Tagged: twitter

Nadine Dorries: Just Say No

Today was the day that parliament had a rather long list of private members bills to debate. Originally there were sixty-four on the list. As this informative post from Kerry McCarthy tells us, they’d normally expect to get through about three of them. The MPs sponsoring the rest of the bills were pretty much wasting their time.

Number eight on the original list was Nadine Dorries bill to teach girls between 13 and 16 how to say no to sex. The Guardian’s headline was MPs to debate sexual abstinence lessons bill, which was slightly disingenuous as the chance of the debate reaching that far down the list was tiny.

But this morning, when the order of business for today in parliament was published Dorries bill was missing from the list. Everyone assumed that Dorries was responsible for this removal. As a spokeswoman for the Commons information office told the Guardian “No one would be able to remove a private members’ bill without the permission of a member”. The assumption seemed to be that Dorries had realised the futility of being so far down the list and had removed the bill. She wouldn’t have been the only one – the published list only contains forty-nine of the expected sixty-four bills.

At lunchtime, things got even more interesting. A new Twitter account called @NadineDorriesMP appeared with this tweet (in reply to a joke by John Prescott):

@johnprescott My bill has not ‘jumped off at Edge Hill’ if you care to read the order paper, it’s number eight on the list!!

Something about this timeline didn’t seem right to me. That tweet was posted at 12:47, which is almost two hours since I first saw the order of business without her bill. I assume the order of business was published some time earlier. The first hint I had that the bill had been withdrawn was this blog post by Kerry McCarthy which was published just after 10am.

On the basis that the real Nadine Dorries would have known by 12:47 that her bill was not on the order paper, I called the new Twitter account as a fake. But it seems I was wrong. People like Iain Dale confirmed that it really was her (and, yes, this is one of the few things I’d trust Iain Dale on).

All of which leaves us with a bit of a mystery. Either Dorries withdrew her bill or she didn’t. If she did then the first tweet on her new Twitter account is a complete lie. If she didn’t then we need to ask who did withdraw her bill – given that it’s only her who is supposed to be able to do that.

And even if someone else managed to withdraw her bill without her knowledge, something still doesn’t ring true. If she was expecting to debate her bill (no matter how tiny the chance) then surely she would have been hanging around in parliament all morning and I can’t believe that she didn’t see the order paper and notice her bill was missing. Or that one of her friends saw that it was missing and asked her what happened.

All in all I find it incredible that she could have got to 12:47 without knowing that her bill was not on the list. So how do you explain that tweet?

This is, I think, the third time that Dorries has joined Twitter. And with her first tweet she has already started people thinking that this time is going to be no different to the previous occasions. She will be ineptly trying to use it to promote her strange view of the world. And she will quickly make herself a laughing stock once more.

Update: At 16:37 this afternoon, @NadineDorriesMP tweeted the following:

Just to make it absolutely clear and leave no doubt whatsoever, my Bill was NOT withdrawn

Curiouser and curiouser. So, now we are left with two questions. 1/ Why wasn’t Dorries’ bill on the order paper? And 2/ At what point did she realise it wasn’t on the order paper?

Update 2: Welshracer may have got to the heart of the matter here. He points out what it says on the official parliamentary web page for Dorries’ bill.

The Bill was not printed and so was not moved for debate on 20 January 2012.

What do we make of this? One interpretation would be that Dorries didn’t withdraw the bill for debate, but that someone in her office forgot to get the bill printed so that it could be included in the debate.

But even in those circumstances you’d think that she’d get a phone call from the people who were planning the day’s business telling her what had (or hadn’t) happened. I still can’t believe that she didn’t know the bill wasn’t on the order paper when she sent her first tweet at quarter to one.

Update 3: Couple more pieces of information came in overnight.

Firstly, it seems that the new @NadineDorriesMP Twitter account was set up two weeks ago. It seems she resisted using it until goaded into it by John Prescott yesterday.

Secondly, the Independent managed to speak to Dorries about this confusion. She says:

The Bill is still live, but there was more chance of being struck by a meteor than getting it debated, so we told the Commons office not to bother printing a hard copy. What I didn’t realise was that if you don’t order it to be printed, it automatically comes off the agenda.

Of course I wouldn’t withdraw it … a lot of people had paid train fares to come and protest. It would have been churlish.

So we finally have the truth (or, at least, Dorries’ version of it). She knew it wouldn’t be debated so she decided not to have the bill printed. She didn’t know that would automatically remove it from the order paper. She didn’t withdraw the bill out of respect for the people who were coming to protest against it.

It’s also not clear to me in what sense the bill is still live. This was the final opportunity to debate private members bills before the end of this parliamentary session. Any unfinished business from this parliamentary session doesn’t get passed on to the next one, so anything that wasn’t approved is, as far as I can see, effectively dead.

You couldn’t make this up!

Did Twitter Censor #GodIsNotGreat?

[Executive summary: Betteridge's Law (probably) applies]

The Twitter furore over the #GodIsNotGreat hash tag has pretty much died down now, but there’s one branch of the debate that is still getting comments and retweets. Here’s an example from johnwilander.

#GodIsNotGreat pulled from trends because christians protest. But #ReasonsToBeatYourGirlfriend was allowed. Stay classy, @Twitter.

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, the hashtag vanished from the list of global trending topics on Friday morning. And this conspiracy theory leapt up almost immediately. As far as I can see, none of the people repeating this claim have any evidence to back it up – which is more than somewhat ironic given Hitchens’ evidence-driven view of the world.

The argument seems to go like this: At one point the hashtag was trending. Then Christians got upset and starting making death threats aimed at the people who started the trend. Soon after that, the hashtag was no longer trending. Therefore Twitter must have given in to Christian bullying and censored the hashtag.

Whilst it all sounds frighteningly possible, I hope I don’t have to spell out the flaws in the logic. If you can’t work it out for yourself then I recommend the Wikipedia article on Correlation does not imply Causation.

I could be wrong here. There might be some irrefutable piece of evidence proving conclusively that Twitter deliberately censored the hashtag. If there is, then I haven’t seen it and I’d be grateful to anyone who could bring it to my attention.

There is, however, some evidence that Twitter didn’t censor the hashtag. On Friday morning, as the debate still raging, a Facebook friend in Canada pointed out that it was still trending there. In the middle of the afternoon someone pointed out that it was still trending in San Francisco. So if Twitter were censoring it, they weren’t doing a very good job. There’s even someone who apparently works for Twitter saying that they didn’t do it.

Of course, none of this is conclusive evidence that Twitter didn’t censor the hashtag. But balancing some evidence for non-censorship against absolutely no evidence at all for the censorship I know which side I come out on.

All of which leaves us searching for an explanation for the sudden disappearance. And, to be honest, I don’t think we really need to look too hard. Things stop being trending topics all the time. Things have to drop out of the list so that new things can come in. Otherwise the list would constantly be full of nonsense about Justin Bieber and Twilight. The Twitter trending topics algorithm can’t possibly just measure the popularity of topics. That would be incredibly dull. Instead, what it does is to look for changes in popularity. A steady buzz of the same few million people talking about a particular topic doesn’t get noticed, but a sudden increase in the number of people discussing the same topic does. The Buffer blog has a good explanation of this and the official Twitter blog says much the same thing.

I’m sure that this won’t convince the conspiracy theorists. “Ah,” they’ll say, “That’s all very convenient. But that just gives Twitter an easy way to cover up their censorship..” Which is true, I suppose, but hardly a basis for a rational discussion.

And that’s the most disappointing thing to come out of this affair. The people making this accusations are fans of Christopher Hitchens. You would hope they’d be from the more rational end of the spectrum. You’d hope that they would be above making accusations like this without evidence. I guess no-one is immune from irrationality.

But I’m going to go out on a limb here. And lay my cards on the table. And other clichés that Hitchens would despise.

Twitter (probably) didn’t censor the #GodIsNotGreat hashtag.

Update: The author of the tweet I quoted above seems to agree with me.

Hitchens’ Last Laugh

This morning I woke up to the terrible (although not completely unexpected) news that Christopher Hitchens had died. The rational community has, of course, lost one of its most erudite and interesting members. But it seems that Christopher had one last trick up his sleeve.

As with most breaking news these days, I found out about his death from Twitter. I checked my Twitter feed as I got up at about 6am. A few people that I follow were already awake and discussing it. As a mark of respect, many of those tweets were tagged with the name of Hitchens’ best known book “God Is Not Great“. And then more and more people started to do that. And before too long, the hashtag #GodIsNotGreat was listed as one of Twitter’s worldwide trending topics. At which point it started to go a bit weird.

All around the world religious people who knew nothing at all about Christopher Hitchens, his books or his death were looking at Twitter and seeing the tag #GodIsNotGreat. And that annoyed many of them immensely. So they started tweeting on the subject. Their tweets seemed to largely fall into three categories.

1/ What is this? And why is it trending?

2/ Attempts to inject their own beliefs into the stream – “God isn’t just great – he’s the GREATEST!!” (from someone called foolishdenise – you couldn’t make this up)

3/ Threats to kill whoever had started the hashtag (all very Christian) [UPDATE: Replaced a tweet with a rather NSFW background with another expressing the same sentiment]

Of course, all of these new tweets all included the hashtag. So that just helped ensure that the hashtag became even more popular. Hitchens fans replied, pointing out why the hashtag was trending (and inviting them to read the book) and the hashtag was tweeted and retweeted and commented on and argued over more than pretty much any other hashtag I’ve followed all year. For most of the morning the Tweetdeck column I set up to follow the tag was moving too fast for me to follow it.

At some point in the morning, the hashtag disappeared from the list of trending topics. Some people claimed that Twitter had removed it deliberately in response to the Christian death threats. But it seems slightly ironic for Hitchens fans to claim something like that without any firm evidence. I suspect that it’s more likely that once a hashtag reaches a plateau of activity then Twitter’s algorithm ignores it – otherwise the top trend would always be Justin Bieber (as two people pointed out to me). Apparently it’s still trending in Canada. But I’m not sure what that proves about anything.

One tweet in particular from luketadams summed things up for me.

Hitchens dies. His book #GodisNotGreat trends. Religious people threaten violence. The point of his book is proven. Hitchens for the win.

It’s tempting to imagine Hitchens looking down on the storm that his death has caused and laughing. But that would go against everything that he believed in.

So don’t do that. Instead, reread his articles, buy his books, watch videos of him demolishing his opponents in debate. And remember the great mind that we have lost.

MPs on Twitter

Did you ever make a chance remark that plants a seed of an idea which then grabs hold of you and refuses to let you go until you’ve done something about it?

That happened to me on Sunday. I was cleaning up some broken feeds on Planet Westminster when I tweeted:

Cleaning up some broken feeds on Planet Westminster (http://bit.ly/47fCK) Interesting how many MPs’ blogs have vanished since the election.

And a couple of minutes later I added:

Someone should monitor the numbers of MPs actively blogging and tweeting over time. Maybe that should be me.

And that was it. I realised that I’d get no rest until I’d started work on the project.

Yesterday I published a graph of the number of MPs on Twitter over time. It’s only the first step. I want to start tracking how active they are and how well they interact with other Twitter users. Expect more graphs to appear on that page over the coming weeks.

I have to thank the nice people over at TweetMinster. They are doing all the hard work of actually tracking the MPs on Twitter. All I’m doing is processing their list.

A few caveats. Currently the graph is generated manually, so it won’t be kept up to date automatically. Also it just works from the date that people on the list joined Twitter. It doesn’t handle people leaving Twitter – they’ll just come off the list and all of their data will vanish from the graph. So it doesn’t track, things like Nadine Dorries’ two (or is it three) flirtations with Twitter.

You should also note that I also don’t handle people joining Twitter before they become an MP. For example, the first MP to join Twitter was Julian Huppert on 2nd May 2007. But he didn’t become an MP until three years later.

So take it all with a pince of salt, But I think it’s an interesting start. Let me know what you think. And feel free to suggest other useful graphs that I could create.

And, yes, I’ll get round to doing blogs too at some point.

Social Networking 101

If you have a blog and a Twitter account then it’s nice to feed your tweets onto the front page of your blog. It can be an effective way to let your friends see what you’re saying in both places.

If, however, you later delete your Twitter account then it’s probably a good idea to remove the widget from your blog.

There’s one very important reason for doing this. Eventually Twitter will allow your deleted account name to be recycled. And then someone else will be able to post tweets which automatically appear on your blog.

Say, for example, you’re an MP who has made a few enemies in her time. And say that you’ve flounced away from Twitter claiming that it is a “sewer”. In that situation you probably don’t want to leave a way open for people who don’t like you to post whatever they want on your web site.

I mean, if you’re currently campaigning about abstinence and sex education, you probably don’t want your web site to say:

I think sex before marriage should be discouraged. It’s better if at least one of you is married, doesn’t matter who to particularly.

Or:

I suppose with fisting there’s no risk of pregnancy.. ..maybe kids should be taught about that?

Sometimes I wonder if the money that Nadine Dorries spent on “PR” wouldn’t have been better spent on IT consultancy.

They’ll fix it eventually, so Tim has captured it for us.

Update: And it’s gone. That was slightly quicker than I expected. I’m now expecting a blog post from her accusing someone (probably Tim) of hacking her computer.

Moonfruit and Techcrunch

For the past few weeks I’ve been working with Moonfruit. They have been working to replace their rather aging web site with something that looks a lot more contemporary.

Today was the day that the new version went live. And it was also the day that I got an interesting lesson in how marketing works in our digital world.

The company’s co-founder Wendy Tan White had been interviewed by Techcrunch and we were expecting that article to be published at about lunchtime. In order to get an idea of when the article went live, I set up a search panel on TweetDeck watching for mentions of “moonfruit” on Twitter.

During the morning there was a steady stream of mentions. This was largely people pushing their Moonfruit-hosted web sites. Then at about 12:25 that all changed. Where previously each update of the search was bringing in two or three new results, suddenly there were twenty in one go. And then another twenty. And another. And another.

On closer inspection I saw that the vast majority of them were exact reposts of this tweet from @techcrunch.

500 Startups Bites Into Moonfruit’s Simple Site Builder For Design Fans http://tcrn.ch/dYbp98 by @mikebutcher

Some of them were retweets, but most of them were automated reposts (often using Twitterfeed). In the first twenty-five minutes I estimate that the story was reposted 400 times. By now (about nine hours later) the number must be two or three times that.

I was astonished to see this volume of reposts. I knew that a story on Techcrunch was good publicity, but I had no idea just how good it was. That’s an incredible number of people who have been told about this article – and, hence, the Moonfruit relaunch.

But there’s another side to this. Why are there so many automated systems set uo to repost tweets from Techcrunch? I know that Techcrunch is a useful source of tech news, but doesn’t that mean that anyone who is interested in tech news will already be following @techcrunch on Twitter? If every tweet from @techcrunch is repeated a few hundred time and @techcrunch posts a few dozen tweets easch day, isn’t that a few thousand pointless tweets? I’m sure that these two or three hundred reposters aren’t amplifying Techcrunch’s reach by two or three hundred times. I’d be surprised if they were amplifying it by even ten times.

So what is the point of these hundreds of reposting engines? Is it some kind of spam system? Or an SEO trick? Or are there really hundreds of people out there who think that their followers benefit from reposted content from Techcrunch?

You might be wondering why I haven’t linked to any of the reposts. Well, of course, in the nine hours it’s taken me to get round to writing this post, most of them have vanished from Twitter’s search engine. Does that mean they were scams that Twitter has cleaned up? Or does Twitter’s search engine just have a really short lifespan?

Web Site Links

Twitter is used a lot for sharing links. In fact that might be one of the main things it’s used for. And because of the nature of a lot of the discussion on Twitter, those links tend to be to either blogs or news sites many of which have a very similar structure. They will have an individual page for each story and a front page which lists the most recent stories. Of course there might also be time-based or category-based archive pages, but those aren’t important for this discussion.

If you find a story on one of these sites that you want to share with people, then the most sensible approach is to link to the individual page for the story. If you just link to the front page of the site then that is going to make sense whilst the story is near the top of that page but as new stories are published, your story will sink down the page and eventually it will vanish off the page completely. At that point anyone trying to follow your link from Twitter is not going to understand what you’re talking about.

The front pages of web sites change regularly. That’s their purpose. The individual story links will always link to their particular story. They’re called “permalinks” for a good reason – they are permanent links to a particular entry on the site.

So if I want to draw your attention to an entry on Tim Ireland’s blog, I’ll link to the individual entry, not to the front page. Perhaps it’s worth looking at those two links in more detail so that you can see the difference.

I’m not trying to be some kind of internet policeman here. I’m not saying that you have to do it my way. I’m just saying that this seems to be a sensible approach and if you carry on linking to the front page of sites then you run the risk of people who discover your link some time after you published it getting confused when it doesn’t show them what it showed when you published the link.

It seems to me that there are three reasons why people wouldn’t make the effort to publish permalinks.

Firstly, they just don’t understand how the internet works and don’t really know what they are doing. That’s ok, of course. We were all beginners once and hopefully this post will go some way towards showing them how things work.

Secondly, they know how it works but they can’t be bothered to go to the extra effort to dig out the real permalink. I mean, often you read these stories on the front page of a site and that’s the address that is sitting in your browser location bar, so that’s the address that you cut and past into Twitter. You might also think that Twitter is a transitory medium and people will only follow your link within a few hours of you publishing it. To these people I can only say that Twitter isn’t transitory and your tweets can potentially be read months or years later. I think that it’s really worth making that little bit more effort in order to make your historical conversations easier to follow.

Finally there might be people who deliberately don’t want to publish links to specific articles as they don’t want to be called on what they linked to at some unknown point in the future. These people have worked out that Twitter isn’t a transitory medium and, instead, they rely on the transitory nature of web site front pages to make their tweets seem transitory. It’s the internet equivalent of the person who gets angry if you try to get him to substantiate an off-the-cuff remark he made half an hour ago. This is a deeply cynical and unhelpful view of the internet and I really hope that no-one reading this fits into this category.

So please make an effort to give permanence to what you say on Twitter. It’s really quite easy to do and it makes a huge difference to the quality of the discussion.

Conversations with CateyMaxx

Summarising @Nadine_MP‘s “informed consent” ideas: A woman can’t have an abortion until a christian nutter has tried to scare her out of it?

That’s the content of a tweet that I sent just before 6pm last night. I thought it nicely summed up the reasons behind Nadine Dorries’ recent speech in Parliament. I didn’t, of course, expect everyone to agree. I wasn’t prepared for the response I got from one corner of the internet.

Having sent the tweet, I went out for the night. Had it not been the era of the smartphone, I would have been completely cut off from the internet for the next few hours. But as I arrived at the venue I checked Twitter to find three tweets from CateyMaxx. For those of you who don’t know, CateyMaxx has been one of a small number of people who have been supporting Nadine Dorries over recent weeks. She said:

CateyMaxx: @davorg lol evening Dave – your usual Stirring self I see! You don’t believe that crap so why on EARTH do you say it? [6:28]

CateyMaxx: @davorg & also – what’s with the ‘Christian nutter’ jibe? @Nadine_MP is advocating informed choice – where do her religious beliefs come in? [6:30]

CateyMaxx: @davorg always presuming, of course, u know & understand her religious beliefs b’cos I certainly don’t! Maybe u’ve had a convo with her? [6:31]

Over the next ten minutes I sent her some replies – which she, in turn, replied to. I think I’ve reconstructed the order correctly here, but we’re often typing across each other.

davorg: @CateyMaxx We already have informed choice [Yes - I meant "consent", not "choice"] – just not of the kind Nadine wants to see. [7:20]

CateyMaxx: @davorg I’m sure you know all about the choice that’s available to pregnant women? You’re so unnecessarily pedantic. [7:21]

davorg: @CateyMaxx She’s definitely a christian – she has said as much. And she hangs around with mutters [Typo: that should be "nutters" - I hope that's obvious] like Christian Concern For Our Nation. [7:23]

davorg: @CateyMaxx Informed concent is already a legal requirement before any major medical procedure. [7:27]

CateyMaxx: @davorg ok, so let’s be clear – you say ‘Christian Concern’ (who @Nadine_MP as u put it ‘hangs around with’ are nutters? Can you elucidate? [7:27]

CateyMaxx: @davorg but it’s the TYPE of information which is accessible to ppl that matters . .surely. All @Nadine_MP is trying to do is make more [7:28]

davorg: @CateyMaxx Anyway, I’d love to chat more but I’m at a gig and the first band is about to come on. Have a nice evening. [7:28]

CateyMaxx: @davorg info to a wider no. of ppl – so they no the mental, emotional aswell as physical implications of abortion. What is wrong with that? [7:29]

CateyMaxx: @davorg lol . .you too! [7:29]

And that’s where we left it. Or, at least, that’s what I though. I dipped back into Twitter a couple of hours later whilst waiting for the headliners to come on, only to see this:

CayeyMaxx: New Blog Post: Tory Totty Online: Is OCD Sweeping the Blogosphere? http://bit.ly/91JJsf [9:17]

I replied as soon as I saw it and we got into another conversation.

davorg: @CateyMaxx Nicely done. Writing an attack on me like that when you know I’m busy and won’t be able to respond for 12 hours. [9:39]

CateyMaxx: @davorg Havent written an ‘attack’ on you – merely reported what’ on your blog. Why? What’s up? [9:40]

davorg: @CateyMaxx And missing out my side of tonight’s conversation was a nice touch. You’ve been learning from the masters :-) [9:42]

CateyMaxx: @davorg thats because you LEFT the conversation and didn’t answer me lol Its all there in b&w. No-ones attacking u – dont be so sensitive [9:43]

davorg: @CateyMaxx I wrote 4 or 5 replies to you which are missing from your blog post. That’s hardly balanced reporting. [9:47]

davorg: @CateyMaxx Hope your blog comments are working early tomorrow morning :-) [9:48]

CateyMaxx: @davorg in that case . . .I will go back and have a look and then put them in the post . . . . the comments are working fine. Feel free. [9:53]

CateyMaxx: @davorg Oh yes – I’ve found them. Will add them to the post now ok? :-) [9:54]

davorg: @CateyMaxx Thank you. I’ll a comment tomorrow. Must go again. Tunng are about to come on. [9:57]

And at that point, I settled in to enjoy Tunng and CateyMaxx wandered off to do whatever she does at that time on a Saturday night (I think it might involve watching the X Factor results programme).

Obviously I’ll come back to this later today and respond to the points that she made, but I just wanted to start by setting the scene and getting the full conversation written out in the order that it happened.

David Wright and Twitter

you can put lipstick on a scum-sucking pig but it is still a scum-sucking pig

That’s apparently what Labour MP David Wright said about the Tory party on Twitter on Monday. I say “apparently” because he claims he didn’t say it. He says that his tweets have been tinkered with. He says that the words “scum-sucking” have been inserted by someone else. But how likely does that seem? I think that we need to consider three alternatives.

  1. The tweet was changed by someone before it was passed to Twitter. This would imply that Wright has someone else who actually runs his Twitter account for him and who decided to have a little fun. No such Twitter assistant has been mentioned by Wright, so I think we can dismiss this possibility.
  2. The tweet has been edited since it was initially submitted to Twitter. Now Twitter doesn’t offer users the facility to edit old tweets so this would involve someone hacking into the the Twitter database, tracking down one tweet by an obscure British politician and changing that. I know that if I wanted to start hacking into Twitter and changing tweets, David Wright would be a long way down my list of potential targets. I think we can dismiss this possibility too.
  3. David Wright is being dishonest. Given that his first response to people complaining about the tweet was “Oh dear, upsetting Tories again. Must’ve hit a nerve” and that the tampering story only emerged later, I think this is a far more likely explanation.

Which leaves us wondering why he thought that lying about it like this was a good idea. This time I think we have two options to consider:

  1. Wright knows nothing about how any of this stuff works and doesn’t realise how ridiculous his story sounds.
  2. Wright knows how ridiculous he sounds, but believes that none of his constituents understand this internet stuff so they won’t realise that he’s talking nonsense.

To be honest, I don’t think that either of those alternatives show Wright in a particularly good light. In the first option, Wright is an elected representative who is apparently jumping on the Twitter bandwagon without understanding the first thing about the tools he is using. And in the second he’s someone who doesn’t mind deliberately lying to the electorate as long as he thinks there’s a good chance that he won’t be found out.

I have way of knowing which of those two alternatives is an accurate description of what happened here. But if I was voting in Telford I’d be having a serious think about whether I wanted a man like Wright representing me in Parliament.

Update: David Wright has issued a statement. He says:

My Twitter account has been hacked into and changed,” he said. “I have demanded that Twitter provide me with the identity of whoever has inputted into my site. I will make a further statement when that information is available, and I will be seeking a meeting with ministers to discuss the general protection of blog sites.

To which I can only respond “Bwah Ha Ha!”

A Twitter Story

People often ask me what is the point of Twitter. What do I get out of it. The answer to those questions change from day to day. Here is today’s answer.

Tonight I’m going to see the Twisted Christmas show at the Barbican. It features a number of performers taking a slightly different look at christmas. Before leaving for work this morning I twittered that I was looking forward to the evening. I only had 140 characters so I just mentioned that the show included Polly Scattergood and Eliza Carthy. There are, of course, many other great acts performing as well.

Before long I had a reply from a Twitterer called FiddlersMrs. She’s with a band called Flaming June who are supporting Eliza Carthy at a gig next March. I was considering going to that gig too, but I hadn’t got round to buying a ticket yet. FiddlersMrs pointed out that through their web site they were selling a limited number of tickets for £8 rather than the normal price of £17. That made up my mind and I bought one of their reduced price tickets. I also followed both FiddlersMrs and flamingjuneuk on Twitter.

So within a couple of hours of getting up today I had bought tickets for a gig at less than half price, discovered an interesting-sounding new band and made a couple of new friends on Twitter. I call that a successful start to the day.

That’s just one reason why I find Twitter useful. But I have a story like that to tell every couple of days. A different story every time, but something just as useful. Connections like that are being made all the time on Twitter. It’s the immediacy of the contact that is so useful. It’s simple to find people who are talking about the same things as you and to get in touch with them.

I’m largely preaching to the converted here. Most of my blog readers are, I’m sure, already Twitter users. You probably already have your own little stories about how it’s made your life better in lots of tiny ways. But if you haven’t, why not give it a try?

I’m @davorg on Twitter. Feel free to follow me.

Oh, and why not come and see Eliza Carthy and Flaming June on 18th March. Tickets (while they last) are only £8 from the Flaming June web site.