Jul 03 2009
What’s the deal with Twitter? Making some cool connections
If you have been watching “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien” you may have seen his Twitter Tracker sketch…
While it’s easy to poke fun at Twitter and the mindless tweets that are floating in the twittersphere, I was able to make some cool music connections with neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin on Twitter last week that were fun and surprising while I was watching “The Music Instinct: Science and Song“…
HOW DO YOU HAVE TIME TO TWEET?
I usually don’t have any time during the school year to Twitter, but last week I downloaded a new Twitter client for my Mac and iPod Touch called Tweetdeck. It’s easy to customize and create columns in Tweetdeck to organize your tweets at a glance:
So you can have a column with all the messages of people you follow; another called “Mentions” that only shows @messages to you; and “Direct Messages” that only you can read (Don’t know how Twitter works? Check out Twitter in Plain English)
“HEY THAT GUY ON T.V. IS TWITTERING ME RIGHT NOW!”
So with my laptop in hand and Tweetdeck up and running, I start Twittering while I’m watching the much anticipated PBS documentary “The Music Instinct: Science and Song” on my new television. I happen to tweet “Watching the music instinct science and sound on pbs remarkable show” with no intention of anyone responding, when about 3 minutes later I receive the following Tweet:
Did you see who the message was from? danlevitin is Daniel J. Levitin, the guy who is co-hosting the show I’m watching right at that very moment! I exclaim to my wife, pointing wildly at the television “Hey! That guy there on t.v. is twittering me right now!” I was embarrassingly giddy.
LET THE CONNECTIONS BEGIN
So now I can send a message directly to Dr. Levitin as I’m watching this show. Not only that, but I can see others who are interested in this fascinating show (with excellent lesson plan resources for music educators) and interact with them as well. As part of the live Q & A mentioned in the tweet, Twitter allows you to create what’s called a #Hashtag. As myself and others were twittering, Levitin designated the hashtag #musicinstinct for anyone who was Twittering about the show. Any tweets with #musicinstinct in the message can now be searched and filtered in the Twitterverse. (This is a great idea if you end up Twittering about a specific topic with several different people.)
TIME WELL SPENT?
Considering I had access to Dr. Daniel J. Levitin and met some fellow music educator’s with similar interests, I think my time on Twitter was well spent. In fact, I’ll be Twittering about this blog post soon…
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Hi, I enjoy your blog. I missed the PBS documentary that you speak of. Do you know how I could get ahold of it?
Hi Jessica-
Thanks for the comment. If you go to the Music Instinct web-site here: http://ow.ly/gpmV
Then click on the “Schedule” tab at the top which will take you to a page where you can enter your zip code and get the time for your local PBS station. I’m not sure when it will be re-broadcast, but there are also a lot of videos at the site.
Hey Ken, great stuff. I recently wrote a blog post on the business model of Twitter. I will have to add live Q&A to the valuable list.