According to Twitter’s own blurb, “Twitter is a community of friends and strangers from around the world sending updates about moments in their lives. Friends near or far can use Twitter to remain somewhat close while far away. Curious people can make friends. Bloggers can use it as a mini-blogging tool.”

Twitter considers itself “the medium between your friends and yourself; we just relay the information.” All you have to do to tap into this viral social network is send a text message from your mobile phone, type a message from the Twitter site, or send an instant message from AIM, Jabber or Google Talk.

In a world of information overload – see Moore’s Law and decreasing attention spans, we’ve now moved from newspaper articles, to blogs, SMS text messages, ICQ and IM (Instant Messaging is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text) to 154 character chunks of boiled down Twitter headlines. Supporters like Steve Rubel, describe Twitter’s value to an information overloaded life as:

“Despite it’s lack of management/search features, Twitter is downright addicting. I love it. It’s brevity lets me blog more actively and at the same time engage in real-time conversations with my “followers” (as they call it).”

Also on the upside, I can see how Twitter might be used to quickly mobilise support for a campaign, which is how US Presidential hopeful, Senator John Edwards, uses Twitter to communicate with his legions of supporters.

A typical entry from Senator Edwards:
“Three cities today and back home in Chapel Hill tonight. 10:44 AM March 16, 2007 from web”

It was Tony Blair who coined the “Big Conversation” , a self-validating bubble of focus groups during the run-up to the 2004 general election, and it can only be a short time before Prime Ministerial wannabe, David “Dave” Cameron gets in on the act with Twitter, if he hasn’t already.

A sprinkling of breaking headlines from Twitter-world this morning:

Jochiewajij: I don’t have a twat, therefore i twit. less than 20 seconds ago from web

KenV: Rise and shine! Drinking coffee and checking email…then hitting the Merritt for the drive to work. less than 10 seconds ago from web

Or more usefully:
bbcengland A debt-hit hospital trust says it still needs to cut 220 posts in order to meet its £16m saving target. http://tinyurl.com/273xg8 half a minute ago from web

From NMK’s Ian Delaney via Steve Bridger, what we’re looking at here is the fragmentation of social media.

So, you’re now asking “How might a voluntary sector organisation use Twitter?” Possible uses might be to micro-blog news headlines as per the BBC England story above. Or you might use Twitter to let service users know via their mobile phone that tomorrow’s coach trip to the beach has been cancelled.

Kathy Sierra has a take I identify with:

“Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it’s a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong “feeling of connectedness” Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain “knows” something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another–potentially more dramatic–contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking… you can’t be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.”

How did it come to this and whatever happened to face to face? My own personal take is that Twitter hooks users with a surface level feeling of connectivity, fostering an always on, always connected, 24/7 mentality – what Linda Stone calls Continuous Partial Attention. Is this healthy?

“….in large doses, it contributes to a stressful lifestyle, to operating in crisis management mode, and to a compromised ability to reflect, to make decisions, and to think creatively. In a 24/7, always-on world, continuous partial attention used as our dominant attention mode contributes to a feeling of overwhelm, over-stimulation and to a sense of being unfulfilled. We are so accessible, we’re inaccessible. The latest, greatest powerful technologies have contributed to our feeling increasingly powerless.“

One wag described Twitter as “like the Seinfeld of the internet — a website about nothing.” Seinfeld was better than that, it was about pre-Internet, pre-millnnial narcissism and self-absorption.

Does any of this really matter and is Twitter the user interface for narcissism? As usual, Nick Carr says it better:

“The great paradox of “social networking” is that it uses narcissism as the glue for “community.” Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. “

In other words, our virtual friends in our virtual world give us real life validation.

Shakespeare would’ve been rubbish at Twitter. Let’s close with the Twitterisation of Hamlet’s third soliloquy (3.1.64-98):

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Be all my sins remember’d.

(114 characters)

To recap, some of the benefits of using online tools for collaborative writing we found were:

• All you need is a computer with a broadband Internet connection and a web browser;
• Extremely easy document sharing and collaboration – just think about how often you’ve worked on a shared document and struggled to figure out the changes made by another author;
• Familiar, intuitive word processor and spreadsheet interfaces;
• Versioning by saving a history of changes (who and when) that can be viewed and compared;
• Ability to save local copies if desired;
• Ability to import and export documents in various file formats (doc, csv, rtf, txt, html, opd, sxw, pdf)

The tools I mentioned for collaborative writing – ThinkFree, Zoho, and Google Docs – are not the only players out there, and you can read more about them at Kolabora and Robin Good.

Coventi Pages looks to be the most interesting of the emerging players in the collaborative writing space with its stripped down set of writing features (like Google Docs) and strong focus on promoting discussion, highlighting text and notes to the fore. You can read a discussion about Coventi’s approach here.

The other key difference between Coventi Pages and other collaborative writing tools is the emphasis it places on a single author’s ownership of a document, with others permitted to comment on rather than being allowed to edit text. This is a completely different approach to the more popular ‘wiki’ in which all contributors are considered co-authors with equal rights to change a document.

Even the venerable PC Pro Magazine is getting in on the discussion about the value of online tools when deputy editor David Fearon says that:

“Google now carries all my personal notes and random ideas, various household budgeting spreadsheets, my cycling log (anally retentive, me?) and basically any new document that’s less than about 500 words long. The piles of paper notebooks sitting in shoeboxes under my bed will, henceforth, not grow any larger.”

Google Docs was also used to plan, organise and marshall a geographically dispersed team of freelance writers, editorial staff and magazine layout designers for a recent PC Pro article on Windows Vista – a great example for the practical value of using collaborative writing tools.

However, as we touched on the ‘Great Web Office Experiment’, the downside of organising one’s digital life like this is data persistance – the idea that your documents are always available, always backed up and and always readable. Now, how many of us have old data from legacy software no longer available, locked away on floppy dics or other media? Plenty, I bet.

In a web office context this means:

• choosing a sustainable provider likely to be around for a few years;
• choosing a provider with support for open document file formats (Google, Zoho);
• regularly downloading and backing up your work.

My own personal favourite web office tool at the time was ThinkFree because it did all the things I needed to produce a complex business document with tables and charts and share it with colleagues. Whilst there will still be a need for high-powered applications like ThinkFree, we will now see more web office tools continue the collaboration trend set by Google Docs and Coventi Pages – basic word processing, open file standards and a strong emphasis on group collaboration and discussion.

I’ve chosen the Google Calendar – the calendar or diary being the first thing that many people check when planning their working day. Google’s web based calendar integrates with Google’s Mail and Map services, offering a tidy calendar solution for a mobile worker or team of mobile workers needing to access their diary from outside the office.

Getting started:
To get started with Google Calendar you’ll need a Google email address – you can get one by signing up at Google Mail or emailing me for a Google Mail invite.

Ease of use:
The Google Calendar is remarkably easy to use – adding new events requires just a click on the calendar. Editing an event on the calendar brings up a box reassuringly familiar to anyone who has used computer based calendar systems – there are options for inviting guests, setting the event as public or private, adding descriptions, and so on.

This kind of usability is key to attracting and keeping users who value time and simplicity above all else – the chances are that if you can’t figure out how to use a web service within 5 minutes, then you’ll not bother at all. Many writers have identified technological factors as barrier to the voluntary/non-profit sector adopting new technology – which we’ll cover in later posts.

Importing calendars:
Importing events from Outlook is also easy – it took me less than 2 minutes to export the Outlook calendar file and import in to Google Calendar. Remember that Google’s calendar doesn’t synchronise with Outlook – any changes you make in Outlook will have to be exported and re-imported to Google calendar.

Create and share calendars:
The Google calendar also makes it easy to create new calendars – and share them. This is particularly useful if you want to create a separate calendar for different teams or different team members. You can share your calendars with contacts in your Google Mail contacts.

There are two main ways of sharing Google calendar.  The first and safest is to share your Google calendar by adding the email addresses of office colleagues/collaborators needing to see your availability for meetings, etc.  You can also set the level of access they have to the Google calendar.  the second method is to give colleagues a private URL to your Google calendar in either XML, iCal or HTML format. The forthcoming Microsoft Office 2007 is set to offer the ability to import or export calendar files in the iCal standard.
You may also want to make the calendar ‘public’ – this is useful if you want the public to see events, workshops or training you’re hosting. Different calendars can also be colour-coded.

Integration:
Calendar events are also integrated with Google Mail – a nice feature if you want to invite people in your Google address book to a meeting. Calendar events also integrate with Google Maps – making events easy to locate. I’d like to see calendar integration with Google Mobile – your diary available on your mobile phone, just like the Blackberry toting dudes, at a fraction of the cost.

Overall:
Google calendar has all the basic diary functions that mobile workers or a small community group might need. I’m not suggesting that it’s a replacement for web access to Microsoft Exchange Server. But Google calendar is free, easy to use and could form part of a web-based suite of tools for those needing to access their diary, documents and mail from anywhere with an internet connection.

There are plenty of other web calendars specialising in group collaboration – like Planzo and HipCal, but none currently offers Google’s integration with other web services.

As always, don’t take my word for it – try these tools as well and let me know what you think about using them as part of a virtual office.