#tweetsmart

Chapter 10. Discussion Groups

Tweet this Project

As I mentioned in my Introduction, the skeptics will tell you that it is impossible to have a worthwhile conversation in 140 characters or less. And, while I agree that at first glance this would appear to be true, the reality is that millions of Twitter fans find the platform an easy and effective way to have meaningful conversations.

One of the best examples of an organized discussion group I’ve seen on Twitter is run every Friday for one hour by Charlotte Abbot (@charabbott) and Kat Meyer (@katmeyer) under the hashtag #followreader. Follow the Reader is a blog that curates an ongoing discussion about, and exploration of, the book industry. Every week Charlotte and Kat invite their web community to gather on Twitter for an hour to speak, in real-time, about the issues of the day.

To participate in the organized chat, people need only to add #followreader to their tweets. All the folks watching that stream will then see the messages and respond using the same hashtag. In this way, folks can throw messages back and forth in rapid-fire at one time, publicly.

While Twitter wasn’t intended originally to function as a chat room, it is surprisingly capable of being exactly that. I tend to see Twitter as the Internet’s chat room—or the Internet’s lobby. However, because the platform wasn’t intended for this particular use, Twitter’s own tools can sometimes make this style of interaction more difficult than it needs to be.

Independent software ...