FestBuzz

You’ve maybe come along to the Fes­t­Buzz web­site to look for Edin­burgh Fes­ti­val show reviews after meet­ing one of our team out in the streets of Edin­burgh, or maybe you’ve been encour­aged to “tweet” your opin­ion about a show you’ve just seen. You might have read about Twit­ter recently or heard it men­tioned on the news but been left won­der­ing, “What is this Twit­ter thing anyway?”

So what is it then?

Twit­ter is real-time mes­sag­ing, or “micro-blogging”, in mes­sages of 140 char­ac­ters or less. Unlike the more estab­lished “blog­ging”, on Twit­ter there’s no room for ram­bling (such as in this post!). So basi­cally you write a short mes­sage, click a but­ton, then it’s pub­lished on your pro­file page at Twitter.com. Like this chap for example.

As you send Twit­ter mes­sages, or “tweets” as they’re usu­ally called, you build up a chrono­log­i­cal time­line of mes­sages. You can fol­low other Twit­ter users and in turn be fol­lowed your­self. The tweets of all the peo­ple you are fol­low­ing appear in your per­sonal time­line as they are sent, just as your tweets appear in the time­lines of those peo­ple that are fol­low­ing you. The result is a flow of real-time mes­sages from those peo­ple that you follow.

Why bother?

Fair ques­tion! I think the answer to that depends on who you ask — Twit­ter rep­re­sents dif­fer­ent things to dif­fer­ent peo­ple. For me it rep­re­sents a stream of con­scious­ness for the Internet.

Twit­ter used to say it was ask­ing the ques­tion, “What are you doing?” To me, it’s really about “What am I think­ing?” When you really want to share some­thing with more than just the near­est per­son you can find, you can tell Twit­ter and instantly you have told the world.

Twit­ter can be great for shar­ing opin­ions about things (like Edin­burgh Fes­ti­val shows!), shar­ing news sto­ries, inter­est­ing web­sites or even ask­ing for help with some­thing. If you’ve ever fan­cied hav­ing your writ­ings on the Inter­net, but don’t have the time or the incli­na­tion to write a blog reg­u­larly (like myself), then Twit­ter is for you!

How do I get started?

The eas­i­est way to start is to pop over to Twitter.com, pick a user­name and reg­is­ter an account. You can do this from your com­puter or from a web-enabled mobile phone. Once you’ve reg­is­tered there are a few dif­fer­ent ways you can use Twit­ter. When I’m on my com­puter I tend to just use the web­site, but many peo­ple use one of the desk­top appli­ca­tions such as Tweet­deck. They offer extra fea­tures, such as being able to group the peo­ple you fol­low in to groups, e.g. come­di­ans, politi­cians, jour­nal­ists, peo­ple I actu­ally know in real life, etc.

Twit­ter can also be used from mobile phones in one of a cou­ple of ways. Once you’re in your account, you can reg­is­ter your mobile phone num­ber and send tweets via text (SMS) mes­sages sent to a spe­cial num­ber. If you’ve got a smart­phone, you can use one of the many Twit­ter appli­ca­tions out there. I use Twit­ter­Berry on my Black­berry and Twit­ter­fon on my iPhone.

Any­thing else I need to know?

It helps to under­stand another few things — replies, retweets and hashtags.

Replies involve using the “@” char­ac­ter before a person’s user­name in a mes­sage. You can do it with a new mes­sage to “men­tion” some­one or to reply to one of their tweets. They then get alerted that some­one has replied (or men­tioned) to them. The web­site and all the appli­ca­tions help you do this. Exam­ple from @stephenfry: @mjpeanut Well, it pre­sented Wal­ter as a kind of con­cep­tual artist. there was nudity, weird­ness and avant garde bonkersosity.

Retweets are when you want to repeat some­thing some­one has tweeted. Per­haps because you agree with it and want your fol­low­ers to the see the mes­sage, whilst still acknowl­edg­ing the orig­i­nal author. To do this you just copy the orig­i­nal mes­sage, include an “@” reply to the author and put “RT” at the start of your mes­sage. Again, most appli­ca­tions will help you do this. Exam­ple from @kejames: RT @Astro_127 Just landed in Hous­ton. Look­ing for­ward to see­ing fam­ily, friends, and colleagues.

Hash­tags are a way of indi­cat­ing that your tweet is about a topic. You can make up any hash­tag you like by putting a “#” in front of a word. Peo­ple very quickly start using the same hash­tags for promi­nent topics.Example from @WEWS AP: A judge has granted Kather­ine Jack­son a monthly allowance from her son’s estate. #MichaelJackson.

How do I send my show review to FestBuzz?

Sim­ples! Our lit­tle army of robots is scour­ing Twit­ter look­ing for men­tions of fes­ti­val shows. Just send a tweet, say­ing what you thought of the show and include the name of the show. To be extra cer­tain that we pick it up, please use the #Fes­t­Buzz hash­tag.

I said before that Twit­ter can be a bit like a stream of con­scious­ness. Well, the cur­rent can get a lit­tle strong some­times so Fes­t­buzz will be read­ing all these tweets then using our unique soft­ware to under­stand the emo­tion in them so we can auto­mat­i­cally assign rat­ings to shows. Clever, eh?

Is that it?

Aye, that’s about it. Just give it a go! Start by fol­low­ing a few peo­ple (Stephen Fry seems to be the UK’s biggest Twit­ter celebrity). You don’t have to be send­ing tweets every day to take part — just send them as and when you have some­thing to share. Of course you should fol­low Fes­t­Buzz, you can fol­low me if you like (no great insights there!) and check out Jen­nie Lees, the brains behind Festbuzz.

and finally…

Twit­ter is great for shar­ing links to inter­est­ing web­pages, but 140 char­ac­ters can eas­ily be taken up by a long URL. There are sev­eral ser­vices, such as bit.ly, which will take long URLs and shorten them to some­thing more man­age­able and Twit­ter friendly (you can also post directly to Twit­ter from within bit.ly).

You can also eas­ily upload pho­tos from your mobile phone and share them via Twit­ter. Check out Twit­pic for starters. The first pic­tures of the US Air­ways plane crash into New York’s Hud­son river were uploaded to Twit­pic.

Any­one that’s also using Face­book might want to check out this.

If you’ve got any ques­tions about using Twit­ter, please feel free to leave them in the com­ments sec­tion and we’ll do our best to help out.