Confession of a silent Twitter

Melbourne Herald Sun, Thursday November 14, 2013

Now this is an embarrassing admission from a journalist about a medium that floated, just a few days ago, for nearly $47 billion. But the truth is, although I signed on nearly five years ago - I never really learned how to Twitter.

I know plenty of avid users: friends like Stephen Mayne, Winston Marsh, even my distant boss, Rupert Murdoch, and every politician from Barak Obama to Tony Abbott and the Pope - but I kinda never got it. Recently with all the interest of the share launch, I have been querying why some leap at Twitter and others fall back.

So what is it that has stopped me jumping into this pot, as opposed to the many I've plunged into over the years. You will need to go through this process yourself and ask: Does Twitter have a use to you?

Twitter is quick and newsy. It's loved by those who have a quick thought, rapidly jot it down and communicate it, then move on to their next train of thought. As opposed to those who think more like a steam train chugging along on a single track. Toot toot, one thought at a time.

If you haven't used it much before, the only way to find out where you fit is to jump in. It's simple enough to install, try "Download Twitter" in Google, or the app store on your phone, and follow the prompts.

A brief study of the site will quickly give you the basic information, so then find a few heroes to follow. Maybe movie stars or politicians, TV favourites or particular interests. I'll leave you to it here, there's masses of good advice on line.

The problem has passed to Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO. He now has to justify the $47 billion that has just been invested by eager share buyers, who no doubt will along the line want to see some return. In the first three-quarters of this year, it lost $143 million, so it has a way to go first.

The money will be mainly generated through advertising, and I can assure you that any business will want to see some pretty high visitor numbers to justify paying big ad budgets.

For Costolo that means getting more joiners through the door - and cutting the number that leak out the other end. Currently they have 232 million active users each month, whereas Facebook has three times as many.

So they need to widen the base of newcomers - how many more people can there be who want to know every detail about Katy Perry or Justin Bieber? (They each have 47 million already.)

Assuming that there is more in this world than the lives of pop stars, the Twitter crew have to work on ways to introduce newcomers - and even old hands - on how to expand their horizons.

Rather than random messages from celebrities, this is also an ideal medium for what old computer hands know as "chat rooms". Through your hashtags, you can gather with those of fellow interests - be it collecting porcelain or comparing pubs, or chatting about tonight's episode of Beauty and the Geek. We see this already with the stream of comments that litter the bottom of the screen in Q&A.

One chat group feeling very cosy are the creators of the phenomenon. Evan Williams is now worth $2.8 billion more; Jack Dorsey $640 million; Costello $195 million; Adam Bain $47 million. And to think he gave up a job at NewsCorp before joining the risky venture.