Time magazine’s

Here are some of Steven’s observations and predictions:

“as millions of devotees have discovered, Twitter turns out to have unsuspected depth. In part this is because hearing about what your friends had for breakfast is actually more interesting than it sounds. The technology writer Clive Thompson calls this “ambient awareness”: by following these quick, abbreviated status reports from members of your extended social network, you get a strangely satisfying glimpse of their daily routines. We don’t think it at all moronic to start a phone call with a friend by asking how her day is going. Twitter gives you the same information without your even having to ask.”

“Twenty years ago, the ideas exchanged in that conversation would have been confined to the minds of the participants. Ten years ago, a transcript might have been published weeks or months later on the Web. Five years ago, a handful of participants might have blogged about their experiences after the fact.”

I personally believe that what Twitter has done is create an in-road for leveraging Text Messaging (SMS) in a new way. Regardless of Twitter’s success or demise, what they created will continue. Twitter is the new email.

A few solid quotes from the article:

Twitter provides another opportunity to maintain and encourage community amongst people who they would otherwise not have the opportunity to know.

If there is one thing that has suffered in our age it is relationships. People have very little time to cultivate relationships, share concerns and hopes, and make their needs known. When we do see one another, it’s hard to know what to say, because we simply don’t know where anyone is coming from. Instead, we spend most of our time hanging out, trying to get to that point where we can find some frame of reference or connection.

While we need to acknowledge that a virtual, internet relationship is really no relationship at all, we also need to be honest and acknowledge what can be the real world benefit of knowing, for instance, that I’ve been thinking of doing some freelancing work, playing PS3 a LOT lately, and meditating on the vanity of life. This sort of knowledge makes the conversation a heck of a lot more meaningful and challenging when we come together on the weekend. By knowing what’s happening in one another’s lives, we know how to speak truth to one another, how to pray for one another, and how to serve one another.

The article uses Scriptural references in additions to quotes from pastors and lay leaders, a first that I’ve seen in these news reports. Here are a few key quotes from the article, which you can read here:

“It doesn’t replace a lot of things — it doesn’t replace church, community or being with people — but it is another way to keep connected. We view it as a way for a leader to communicate with a lot of followers without a lot of extraneous (effort).” – Dale Swanson, Victory Church, Executive Pastor

“The Rev. Dave Evans, 53, senior pastor of Highland Baptist Church in Moore, OK, said he realized 150 to 200 members of his congregation were members of Facebook. He said he decided to try Facebook and Twitter for the outreach opportunities. Evans said Twitter has allowed him to follow the day-to-day lives of others and lets them do the same with him. “It is a way to offer prayer, support and encouragement to each other,” he said.

The Rev. George Back, 67, longtime dean of St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral, said his church, 127 NW 7, has about 70 people connected to its Facebook page. He said each day, more people are following its tweets on Twitter, though the church only joined the latter a few weeks ago. He said social networking seems to meet a need in a society where lots of people don’t know other people in their immediate vicinity very well. ”If you think back 100 years, people were meeting in the store or the bank. Now people are driving from place to place; they’re pressing the button and going into the garage and not seeing their neighbor,” Back said. ”Today, they are encountering one another in different ways. This enables a process that has been short-circuited by modern times. In that sense, it’s not brand-new; it’s a resurgence of something that was lost and now is found — that ongoing connection.”

It’s so easy! Be sure to go to the TBuzz website to actually do it as the image below is just a screen grab.

WIth a built-in URL shortener, this takes all the work out of tweeting about a great web page. It works for all major browsers, though be sure to watch the video on the front page of the TBuzz website if you’re an Internet Explorer user, as there’s a couple of steps that are required.

Seriously, is this cool & useful or what?

On Easter Sunday, pastor Todd Hahn prefaced his sermon by saying, “I hope many of you are tweeting this morning about your experience with God.”

“It’s a huge responsibility of a church to leverage whatever’s going on in the broader culture, to connect people to God and to each other,” says Hahn.

If worship is about creating community, Twitter is an undeniably useful tool. The trick is to not let the chatter overshadow the need for quiet reflection that spirituality requires. At Westwinds, people can ask questions about the sermon that the pastors will answer later, or they can tweet in real time and hope another congregant offers insight. Some use Twitter as a note-taking tool. Often, it’s pastor-directed, with McDonald preaching while Voelz taps out, “In what way do you feel the spirit of God moving within you?” Discuss.

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It’s a nice, big fluff PR piece but it does at least provide some interesting observations about corporate life at Twitter HQ. More interestingly, Apple, who needs no help with branding or customer loyalty, showed an interesting side in actually wanting to be identified with another company, something you don’t see them do very often.

The study and report, I think, is highly flawed. They only looked at those people who use Twitter.com to access their Twitter accounts. As I’ve pointed out repeatedly, there are far too many highly useful tools on both mobile devices and computers that make using Twitter easier and, in my opinion, better. Nielsen didn’t report on those users, which I would hazard a guesstimate to be no less than 35% and most likely a good bit higher percentage. Use TweetDeck? Tweetie? Twitterific? Twitterfone? Twhirl? You’re not a part of their study data.

Here’s a bit of what they said, and a couple of nifty graphs to illustrate their flawed viewpoint:

Currently, more than 60 percent of U.S. Twitter users fail to return the following month, or in other words, Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent.


Maybe we’re jumping the gun. Twitter is still something of a fledgling, and surely some other sites that eventually lived up to Twitter-like hype suffered from poor retention in the early days. Compare it to the two heavily-touted behemoths of social networking when they were just starting out. Doing so below, we found that even when Facebook and MySpace were emerging networks like Twitter is now, their retention rates were twice as high. When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today.

Nielsen, in their own words, admits to “jumping the gun”, but I think their assumption that all and/or most users access Twitter through the Twitter.com website to be absurd. In effect, it makes this “study” highly suspect and, most likely, highly inaccurate.