Twitter: A Minimal Introduction

Designed by founders for teens and phones.
Taken over by everyone else for almost everything else.
Mainstream Media is completely misleading.

Monetization:

Spam is almost nonexistent. (Unfollow is especially easy.)
Many spammers (...well ~excuse me~, "businesses") don't get model at all.
Monetization by Twitter organization is unclear. (Eventually like Google Ads?)
Suggestion: Do searches on name being used and join the conversations.
(Do this by using the at symbol at the front of the account name.)

Information flows:

One-way: Ends up being mostly journals, magazines, and premium bloggers.
Over time individuals refine and do less of this.
Two-way (conversations): Possible only if each Follows the other.
Tends to increase over time. (Or individual quits Twitter.)

Social customs and optimization:

Avoid coming off as a spammer. So usually personal names or CEO names instead of business names. I almost never even check-out a new follower that has a business name. It's a waste of time. Perfectly good, desirable even, to give business name and link in the short biographical space provided.

When someone follows you (with a account that has a personal name), right-click to check out their page. If looks interesting with a comfortable frequency and quality of tweets then I generally follow-back.

Spammers often follow a strategy to get you to follow them by first following you, along with a thousand others! A few days later they Unfollow to improve their "stats" to appear popular.

Lists:

I have found Twitter goes much more smoothly for me if I use my main "Follows" list for only the people who I can have conversations with (with a few exceptions). If you have created another list then they are on the right side of your main page. I use the other lists as newsfeeds. (That is what I am shooting for, but I might get around to doing that for a month.)

Direct Messages (DMs) links have been targeted by viruses a lot. I never click on links in DMs.

Comparisons to Facebook:

Ignore all mainstream (business-based) media hype about this.

Brevity -- I really, really love how Twitter forces people to be brief. I like my Facebook friends (of course), but frankly often find to my astonishment they're way too chatty, or go on and on about things I have absolutely no interest in. (Note that MSM portrays Twitter as chatty, Facebook as friendly. The reverse is more true in my experience.) (As Twitter conversations deepen I usually move from Tweets to DMs, and then to Facebook or G-mail.) (Friendfeed is very popular with scientists and science reporters. Still a little too chatty for me.)

Some brain-storming: Indexing theory and searching theory are very closely related. Awhile back I tweeted something like -- "The Twitter character limit is mostly trivial for book indexers. All day long it's Main Head, Sub-head, and Locator/Link". I see Twitter as part of a larger trend of the push-pull "fitness" between human and computer information-processing systems. (See me for a detailed explication of this concept.)

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