Do you remember your first?

Have you seen MyFirsttweet, a site developed by Noah Brier, that searches the database for a user's first tweet? It's a little buggy, but the concept is sound. What was your first tweet when you started and were in the Ham sandwich phase. From the archives, the first few tweets in history:



The first Tweet in history? From Jack, "just setting up my twttr" and a not very imaginative nor visionary one either. In fact, none of the founders showed much excitement for the revolutionary microblog! About the only thing that one can glean from this is the product's first name was twttr. How very Web 2.0! Now let's look at some other prominent Tweeters?














Anyone can find their first tweet without Myfirsttweet.com. Well, almost anyone, you'll see. Thanks to Jason Grigsby, there is a simple formula:

• Go to the Twitter page of the person whose first post you want to see. Take note of their Twitter username.
• Look for the number of updates in the Stats section in the right column.
• Take the number of updates and divide it by 20. (There are 20 updates per page).
• If you have a remainder after the division, add 1 to your result. This is the page number you need.
• Construct a url using the following syntax:

  http://twitter.com/[username]?page=[pagenumber]

• Load that url in your browser.
• As an example, for me, since I have updated 4039 times, my first tweet should be located at: http://twitter.com/warrenss?page=202

However, it doesn't work! According to Biz,

After playing around with it for awhile, i think the threshold is about 150 pages, so if you have tweeted fewer than 3000 times, you are in luck!


For the rest of us, sorry, keep waiting.

Re-introducing Twitter

My friend, Aaron Strout, just celebrated his 10,000 Tweet by tweeting his top 10 Social Media lessons learned as he approached 10K.  Aaron provided some great advice that everyone can benefit from.  A few of his Twitter related tips include:

• Make sure you spend as much time commenting, responding and reading other people's content as you do creating your own.
• Every day I a point of calling out others blogs, Twitter updates or FF activity. Remember its all about them, not you!
• On Twitter be social. Talk about work AND social things. Too much of either can be a turn off.

Thinking about Aaron's tweets, I realized that although I blog about Twitter, I haven't been all that helpful in teaching people about how to use Twitter here. As we all know, although Twitter is very simple to learn and use, it can be difficult to master.  Since much has been written about how to Tweet, I have combed the Twitter ecosystem to find the best advice. I highly recommend each one of these great posts:

• A classic from Jeremiah Owyang, "How I use Twitter, and you?"
• Connie Bensen has written a compendium of  Twitter 101 instructions that includes, insights, tips, links and tools.
• Mark Goren provides quick Twitter thoughts I and II
• Jordan Levy has written a fantastic Flowgram which includes the famous Common Craft video, Twitter on Wikipedia, Chris Brogan's 50 ideas on using Twitter for business
• A list of 170 bookmarks of other instructional Twitter posts on Delicious.com 

 And finally, here is a deck that I presented to Seattle Podcamp, Twitter, What's it all about and why should I use it

Twitter- What's It All About And Why Should I Use It?

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: podcampseattle twitter)

Join me on Saturday

This post may be a little OT, but I promise a twitter connection. On Saturday, June 21st, PodCamp Seattle 2008 will be held at the University of Washington Communications building.

PodCamp is a free, informal "unconference" event where people come together to connect, learn and share about online social tools, such as blogging, podcasting, videoblogging, Twitter, wikis, virtual worlds, etc. Our Seattle event is aimed at new media enthusiasts, marketers, PR and ad people, and technologists. PodCamp is a free, informal type of event where you get to meet a bunch of cool people and hopefully come home with a few new tricks. The planned presentations are split by topic: tech, marketing, social good, and intro/101.

This event is co-sponsored by Seattle Ad Club, Puget Sound AMA, the University of Washington, Edelman Digital and the Seattle Podcasting Network.

I plan to speak on Twitter (see, there’s the connection). On the agenda, my topic is positioned as Twitter for beginners, but depending on the audience, I hope to expand the conversation to talk about some of the cool ways businesses have been using twitter as well as some great tools.

It runs from 9am to 3:30 in the afternoon, but you won’t have to listen to me for six hours! There are 18 great sessions. You’ll also get to hear from Eric Weaver, from Edelman (who is organizing the event) has the provocative topic, Your Customers Have Left the Station, Kathy Gill, a super energetic communications professor at the University of Washington will discuss Beginning Podcasting, Jason Preston of Parnassus Group will be presenting some basics of video editing and distribution, Patrick Byers of Outsource Marketing, will talk about Using Social Media to Create Social Good, and Leigh Fatzinger of On Message Ventures will talk about Social Media and PR.

If you’re planning to attend, you should register on the eventbrite page - and you can learn more from the Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6284941092. See you Saturday!

From the late show last night

Last night Deb Micek and Warren Whitlock of Twitter Handbook held a webinar on the Blog Talk Radio Show:

Topic: Twitter Applications (AKA: “Twitter Apps”)
What’s YOUR Favoriate App?

Blog Talk Radio Show on Twitter

It was a very informative show for new twitter users who learned a lot about some of the nuances of twitter such as the use of the @, direct messages, and hashtags. In fact, a hashtag was set up for the call, #th3, where you can see the twitter transcription. Notable contributors to the webinar were Corvida of ReadWriteWeb and noted twitter power user, Wayne Sutton.

Attendees learned about some of the more useful twitter tools that we take for granted like the aforementioned Twemes. Summize which was mentioned on Twittermaven last week was also discussed in some detail as well as several of the desktop and mobile twitter clients. My favorite, Twhirl, was described quite a bit.

It was a great webinar for beginning twitter users to learn more about how to get much more out of the tool and community. Unfortunately, the start time (8 PM Pacific) and duration probably limited the number of east coasters who could attend.

How do you search twitter?

One of the keys to successful twitter use is tracking conversations and keyword search. Since twitter’s search feature is basically non-existent, we have to go outside of twitter to the rich ecosystem of twitter tools.

The first search tool dedicated to twitter is tweetscan. Although Tweetscan is reasonably effective, it is extremely limited in terms of its user interface and capability. Tweetscan does offer a nice feature of daily emails of your search results as shown in a search for word of mouth (wom).

Tweet Scan for warrrenss on 2008-06-06

Your scan: wom

	dbinkowski : @vaspersthegrate as an online WOM guy, i can tell you that the major of WOM still happens offline. those are all con jobs too? <<
	LeaderABW : Never minding what kind of person types an URL into an SE, it shows that either my branding worked or it's an actual WOM sale! Way cool! <<
	bcarlson33 : @andrew_walsh I dreamt a WoM guest fell through and I was the standby. I worked out what I should say, then woke up while being introduced. <<

You received this email because you activated Tweet Scan for this email address. To adjust your searches, change when you get this email, or turn it off altogether, please visit: http://tweetscan.com/main.php

The next generation search tools are much more effective, with stronger functionality. Summize is an excellent tool that provides fast search. Additional features enable you to post the search to twitter or subscribe to RSS feeds for the topic that you are searching for. The search can be narrowed down by zip code which is great functionality. Lifehacker’s Gina Trapani is a fan.

Twist is the newest tool in the search arsenal. Not only will it show you the tweets that you are searching for, but it will graph your terms, so you can see the activity by date. You can compare up to 10 trends.

So what search tool do you use?

Tweetup

One of the unique things relevant to the Twitter community is the tweetup, a physical meeting of twitterers. Although the Twitter community is quite strong online, many people have felt that the bonds become even stronger when you meet someone face to face. Tweetups occur all the time, in fact there is a section on the Twitterpack PBwiki devoted to tweetups and there are a few tweetup specific accounts on twitter like TweetupNYC, Ottawa_tweetup.

Tweetups occur all the time, as you can imagine. Last week, there were two tweetups of significance. Erin Kotecki traveled to Kansas City from her Southern California home to visit family. Erin is a prolific tweeter with just under 3000 friends and followers, respectively. She has written over 14,000 tweets. Her KC fans and friends celebrated her visit with a prodigious tweetup. Zena Weist, another prolific tweeter, organized the event and captured it on her blog. Approximately 30 tweeters attended KC’s maiden tweetup.

The success of the event can be summarized by Zena’s tweet below.

Another special tweetup occurred in Boston. A tweetup celebration was held for Doug Haslam who was changing jobs. Doug is another prolific tweeter with well in excess of 3000 friends and followers. The party held at a local karaoke bar was quite festive as many of the revelers reported on twitter, utterz, and facebook.

The Boston Twitterati including Chris Brogan were all there.

Adam Zand does Borderline.

Rules to abide by

Michael Brito is a Social Media Evangelist at Intel. It sounds like a fabulous job, by the way. He has written a great Twitter manifesto that lays out appropriate rules for Twitter etiquette and behavior that he abides by. Some great tips include:

• Don’t expect the people you are following to follow you.
• Participate.
• Reply.
• Minimize self promotion.

I think we can all benefit by following @Britopian, both on Twitter and in behavior. I certainly agree with these principles. Congratulations @britopian on a job well done!

A few other rules have been written by noted Twitterers, David Berkowitz, Reflections on a Milestone and Robert Scoble who wrote 10 Rules not to follow. All great rules to tweet by.

So what are you doing?

Lee LeFever of CommonCraft has created a great video explaining Twitter.



CommonCraft - Twitter Expained from Jeff McCord on Vimeo.

Additional sites that describe the how to's are:

• Artmaker - How to Twitter.
• Maki - 17 Ways you can Use Twitter.
  

What do you think? Any questions?