The Twittersphere

Twitter has reached a critical mass of users, cultivated an ecosystem of developers and device integrations, and attracted interest from business big and gigantic. To understand it truly is to live and breathe it, but there's a few things we can glean from kicking the tires a little.

objective

Explore the nature of conversations on twitter and the importance of third-party applications to the process.

requirements

Tweet from a third-party application

Participate in 3 or more trending topics (these can be from the real-time, daily, or weekly trends list on the homepage)

Analyze the content of any 5 of the top 100 twitter accounts, found at http://twitterholic.com/

Integrate a Twitter widget into your blog

Identify a current marketing campaign utilizing twitter as its primary channel

first steps

Sign up for a twitter account

Explore the list of third-party twitter applications (mac, windows, web, etc.) at the Twitter Fan Wiki and here

Check out the trending topics on the twitter homepage

Explore a list of twitter widgets for your blog: here and a few here

Use twitter's search feature to find activity related to marketing campaigns

grading

50 points possible

Up to 10 points for each requirement

Points off for cutting corners or other evidence of a lackluster effort.

Creativity is welcome and encouraged

deliverable(s)

  1. Post a response to this exercise with a link your blog post summarizing what you did to meet each requirement (include links to any actual tweets you created for this exercise)
  2. Respond to at least one of your class colleague's submissions by replying to their comment on this assignment page.
  3. Rate this exercise and explain your rating with comments about specific strengths/ improvement ideas. Anonymous posts are perfectly acceptable, just log out of the site first.
  4. UIUC Students: Tag the link “ADV400E7” on delicious.com
  5. SU Students: Tag the link "IST400E7" on delicious.com

resources & examples

Twitter.com | a web service that allows members to post 140-character messages from a variety of applications

Twitterholic.com | a web site that stores data on the popularity of twitter users

Twitter Fan Wiki | a massive wiki that contains links to various applications and services that integrate with the twitter platform

wefollow | a directory of twitter users arranged by category

Twitter on delicious | a list of great twitter websites that track statistics and other useful visualizations of twitter data

stats