One of my favorite Twitter resources is @Twitter_Tips, which produces a steady stream of interesting, useful, valuable and enterprise Tweets about Twitter news and services. I became curious about the people behind @Twitter_Tips and why they do what they do. So, I fired off a DM, and Dave and Sarah happily agreed to answer a few questions.
When did you start using Twitter and why you’re so enthusiastic about it?
Dave: I think I got in mid-late 2007, but we only started using Twitter seriously in early 2008. I saw it at first as sort of a whole new planet in the Internet solar system. I’d forecast the popularity of blogs in 2000, but didn’t get involved then because the software wasn’t developed yet for that, and always felt I saw what was happening but missed out. I thought there can’t be too many opportunities like this in one lifetime and didn’t want to miss out on Twitter.
Sarah: Once we got more involved, it was clear people were very enthusiastic about connecting and helping one another via Twitter, and as a teacher for so many years, I love connecting and helping!
Dave: You’re the next Oprah! She knows I mean it—one of my missions to help Sarah help more people.
Sarah: Twitter is such a fantastic way to connect and help. Some new students found me through Twitter and wanted to take my classes, and I got to know the wonderful @Tom_Godell who helped me get considered for a national radio job with NPR before the economy put a freeze on hiring.
Dave: There are so many stories on Twitter about helping one another. For example we held a fundraiser for a sick friend we met on Twitter to help her with expenses while she was getting chemotherapy.
Sarah. Right, @peasandluvfrmJO—Karen (Jo) Moseley—and through her we met @SusanAustin who took wonderful show photographs for the dance company I’m in, Jawaahir. As we thought about setting up accounts for some of our interests Dave realized right away that one of his primary interests was helping people understand Twitter.
Dave: At first we kind of took sites we had already bookmarked for different interests and shared them through accounts like @LaughItUp and @DivineLove. One of the fun things we did was ask Sarah’s Twitter friends to help us write a blog post, which became the very popular “You know you are too popular on Twitter when… ” Then I started mashing up feeds trying to create a stream of articles being written about Twitter and share them via @Twitter_Tips later in 2008. As we started to grow, we also started doing a lot of tech support for people trying to understand Twitter…
Sarah: …which meant when the Shorty Awards came around, we had helped so many people by that point—even though we didn’t have a lot of followers yet—that it easy to find a core group of Twitter friends who wanted to vote for us. After we won the award Dave was insistent that I be the one to go the ceremony in New York.
Dave: She’s a lot prettier than I am! Of course they required someone to attend in person to accept the $1,000 reward, and we didn’t want to pass that up.
Sarah: It was a lot of fun, and I got my picture on CNN since Rick Sanchez was the master of ceremonies. I met and stayed with the awe-inspiringly wonderful @SueKeck while I was in town, and then when it was time to go another Twitter story unfolded.
Dave: Sarah had taken a smaller plane out to New York, and each day they kept grounding the flight because the plane was too small to take off in the high winds. Sarah had to find a place to stay on little notice day after day as the plane kept being grounded. We found people through Twitter and Facebook willing to let Sarah stay with them.
Sarah: Around that time we had really begun to perfect finding articles on Twitter, so Dave asked @GuyKawasaki if he would put us on Alltop, and he said he’d be happy to. TwitterUserManual.com was Dave’s first idea for a blog, though now it’s TweetSmarter.com.
Dave: We have a popular Twitter application there, but no blog—yet.
Sarah: Doing @Twitter_Tips takes a lot of time!
How do you find all the Twitter tips and services?
Dave: I started with attempts like using Yahoo! Pipes to filter popular tech blogs for articles on Twitter and reviewing them in Google reader. Currently we have dozens of feeds we’ve created and review as many as 2,000 items each day to find a couple dozen to tweet one per hour.
Sarah: Dave is such a geek he’s really been good at setting up and refining how we find and review items over time.
Dave: We both have strong writing backgrounds so we share the task of writing the tweets themselves, and we both work different parts of the control panel at different time. We’re in the U.S. central time zone, so just before we go to bed most evenings you’ll find us both in the home office setting up the Tweets for Australia and other time zones that are overnight to us.
How do you decide what tips and services to highlight?
Dave: It’s mostly watching the kinds of questions people who need help with Twitter send in, and tracking what people are retweeting. Three months ago an article on “How beginners can use Twitter” would have been tremendously popular. Now we have more people who’ve been getting the hang of Twitter and are interested in articles aimed at slightly more experienced users. Twitter actually seems to be changing a lot over time as well.
Sarah: Despite how efficient we’ve become, if we were to try to pass this to one person to learn to do, it nearly a full-time job for someone to learn to do all that is involved.
Dave: Although the tweets that actually go out are usually not scheduled too far in advance, we do have a lot of tweets scheduled up to a day in advance in case for some reason something happens and we can’t update the service. But 99% of the time we replace the advance-scheduled tweets with more current tweets. I have looked at other people’s tweets to try to find good articles, but a lot of people retweet things as favors to friends—you tweet something for me, I tweet something for you. We haven’t been able to do that because that doesn’t bring the best, most current articles to the top. We try to only tweet the best of what’s come out in the last 12-24 hours.
Recently some services like DailyRT have gotten more consistent, and we have started looking at some tweets again to find content. You can definitely find great content looking at people’s tweets, but there’s no way to tell how current what they are tweeting is, or if they really think it is the best thing they’ve seen rather than just one of the best. We’re shooting for the best.
What’s your take on Twitter’s future? How do you think it can make money?
Dave: My opinion is that Twitter’s future is going to be composed of three parts: (1) What users do, (2) How well Twitter supports #1 and (3) New things Twitter introduces. Twitter needs to do a better support job right now.
As far as money, the old approach is if you feel you have a strong connection with a person or company, or they know a lot about you, they can use that connection or knowledge to find things you would be willing to pay for: Targeted or relationship marketing. In more recent years, the internet has hugely expanded the idea of providing services to expand your life experience. Twitter will find things to monetize using both old and new paradigms, but I personally think the real money will be a future use of a service like Twitter that is both very valuable to users and easy to monetize. I’m actually shopping around some ideas of what that might be right now based around people helping one another.
Tough question but what are your favorite Twitter services?
Dave: There are no Twitter services I really like. What’s missing is the ability to persistently filter messages and put in one place those from real people trying to get in touch with us via @ or DM. I don’t want to see automated messages (“Thanks for following! Visit my web site”), retweets, game invitations, etc. in the place I go try to find people who are asking us for help. Twhirl comes the closest. Also to show the back-and-forth of conversations with one person (threading) across both @ and DM. I don’t know of any tool for this. I did create a way to do this, but it wasn’t easy to automate, so we’ve dropped it.
Sarah: All the stuff we use Dave has customized by creating control panels on a master web site page that link to different parts of different tools, so we kind of have one big custom service that takes the pieces we like from lots of different services and makes it all work for us.
Dave: We use free versions of several products. We started with TweetLater, but EasyTweets has an area for saving drafts that made life easier for us. HootSuite is terrific for creating tweets while you’re visiting a page. One of our computers is too old to run TweetDeck well because of memory issues having it and a browser with several tabs open at the same time, or we would use it more. I’ve tried several hundred services over time. They all have downsides.
When you’re not writing about Twitter, what do you do?
Dave: Several years ago I had an idea for a new way people could work together that would be accessible to the majority of the world’s population, but I saw that it wouldn’t really fulfill it’s destiny unless a new kind of protocol or service arose that would compete with phone and email to allow people to share their status in short snippets on a real-time basis. When you realize that what I was thinking of describes Twitter almost to a tee, I have to admit it took me a ridiculous amount of time to realize that Twitter was the service I had foreseen.
And when I say “forseen,” I don’t mean I knew this would happen. I just saw that if it existed, it could be the basis for a number of new ways for people to interact and enrich their lives. So in a very real sense, I’ve been working for several years on services that could be built using Twitter or something similar as their backbone. Reaching the point where we can bring one of these services out (hopefully later this year) is what I’m working on.
This website uses IntenseDebate comments, but they are not currently loaded because either your browser doesn't support JavaScript, or they didn't load fast enough.
A Q&A With @Twitter_Tips
When did you start using Twitter and why you’re so enthusiastic about it?
Dave: I think I got in mid-late 2007, but we only started using Twitter seriously in early 2008. I saw it at first as sort of a whole new planet in the Internet solar system. I’d forecast the popularity of blogs in 2000, but didn’t get involved then because the software wasn’t developed yet for that, and always felt I saw what was happening but missed out. I thought there can’t be too many opportunities like this in one lifetime and didn’t want to miss out on Twitter.
Sarah: Once we got more involved, it was clear people were very enthusiastic about connecting and helping one another via Twitter, and as a teacher for so many years, I love connecting and helping!
Dave: You’re the next Oprah! She knows I mean it—one of my missions to help Sarah help more people.
Sarah: Twitter is such a fantastic way to connect and help. Some new students found me through Twitter and wanted to take my classes, and I got to know the wonderful @Tom_Godell who helped me get considered for a national radio job with NPR before the economy put a freeze on hiring.
Dave: There are so many stories on Twitter about helping one another. For example we held a fundraiser for a sick friend we met on Twitter to help her with expenses while she was getting chemotherapy.
Sarah. Right, @peasandluvfrmJO—Karen (Jo) Moseley—and through her we met @SusanAustin who took wonderful show photographs for the dance company I’m in, Jawaahir. As we thought about setting up accounts for some of our interests Dave realized right away that one of his primary interests was helping people understand Twitter.
When did you start @Twitter_Tips and twitterusermanual.com?
Dave: At first we kind of took sites we had already bookmarked for different interests and shared them through accounts like @LaughItUp and @DivineLove. One of the fun things we did was ask Sarah’s Twitter friends to help us write a blog post, which became the very popular “You know you are too popular on Twitter when… ” Then I started mashing up feeds trying to create a stream of articles being written about Twitter and share them via @Twitter_Tips later in 2008. As we started to grow, we also started doing a lot of tech support for people trying to understand Twitter…
Sarah: …which meant when the Shorty Awards came around, we had helped so many people by that point—even though we didn’t have a lot of followers yet—that it easy to find a core group of Twitter friends who wanted to vote for us. After we won the award Dave was insistent that I be the one to go the ceremony in New York.
Dave: She’s a lot prettier than I am! Of course they required someone to attend in person to accept the $1,000 reward, and we didn’t want to pass that up.
Sarah: It was a lot of fun, and I got my picture on CNN since Rick Sanchez was the master of ceremonies. I met and stayed with the awe-inspiringly wonderful @SueKeck while I was in town, and then when it was time to go another Twitter story unfolded.
Dave: Sarah had taken a smaller plane out to New York, and each day they kept grounding the flight because the plane was too small to take off in the high winds. Sarah had to find a place to stay on little notice day after day as the plane kept being grounded. We found people through Twitter and Facebook willing to let Sarah stay with them.
Sarah: Around that time we had really begun to perfect finding articles on Twitter, so Dave asked @GuyKawasaki if he would put us on Alltop, and he said he’d be happy to. TwitterUserManual.com was Dave’s first idea for a blog, though now it’s TweetSmarter.com.
Dave: We have a popular Twitter application there, but no blog—yet.
Sarah: Doing @Twitter_Tips takes a lot of time!
How do you find all the Twitter tips and services?
Dave: I started with attempts like using Yahoo! Pipes to filter popular tech blogs for articles on Twitter and reviewing them in Google reader. Currently we have dozens of feeds we’ve created and review as many as 2,000 items each day to find a couple dozen to tweet one per hour.
Sarah: Dave is such a geek he’s really been good at setting up and refining how we find and review items over time.
Dave: We both have strong writing backgrounds so we share the task of writing the tweets themselves, and we both work different parts of the control panel at different time. We’re in the U.S. central time zone, so just before we go to bed most evenings you’ll find us both in the home office setting up the Tweets for Australia and other time zones that are overnight to us.
How do you decide what tips and services to highlight?
Dave: It’s mostly watching the kinds of questions people who need help with Twitter send in, and tracking what people are retweeting. Three months ago an article on “How beginners can use Twitter” would have been tremendously popular. Now we have more people who’ve been getting the hang of Twitter and are interested in articles aimed at slightly more experienced users. Twitter actually seems to be changing a lot over time as well.
Sarah: Despite how efficient we’ve become, if we were to try to pass this to one person to learn to do, it nearly a full-time job for someone to learn to do all that is involved.
Dave: Although the tweets that actually go out are usually not scheduled too far in advance, we do have a lot of tweets scheduled up to a day in advance in case for some reason something happens and we can’t update the service. But 99% of the time we replace the advance-scheduled tweets with more current tweets. I have looked at other people’s tweets to try to find good articles, but a lot of people retweet things as favors to friends—you tweet something for me, I tweet something for you. We haven’t been able to do that because that doesn’t bring the best, most current articles to the top. We try to only tweet the best of what’s come out in the last 12-24 hours.
Recently some services like DailyRT have gotten more consistent, and we have started looking at some tweets again to find content. You can definitely find great content looking at people’s tweets, but there’s no way to tell how current what they are tweeting is, or if they really think it is the best thing they’ve seen rather than just one of the best. We’re shooting for the best.
What’s your take on Twitter’s future? How do you think it can make money?
Dave: My opinion is that Twitter’s future is going to be composed of three parts: (1) What users do, (2) How well Twitter supports #1 and (3) New things Twitter introduces. Twitter needs to do a better support job right now.
As far as money, the old approach is if you feel you have a strong connection with a person or company, or they know a lot about you, they can use that connection or knowledge to find things you would be willing to pay for: Targeted or relationship marketing. In more recent years, the internet has hugely expanded the idea of providing services to expand your life experience. Twitter will find things to monetize using both old and new paradigms, but I personally think the real money will be a future use of a service like Twitter that is both very valuable to users and easy to monetize. I’m actually shopping around some ideas of what that might be right now based around people helping one another.
Tough question but what are your favorite Twitter services?
Dave: There are no Twitter services I really like. What’s missing is the ability to persistently filter messages and put in one place those from real people trying to get in touch with us via @ or DM. I don’t want to see automated messages (“Thanks for following! Visit my web site”), retweets, game invitations, etc. in the place I go try to find people who are asking us for help. Twhirl comes the closest. Also to show the back-and-forth of conversations with one person (threading) across both @ and DM. I don’t know of any tool for this. I did create a way to do this, but it wasn’t easy to automate, so we’ve dropped it.
Sarah: All the stuff we use Dave has customized by creating control panels on a master web site page that link to different parts of different tools, so we kind of have one big custom service that takes the pieces we like from lots of different services and makes it all work for us.
Dave: We use free versions of several products. We started with TweetLater, but EasyTweets has an area for saving drafts that made life easier for us. HootSuite is terrific for creating tweets while you’re visiting a page. One of our computers is too old to run TweetDeck well because of memory issues having it and a browser with several tabs open at the same time, or we would use it more. I’ve tried several hundred services over time. They all have downsides.
When you’re not writing about Twitter, what do you do?
Sarah: I teach and perform oriental dance as well as work as a voiceover artist and instructor. My main career has been in radio for a long time, but the job turnover in that industry has gotten more ridiculous over time, and the economy has made it even worse.
Dave: Several years ago I had an idea for a new way people could work together that would be accessible to the majority of the world’s population, but I saw that it wouldn’t really fulfill it’s destiny unless a new kind of protocol or service arose that would compete with phone and email to allow people to share their status in short snippets on a real-time basis. When you realize that what I was thinking of describes Twitter almost to a tee, I have to admit it took me a ridiculous amount of time to realize that Twitter was the service I had foreseen.
And when I say “forseen,” I don’t mean I knew this would happen. I just saw that if it existed, it could be the basis for a number of new ways for people to interact and enrich their lives. So in a very real sense, I’ve been working for several years on services that could be built using Twitter or something similar as their backbone. Reaching the point where we can bring one of these services out (hopefully later this year) is what I’m working on.