Get pickled

I was in the pub the other night. Get used to that as an opening sentance on this blog, it’s going to happen a lot. Anyway. So. I was in the pub the other night, and a friend asked me: ‘what’s the point of Twitter’.

Good one.

So I had a think and rather than start blathering on about social media this and buzzword that I gave her an example, and it was this:

I do a wee bit of mountain biking, and an oft-used abbreviation for mountain bikes is ‘mtb’. When I was up in Scotland a couple of weeks ago riding some of the brilliant 7 Stanes trails I started tweeting about what I was up to and adding the hash tag ‘mtb’ so that other twitterers would be able to find my posts if they were interested in mountain biking. I also did a quick search for #mtb myself and as a result started following a couple of interesting people, including @teampickle, @bikerumor and @LostSociety.  Team Pickle especially have been really useful, they’ve already introduced me to a couple of new areas to ride that I didn’t know existed – including Lee Quarry Mountain Bike Centre, which I intend to ride very soon. I’ve also discovered Team Pickle’s blog, which I’m a big fan of – check it out if you need a bit of inspiration to get out and ride.

So to go back to my friend’s question, the point of Twitter, quite simply, is to share information – and that information can be as frivolous, as geeky or as useful as you want it to be. Guaranteed, there’s someone else out there tweeting about something that matches your interests, and your life could get a teeny bit better as a result of what you learn.

The information Twitter delivers is also stuff you wouldn’t necessarily get to via Google. A Google search for mtb is clogged up with lots of official resource sites and commercial organisations – I got to page 5 and Team Pickle’s blog still hadn’t appeared. And yet, from a generic search term like ‘mtb’, the information I got from Team PIckle (via Twitter) was extremely relevant to me – potentially more so than the Google stuff.

So, Twitter = information delivered in an alternative way to Google. Not a great revelation to anyone I’m sure, but it’s always nice to clarify things for myself, especially when I’m in a pub.

And I hope everyone checks out Team Pickle. Go on, they look like nice folks!

Chart of the day

A friend of mine recently hooked me up to the Sillicon Alley Insider and more specifically their Chart of the Day. If you’re a bit of an infographics freak, as I am, then you’ll probably enjoy it. But it’s also a really useful resource for anyone who needs to understand what’s going on in the digital world.

I found the chart from Tuesday 21st (I know, I know, I’m way off the pace!) particularly interesting:

As we all know, the power behind the social web is the ability to share content, and it’s therefore crucial for any social network’s long-term viability that users are sharing. This chart shows that more people currently use Facebook to share links than anyone else. Not surprising given that Facebook is the size of a large country (I think it works out at around the 5th most populous). What is interesting is that Twitter, despite having only around one tenth the users of Facebook, is used by half as many people to share content. So (unless my thinking is flawed here), Twitter lends itself more readily to sharing.

There are a couple of points to consider, mostly centred around the fact that the AddToAny tool used to measure the data is biased toward certain web properties. Technorati’s top 5 most influential blogs don’t use the AddToAny widget and so aren’t included in the report, and the figures for email are not recorded accurately. There is also the fact that Yahoo owns a number of the spaces on the chart, and if combines would be second largest.

But even given these objections, I find the chart interesting. I’d actually like to see a chart that shows sharing as a proportion of the number of users – then we could really see the champion space for sharing. Any chance of that, Chart Of The Day?

Chart Of The Day picked up the story from Mashable.