The power of Twitter

twitterLast week I decided to investigate Twitter. I’d started to hear more and more about it and decided to have a play around. I have to say, from an initial position of scepticism I am now blown away by its possibilities!

It’s not an easy concept to define so I’ll paraphrase;
“Twittering is defined as micro blogging. Micro blogging is a form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by members of a social group
These message can be submitted by a variety of means from mobile updates, instant messaging, email, mp3, video or the web”

Still confused? Let me tell explain my experiences last week. I’d read somewhere that when you ‘followed’ someone, it was twitter etiquette for them to ‘follow’ you back. So with this in mind, I decided to test out this theory.

I added a biog and a photo to my account AtticManTrader and set about trying to find some active stock traders. I used the find function to locate a couple of traders that I had met during a seminar in Oct 2007. Sure enough these guys had twitter accounts and were being followed by about 1,000 people, so I decided to ‘follow’ some of these people. After spending about 20 minutes carefully researching profiles and previous twitters, I decided on 20 people that I would be interested in following. I clicked the ‘follow’ button and, rather pleased with myself, nipped down and made myself a nice cup of coffee.

On my return 10 minutes later, I was amazed to see that 7 people who I now followed had decided to follow me! Excited by this new toy, I decided to follow a couple more. Sure enough, they followed me back and within a couple of hours I was now connected to nearly 20 people who were interested in trading stocks and futures. That was last Thursday, it’s now Monday and I’m building up a very nice collection of new friends – 122 at the last count now follow my every word (well, they follow my tweets) and I’m following 152. As well as traders, I follow some ‘life coaches’, some Internet marketeers, a couple of sportsmen and a few celebrities!

Twitter really is an incredibly powerful tool. It lets you make contact with people that you would not connect with using something like linkedIn or Facebook – It is more informal and much more dynamic – and because of that, it has so many more possibilities. As a source of trading ideas, it’s incredible – I’m following some of the top traders and educators in the markets today – and all for free! As a source of news, it’s also pretty dam good. Yesterday there was talk that the Oscar winners list had been leaked, I’d did some research on Twitter and found quite quickly that it was a fake (otherwise I’d have been betting on it!).

My love affair with this incredible little tool is in the early stages, but as I spend more time researching and understanding its power it is clear that to me that Twitter is a “Killer App” and is set to fundamentally change the way we communicate with one another.

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6 Responses to “The power of Twitter”

  1. hayfro says:
    February 24, 2009 at 1:25 am

    Give Tweetdeck a try if you haven’t already. It will make your twitter experience even more amazing….nice to see you on twitter.

    jeff
    (zentrader)

  2. rdv says:
    February 25, 2009 at 10:21 pm

    I agree completely with you, I must say. First I thought nothing but a waste of time but after some searching and trials it became interesting. You can put your tweets on your blog also, as well as tweets from others.

    greetz, rdv_daytrader

  3. rdv says:
    February 25, 2009 at 10:22 pm

    Ow I just see your tweets are here already :-)

  4. AtticManTrader says:
    February 26, 2009 at 1:10 am

    Hi Zen,
    I’ve downloaded Tweetdeck but not played around with it too much. I’ve been spending lots of time looking at apps that have been developed for twitter, and the numbers are increasing hugely. Being able to arrange users into groups and follow these groups in separate threads would be really useful. Does anyone know of way of doing this? (Tweetdeck???)

  5. Chris says:
    February 26, 2009 at 9:12 pm

    I had a similar experience to you with Twitter and have been hooked since. I found you as you had just decided to follow me and I checked out your blog. Keep up the tweets.

  6. AtticManTrader says:
    February 27, 2009 at 12:41 am

    Hi Chris, Thanks very much for visiting the site. I’ll be keeping an eye on your blog from now on. Good luck with you trading and please come back and visit me.

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