2008.

The magical thing about Twitter is that if enough users block an account or notify Twitter that they’re being spammed, the account in question gets suspended.

A lot of times, though, what appears to be a spammer is a well-intentioned user who is so new, that he or she doesn’t understand how the community works and whose only crime is the desire to have their site visited.

This was the case with @lollydaskal. I saw her multiple tweets with the same link in her stream and was about to hit block when I saw her newest one: “new at twitter ….not sure i am doing it right.” I shot her a direct message. “Send me your e-mail address and I’ll help you.”

She did. In the next few minutes, I threw together as many resources and thoughts about how to get a business started on Twitter (her objective) as I could think of and shot her an e-mail.

One of the most important things about using Twitter for business is learning to step out of the old marketing model where you just throw out information about your product into the masses. In today’s world of social media, the relationship between a company and consumers is no longer a one-stop information destination. Web 2.0 is all about the conversation and building a community.

I linked some classics: Chris Brogan’s Twitter for Business, Ogilvy’s Best Practices and Warren Whitlock and Deborah Micek’s Twitter Handbook.

Since she reached out to the community for suggestions on improving her approach on Halloween, @lollydaskal’s gathered a following of 232 people and I am glad to count myself among them.

I remember thinking at the time how wonderful it would be to have all the how-tos in a single place, a catch-basin of quick, easy-to-digest information about how to make the best of Twitter, whether you’re a business or a casual user.

So today, when Laura Fitton, head of Pistachio Consulting, announced she’d signed a contract to write Twitter for Dummies, I was thrilled. Like everything related to the micro-blogging platform, this is a community project. Fitton’s already invited her 8,494 followers to contribute their ideas.

Equally exciting is the recent launch of Twitip by Darren Rowse, of ProBlogger fame.

“TwiTip is about capturing some of the lessons that I’ve been learning about Twitter and how to use it more effectively,” Rowse writes in the blog’s about page. “It will cover Twitter Tips of all varieties including Writing for Twitter, Branding, Growing a Following, Corporate Tweeting and a lot more.”

These two are invaluable resources for the beginner—maybe even the seasoned user.

For example, one of the newer posts on Twitip, by Hugh Briss of Twitter Image, goes into detail about the importance of a Twitter background in establishing brand identity (some great examples of this are available at Mike Smith’s blog—with my friend Atherton Bartelby among them!).

It’s true that space we’re given for bios on Twitter is limited—only 160 characters!—and it’s been the practice for some time now for users to put much of their bios and contact details right on their pages by incorporating them into their background images. While many great people I follow do this, it’s not until now, reading Briss’s post on the topic, that I’ve begun to give it more serious consideration.

But it’s not all brand and business. And another recent post on Twitip touches on how to avoid making your followers feel like they’re overhearing one side of a conversation–I’m quite guilty of it and while for me Twitter is all self-expression, I don’t want to leave anyone out if I can include them in the fun.

As more companies jump on the Twitter wagon, the wave of resistance from casual users grows. Not everyone is happy to see all work and no play in their Twitter streams. Just today, blogger Jay Hathaway posted about his displeasure about the wave of business users that Twitter for Dummies would bring about:

Predictably, the book on Twitter isn’t being written by someone funny or entertaining. It’s being written by someone who posts 100 times on a slow day, and talks about things like conversations and communities and branding and … I don’t know, money? This doesn’t seem sustainable to me. Marketers can market to marketers and make friends with marketers and talk about marketing all day, and it’s not particularly interesting to regular people.

So don’t read it, right? I don’t. But a whole lot of other people do, because they’re climbing on top of each other to associate themselves with the people who have the most marketers reading them, so that they can market themselves to still more marketers, and become what I can only guess is called Market King of the Market.

That’s the audience for this book. I’m sure a lot of people will buy it, and it will make some money for the publisher. Good for them! Also, possibly good for the future of Twitter as a business, so that it can continue to exist as a place where I’m allowed to have chuckles and make friends. Fair enough. It’s just sad that a lot more people will be on Twitter, working. No time for dick jokes, ladies, I can’t rest now that I’m in The Market. Got to rack up some more followers, and some of them might even have Secrets of Success!

He’s not alone in that, either. There seems to be a bit of tension between people who use Twitter to further themselves in their industry and those who use Twitter for fun. I have been told a few times by people that they like my blog and wish my tweets were a little more industry-focused: the amount of oversharing and, yes, dick jokes, just isn’t conducive to achieving their goals on Twitter.

I’m not offended–Twitter is all about pulling people around you whose ideas are useful or amusing. Tastes vary and I come with a disclaimer. Just as some choose to further their business on Twitter, some of us choose to have fun and be ourselves in explosions of 140 characters. I do have another account on Twitter (@omgomgomfg), which I, admittedly, greedily grabbed to protect my brand, and which I intend to develop as a catch-basin for more of the web stuff that interests me and many of the readers of this blog. Now and always, my Twitter stream at @avflox is where I let it all hang out.

Regardless of whether Twitter is play or work, it’s never too late to analyze what you’re doing and whether it fits into your goals for social networking. Could you put this magical tool to even better use?

There is always room for improvement, whether you’re looking to get your product out there or pick up a date. And with this in mind, it’s not hard to see how Twitip and even the more rudimentary Twitter for Dummies are going to be valuable resources for many.

The best part is that we can build this together. No matter what our focus, we are the Twitter culture. There is value in what we know and think and this platform allows for us to share it, to reach out to people we may never otherwise have met and connect in a mutually-beneficial way.

So here’s to growth—in terms of reach, yes, but most importantly, in terms of community.

This article was redrafted at 8:15PM MST to include Hathaway’s thoughts on Twitter for Dummies and my personal thoughts on play vs. work. Million thanks to Atherton Bartelby for pointing out the importance of its inclusion in this discussion.

“Technology is a necessary evil,” he told LifeWire about his wife, Jane, who runs MomGenerations.com. “She’s always texting in one hand and Twittering (an online social network and messaging service) on the other. I’ve woken up before and she’ll be zonked out in bed with the laptop on her lap. It’s insane.”

My husband can relate—and he’s not the only one.

“She grabbed my iPhone out of my hand, threw it on the ground and actually stomped on it,” my friend Peter told me in a recent conversation about why he’d broken up with his latest object of affection. “It’s too bad because the phone was OK and I really liked her, but, you know, on principle. I mean, WTF? Who stomps on stuff past the age of four?”

When I asked him how long she’d been trying to get his attention, he grudgingly admitted he didn’t know.

They don’t call them CrackBerries for nothing. In mid-2007, The Guardian reported on a survey conducted by AOL and Opinion Research of 4,025 Americans over 13 years of age, which found that six out of 10 people use their mobile email gadgets in bed and at least four reply to messages in the middle of the night.

In March, Brian Alexander, who writes the Sexploration column for MSNBC.com followed up on the trend: as of March, 25 million Americans use a smart phone like the BlackBerry or Treo and 68 percent of Americans say they feel anxiety when they’re disconnected from the web.

Alexander points to a study by Sleep Council, a UK-based bed industry group which found eight of 10 people are playing with their high-tech gadgets before bedtime and one in three sends or receives text messages or e-mails while in bed.

A more recent study from Sheraton Hotels found that about 87 percent of users take their gadgets into the bedroom, 84 percent check them just before going to bed and as soon as they wake up, and at least 85 percent say they look for messages in the middle of the night.

A piece by Clive Thompson in The New York Times Magazine summarized the growing popularity of online interaction as a reaction to modern social isolation.

“The mobile workforce requires people to travel more frequently for work, leaving friends and family behind,” Thompson writes. “Psychologists and sociologists spent years wondering how humanity would adjust to the anonymity of life in the city, the wrenching upheavals of mobile immigrant labor—a world of lonely people ripped from their social ties.”

This is how. Social scientists call our incessant online contact “ambient awareness.”

“It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does—body language, sighs, stray comments—out of the corner of your eye,” Thompson writes.

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told [Thompson]. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.”

But is it just helping us stay connected or is it completely changing the expectations we have of our interaction? I think therefore I am, right—but is a thought not really a thought unless it’s a tweet?

Is living the thrill of a relationship without an audience no longer enough? Who can forget Heartbreak Soup or Jakob and Julia? I am continuously haunted by a tweet by former Valleywag writer, Melissa Gira Grant: “Uneasy truth: this relationship makes more sense with an audience. It’s when we’re most honest?”

Is talking to a single person at a time no longer enough, do we need the continuous bombardment of data from all corners of the world? The Sheraton study mentioned in the section above found that more than a third of those surveyed said that if they were forced to make a choice between their partners and their PDA, they’d keep their gadget.

“I can’t decide what’s harder, being in a relationship with someone who’s as obsessively online as you, or being in a relationship with someone who isn’t connected at all, or only minimally,” I say to my friend Atherton Bartelby during one of our daily exchanges.

“I’d say being in a relationship with someone who isn’t in connected at all or minimally,” he responds, “because they don’t understand the anxiety one experiences when they’re disconnected.”

He’s right about the anxiety. Solutions Research Group, which surveys user technology habits, published a report earlier this year called “Age of Disconnect Anxiety,” which found 68 percent of Americans say they feel disoriented, nervous and anxious when deprived of internet access.

“I dated someone who was online just as much as I was, if not more,” I tell Atherton. “Often, we’d be in the same room for hours, but we hardly talked. We had a rule against talking in the ‘computer lab,’ actually. If we had something to say, we’d IM. But it wasn’t chit chat, it had to be important.”

“Dude, that’s totally messed up,” Atherton responds. “I don’t think it was technology’s problem. I think it was you guys.”

He’s not wrong about that. But neither am I wrong that sometimes ambient awareness tools, which are made to facilitate communication and enable connection, can get in the way of communication in a relationship and cause a major disconnect.

For her piece for LifeWire, Diane Mapes talked to Joe Guppy, a Seattle couples counselor, who agreed.

“Communication problems seem to be the number one thing people ask about when they call,” Guppy told Mapes. “They come to the session and pay me $100 just so they can sit together and talk. And to me, the number one red flag is if each person is engaged in their own cyberworld or video world. I had one couple that would even get into arguments via text message.”

A friend of mine calls Twitter the anti-marriage, which is funny because he wants to marry a girl he hooked up with on the microblogging platform.

But still, I can’t help but agree. As our networks expand thanks to social technology and people cater more and more to our niches, we’re less likely to move in the same circles and discuss the same things with our significant others. Social networking may enable us to hook up far more easily, and ambient awareness may accelerate the development of our relationships, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t taking a toll on established relationships.

And it’s not just about taking real quality time together with zero interruptions—it’s affecting sex, too. In his Sexploration column, Brian Alexander declared how surprised he was by reports on technology and human interaction, which, “if taken together, could indicate that we are spending big money to kill off our sex lives.”

Alexander quotes Marta Meana, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies desire and treats people suffering from low to no desire, including couples in “sexless” marriages.

“There are reasons to believe there is a link,” Meana says of sex drive and technology. “If we are feeling like we are multi-tasking a lot, and our attention is divided many ways, that is getting in the way of making quiet time to have sex and really focus on another human being … Unfortunately, we do not privilege sensuous activity and sexuality the way we should in our marriages.”

My husband is so jealous of my laptop that if he could take it out back for a fistfight, he probably would. Luckily, he can’t, because I’m not sure he’d win, as he’s not exactly the fighting kind.

“You being on the internet makes me feel isolated the way you feel isolated when you’re not on the internet,” he said recently when I told him what I was writing about.

“That’s because I am your internet, darling.”

I waited for him to retort, “no, iJustine is my internet.” But he didn’t. He doesn’t know who Justine Ezarik is or that on her Twitter bio she says, “I am the internet.”

Joe Guppy, the couples counselor cited above, suggests a way to keep connected to your partner in the age of perma-connection to the world: involving your partner in your digital distractions. Other people suggest weekly technology sabbaticals.

Outside of YouPorn, I haven’t had much success getting my husband excited about my digital distractions. But we have established that lunch, dinner and bed time are one-on-one interaction times.

It’s going well. I mean, we fought less when we hardly interacted. But, you know, at least we’re talking.

This piece was written for Gloom Cupboard

The story exploded nationally when it was reported that the man responsible for the accident was an illegal immigrant who’d not only never had a license, but had a lengthy rap sheet, including 20 previous arrests.

Following the funeral of the boy, the attention shifted to the media. Berny Morson, a journo for The Rocky Mountain News, used the micro-blogging platform Twitter to take notes at the young boy’s funeral using his cell phone.

Live-tweeting—that is, reporting live using Twitter—is very common. From the Democratic and Republican National Conventions to the season premier of the CW show Gossip Girl, everyone’s doing it.

John Dickerson, who covers the presidential campaign for Slate, told The Washington Post, “If I have a thought that occurs to me, I’ll fire it off. Sometimes it ends up being the lead of a piece, or the notion a piece gets framed around.”

It’s probably not the first time someone has live-tweeted a funeral (heaven knows everything from being fired to giving birth has been live-tweeted since Twitter went live in 2006), but to my knowledge, this is the first time that a newspaper has run the unedited stream of live-tweets from a funeral as a sidebar on a major story.

Cara Degette at The Colorado Independent called it, “utterly, and unforgivingly, inconceivable.”

I asked Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU who’s very active on Twitter, what he thought.

“My opinion is that you need to separate the method—Twittering from a funeral—from the execution; were these the right Tweets?” Rosen responded via an e-mail. “I don’t see anything wrong with the method. The content can be criticized.”

When asked how he would criticize the tweets, the former department chair said he didn’t know the community served by The Rocky Mountain News well enough to offer useful comments.

“Can someone explain the news value of this tweet stream for Rocky Mountain News readers?” Michelle Ferrier asked on the Poynter Institute E-Media Tidbits blog. “I think the glitz of technology has taken over common sense.”

“I think there is a mania to use new technology no matter what and they aren’t thinking,” said John Windrow, night city editor at The Honolulu Advertiser. “It gives newsmen a bad name.”

Samuel Freedman, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and author of Letters to a Young Journalist, offered some more insight.

“I think that reporters are often in the uncomfortable position of reporting from settings where people are in great grief,” Freedman told ABCNews.com. “These situations call for the greatest understanding and discretion on the part of the reporter. To be putting real-time notes out there as opposed to waiting until the ceremony is over; there’s an element of pillaging a private moment of grief that I’m uncomfortable with. A memorial service for a murdered—for a slain child—is not a fit subject for play-by-play updates.”

David J. Zucker, the rabbi who officiated at the service, told ABC News that he didn’t think there was anything offensive in Morson’s live-tweeting.

“The way I see it is that it’s somebody sharing to a wider community interested and felt connected to this sad event.”

In the midst of the hullabaloo, John Temple, editor at The Rocky Mountain News went on the record to clarify matters:

As is our custom, we asked the parents of Marten Kudlis whether we could cover his funeral. To be clear: We never enter funeral services to report on them without the family’s permission. Period.

… Most of us couldn’t attend the service. But that doesn’t mean we don’t empathize with the family and don’t want to join in their mourning in some way. Marten was one family’s son before he died. But because of the way he died, his loss was felt by thousands.

One way for a news organization to help a community connect is to send information live from the service, just as we do from events ranging from political conventions to road closings to concerts and parties. We don’t have to wait to publish in the next day’s paper anymore. TV and radio don’t wait, and people seem to value that.

I can imagine some might think live updates during a solemn event might be disruptive. But typically reporters can sit at the very back of a hall, out of the way of mourners.

Ultimately, to me, it’s all about execution. Poorly done, such journalism might very well feel inappropriate. Done well, I don’t think so.

Some criticism of the short blasts our reporter sent may be justified. They can seem cold, even crass. But I am responsible for that failing. It is my job to make sure our staff is trained properly.

Think of such live reporting as someone whispering into a phone directly to a global audience. There is no room for editors. What the reporter writes is what you read almost instantly. That requires special skill. It takes practice.

But to claim there is something inherently wrong with the idea is to make too sweeping a judgment. Everything from services for major public figures like presidents and popes to ceremonies for victims of tragedies like the one at Columbine High School have long been covered by TV and radio.

… We must learn to use the new tools at our disposal. Yes, there are going to be times we make mistakes, just as we do in our newspaper.

But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try something. It means we need to learn to do it well. That is our mission.

Shortly after composing this piece, I shot Twitter co-founder Evan Williams a DM asking his take. He replied with the following comment:

The concept does seem odd–coming to you “live” from… a funeral. And coming to you live via Twitter probably seems uncomfortable for at least a couple more reasons:

1) As opposed to newspapers, Twitter is in general not perceived as being very serious. Therefore, perhaps reporting a funeral via Twitter make it seem like it’s not being taken seriously.

2) While a reporter covering the funeral is probably taking notes anyway, sending text messages sounds disrespectful and like he/she is not really paying attention. (In reality he/she is probably paying more attention, in order to report.)

I didn’t read the tweets from the event, so I don’t know if any were inappropriate. But as far as whether the idea itself is flawed, I’d have to agree with John Temple: If the family was okay having the event reported on in general, it being covered while it was still happening shouldn’t be that much different. In these types of matters, though, people’s initial reaction may be more important than the logical argument. I do not blame the reporter (or newspaper) for not predicting people would react that way.

My prediction would be that in the future this type of thing does not seem odd, though. Live video coverage will probably also be common (not that we haven’t seen live video of funerals already).

What do you think—did The Rocky Mountain News go too far?

What’s Twitter? Read my piece about the microblogging platform here.