101 uses for Twitter

I had a rather staggering exchange at work the other day with normally level-headed colleagues dismissing the suggestion that the organisation I work for should use Twitter in a very grumpy-old-men fashion (sorry guys, if you’re reading, but be honest – I’m not being unfair!).

I can understand the impulse up to a point: I have been resistant to mobile phones and Facebook in the past, but this has taught me a simple truth: if you find yourself having conversations with people you know about a popular technological innovation, it’s not a fad, in fact it probably has some benefit, and you’re mugging yourself by not joining the party, so stop bloody moaning. Chances are it’s not a matter of if you’ll end up using it, but when.

In the case of Twitter, even if you don’t feel you have anything you want to share with anyone else, being able to access the wealth of information it offers is reason enough to sign up. Here are some things I have got out of it, or seen it being used for, which I hope will prove the point. I’m sure other people have done better versions of this article, and that there are even more innovative uses of the platform out there; but this reflects my experience.

Campaigning
I’ve seen three really good campaigning uses of Twitter so far. The first was the use of blacked-out profile pictures to support a campaign against strong anti-piracy laws in New Zealand. The second was the message of one in ten women being victims of domestic abuse, in which supporters all posted the same message and changed their profile pics to a graphic of a digital clock showing 1:10 at the same time – probably ten past one on January 10th, now I think back. The third was a re-tweet by Graham Linehan of a rather good blog post by him about a particularly obnoxious newspaper story in which Dunblane survivors were vilified for acting in a normal teenage way, using evidence drawn from Facebook accounts. An apology of sorts was forced by that, and an accompanying web petition that I happily signed, having been alerted to it (set up by a college contemporary of mine, Matt Nida).

Travel information
I work in an office very close to Heathrow airport, and get the tube to and from there every day. On the Thursday before Easter, I was due to head up to see my parents, which entailed a prompt getaway from work at 5 to make a reasonably tight connection at Euston. At the end of lunch, a colleague informed me the buses into the airport were all snarled up for some reason – the TfL and BBC websites said nothing, however. Oh dear – could the airport be inaccessible for the rest of the afternoon? A search for “Heathrow” on Twitter found a load of people observing they had just been evacuated from Terminal 3 due to a bomb scare… Happily, half an hour later they reported the evacuation was called off. Phew! More prosaically, Crewe station has a Twitter feed updating every departure – do any other stations do this, I wonder?

Live updates
During the farcical rain crisis at the Malaysian grand prix I compensated for the lack of anything interesting to watch by logging on to Twitter and following posters using the #F1 hashtag. The result was a torrent of interesting opinions from all over the world about what was going on, and occasionally some explanation that came quicker than the TV could manage: it was Twitter that explained to me the reason for the proposal for cars below a certain position to do an extra lap (they had been lapped – obvious I suppose). Getting reaction from around the world in real time added enormously to the experience, which would have been pretty dull otherwise.

Humour
Comedians have found many ways to exploit Twitter. I follow a good number of stand-ups, who offer posts that are regularly amusing in their own right. But there are more developed examples: Peep Show’s characters all have Twitter accounts, and occasional bursts of scripted Twitter interaction are occasionally unleashed, usually to pretty amusing effect. On 6Music, Jon Holmes’s new feature Twitter Sweet Symphony entails a real-time set of tweets as he plays a song, usually one with a strong narrative (Squeeze’s Up The Junction last week),offering a sarcastic take on the song’s events, usually from the perspective of its protagonist and often making jokes he couldn’t get away with on-air. Another of my favourites is the growing grid of fake F1 drivers, offering at times bitingly funny takes on the fortunes of the people they imitate. Fake Mark Webber started it all; but there are more now.

Free advice
Numerous TV screenwriters have blogs, and numerous of them have Twitter feeds. In my slow and occasional stabs at writing TV drama, I occasionally make the odd tweet about how it’s been going, and now and again the scribes are kind enough to respond – in particularly, Lucy Bang2Write gave me an extremely helpful pointer on how to deal with a conflicting load of feedback.

Logistics
I’ve sold a spare gig ticket via Twitter in the past, and the potential for arranging relatively casual meet-ups for the odd drink here or there is obvious (well, it will be to anyone who uses it).

News
I have heard about some big news stories for the first time via Twitter, and some smaller ones that were not reported anywhere else. Among the bigger ones are the McBride affair and the various F1 stories recently (tweets from James Allen and Lee McKenzie are excellent ways of getting an early heads-up on Friday practice form and incident). Among the lesser – did you hear about the bendy bus that killed someone in Oxford Street the other week? No, didn’t think so.

Interaction with the stars!
Famous people use Twitter, and with many you can be exposed to their daily lives in a relatively unvarnished way. I’m not going to laud proximity to celebrity for its own sake, but even so it can be nice to have a casual but honest insight into what people you admire are up to. Occasionally you can even interact with them directly (though I can’t claim anyone massively impressive). That said, some do tweet far too bloody much and find themselves getting un-followed by your humble narrator – stand up, Messrs Linehan and Schofield!

Maintaining friendships
When it comes to tweeting at people I actually know from real life, the great virtue of Twitter is that it is very light-touch. As with Facebook, you can have brief exchanges with people you might not have seen for months or even years, in a way that you simply wouldn’t over email; if you’re prone to letting lengthy periods of radio silence lead to the collapse of an acquaintanceship (which I certainly am), Twitter is your answer.

Multiple platforms
In a rather pleasing Web 2.0 ouroboros, I have automated my blogs to send a message via Twitter whenever I make a new post, while my Twitter feed is displayed on a sidebar to my main WordPress blog. It’s a powerful mechanism for promotion, although it can go too far: some Twitter feeds (such as Charlie_Brooker, not to be confused with the real thing, CharltonBrooker) are just RSS feeds from other websites, converted into a robot. If you want to follow an RSS feed, use a feed reader, not blimmin’ Twitter! Twitter can also be plugged into Facebook status updates, which is handy.

An honorary mention must go to comedian Matt Forde for his occasional, but often amusing and frequently cheery and uplifting tweets – there are some top people on Twitter who simply put up messages that will cheer you up. I don’t see how that can be a bad thing.

Sorry, did I say 101? Typo – I meant 10. Still, that’s good going without mentioning Stephen Fry!

Escalating things

I was on the ground floor of a department store yesterday, and got on an escalator, going up. Immediately behind me, a woman got on who was talking into her mobile phone.

Even though we had barely moved upwards, she immediately said to the person she was talking to: “I’m upstairs now.”

Part of me wanted to turn round and say to her: “Do you think this is a teleport? It isn’t, and there’s a pretty bloody big clue why not. If it was a teleport, they’d have made you turn your mobile phone off, I’m pretty sure.”

A more substantial part of me thought it wasn’t worth the bother.

Death in the Middle Ages

David Mitchell’s highly enjoyable Soapbox videocastpodblogthing takes a historical turn this week, and although he goes out of his way to point out that Vikings did not in fact have horns on their helmets, he does not attach a similar caveat to his recounting of Edward II’s death. So, from memory, here is a quick and garbled account of the two most famous medieval English deaths, and the gen on whether or not they actually happened like that.

Edward II
The story goes that in 1327 Edward, having been deposed by his French wife, her exiled English lover and an invading army, and imprisoned in Berkeley castle, was murdered by having a red-hot poker shoved up his arse. Murdered in Berkely castle he certainly was: the usurpers could not afford to have a legitimate crowned king of England just sitting around, as someone would most likely try to stick him back on the throne. But the poker business is a fiction: it first turned up in documents about a hundred years after Edward’s death, and is a non-too-subtle comment on his sexual preferences.

Strangely, there is also a story that Edward actually escaped and lived out the rest of his life as a monk in Italy. I remember reading a fairly interesting journal article about it in the stacks of the University Library in Cambridge – it was notable principally for citing no sources whatsoever.

Clarence
Edward IV had his younger, conniving and probably somewhat unstable brother George, the Duke of Clarence, executed in 1478 after his involvement in a series of plots. The story goes that, as a last brotherly favour (of sorts), Edward allowed Clarence to choose the manner of his own death. He elected to be drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. In contrast to the Edward II story, this one was contemporary: we know that it was circulating in London around the time of the execution. So it could have happened. However, there is no stronger evidence for it than the London rumour mill: a surviving record of someone being paid to dispose a spoiled vat of wine at around the same time would more or less seal it, but none exists. Clarence’s remains – or, at least, a skeleton believed to be his by virtue of being stored in his tomb – were corroded somewhat by the sarcophagus being flooded at some point, so it is not possible to tell by inspection whether they suffered any trauma from more a conventional execution method, such as a snapped neck or stab wound. The possibility of this exotic death having happened therefore remains open – though it is still something of a tall tale.

Disclaimer: this is all drawn from my recollections of a few articles I read about seven years ago, so it could be nonsense. But – forgive me, I can’t resist – I got a first and David Mitchell got a 2:2, so take yer pick.

Thoughts for the losers

Reflections on the F1 diffuser appeal. Firstly: phew! Not just for avoiding a debacle for F1 generally, but for finally confirming that Jenson Button has a long-deserved proper tilt at the world title on his hands. Much as I admire 6Music’s Jon Richardson, he recently made a snide remark about F1 “showing itself up” because “bad drivers are suddenly good drivers now they’ve got a good car”; look in the dictionary for “doesn’t understand F1 properly” and you’ll find “someone who suggests Jenson Button isn’t any good.” First race in a car capable of winning on merit, and he wins on merit – what more can you ask?

But I’m more interested in the losers of the diffuser appeal. It’s especially unfortunate for Red Bull, who seem to have produced the fastest chassis not to use a “trick diffuser” – but also the one that has the concept furthest removed from that diffuser style, and which will seemingly require the most modification. Red Bull were touted as a team that could make a big leap forward thanks to Adrian Newey’s knack at interpreting new regulations: make a leap they have, but Newey now claims he ran a doubel-deck diffuser concept past Charlie Whiting and had it rejected on grounds of illegality. One must now presume the design was out by a matter of small details; Newey seems to have taken it to mean that in fact the whole concept was out. Unlucky. Then again, in a pre-season Q&A, I think it was Newey who, when asked about whether the new Red Bull adhered to the spirit of the regulations, replied, “happily, there’s no such thing.”

Over at BMW, Mario Theissen seems to be particularly sour about the situation. There may be an internal-facing reason for his comments: last year, he deliberately held back the development of the 2008 BMW, which was unexpectedly in with a chance of letting Kubica take the title. The gamble was that by focusing early on 2009, BMW would be best-placed to mount a title challenge: with such a big change of regulations it was a massive gamble, and it has failed. Kubica’s grousing about not being allowed to make a title run when he had the chance now, albeit with hindsight, looks fully justified: it was a bird in the hand, after all. Theissen may well have some explaining to do to his bosses, and be seeking to pin the blame on an unfair decision on diffusers rather than his own conservatism. Then again, that conservatism has led to a lot of progress and success for the team – Theissen should not be taking too much flak for getting one very difficult call wrong.

Finally, I was amused by the crassness of Ferrari’s lawyer, with his personal insults towards Ross Brawn and Charlie Whiting. It seemed positively Berlusconi-esque; but I wonder if there is a greater acceptance in Italy for embellishing an argument with gross personal insult than is the case in most countries. Tozzi by name, Tozzer by nature?

Limited appeal

Tomorrow comes the appeal over the diffusers. If it is upheld, it scarcely bears thinking about. Would the cars with “trick diffusers” be excluded from the results of the first two race? Would points be re-allocated? Can they do that?

Never mind for a moment how ridiculous this would make Formula 1 would look, and how damaging this would be at a time when it needs to shore up its remaining sponsors and attract new teams. What would the revised standings actually look like, without the Brawns, Toyotas and Williamses? Here’s what.

Australia

1. Alonso
2. Buemi
3. Bourdais
4. Sutil
5. Heidfeld
6. Fisichella
7. Webber
8. Vettel

Malaysia

1. Heidfeld
2. Webber
3. Hamilton
4. Massa
5. Bourdais
6. Alonso
7. Piquet
8. Raikkonen

Championship standings would be (bearing in mind the half-points awarded in Malaysia):

1. Alonso (11.5 points)
2. Heidfeld (9)
3. Bourdais = Buemi (8)
4. Webber (6)
5. Sutil (5)
6. Fisichella = Hamilton (3)
7. Massa (2.5)
8. Vettel = Piquet (1)
9. Raikkonen (0.5)

What a bloody mess that would be.

What a shower

Let’s pick the bones out of the Malaysian grand prix. The first talking point has to be the circumstances in which the race was red-flagged: this outcome was down entirely to the time at which the race was started. Not only did such a late start mean that there would be insufficient light if the race went on much beyond 90 minutes, but the climate around the circuit is such that early evening is, as I understand it, a time of day at which rain is particularly likely. For the sake of a slightly earlier start – even an hour would be sufficient to address these problems – it is surely worth jeopardising viewing figures in Europe slightly. The alternative is what we had today: the viewers don’t get a full race. All told, the extended period of drivers and teams fannying around on the pitlane, with nobody having any idea what was going on, made F1 look like a total shambles. Fascinating though it was for the dedicated viewer – and watching a global conversation via Twitter as it all unfolded on TV certainly added an interesting new dimension to F1 – to the casual viewer it must have seemed inexplicable and stupid. It should not be allowed to happen again.

The other conclusions we can draw from the race seem to be much more positive. There certainly seems to be more overtaking this year: whether this is because of the new aero regs making it easier, or because the cars are so close together anyway, is hard to tell. The former must be playing a part, as is the variety of KERS and non-KERS cars through the field.

KERS itself seems to be a decidedly mixed blessing: while Ferrari claim it gives a two-tenths advantage over a single lap, it seems not to be benefiting them in qualifying: presumably it must be very precisely used to get this time boost. It also seems that KERS cars’ extra weight makes them awkward when braking: Ted Kravitz identified this in relation to Alonso, who several times lost places because he got his braking wrong, but it also seemed to apply to Nick Heidfeld in the BMW and to Raikkonen in the Ferrari. That said, it does seem to allow drivers to defend against, or power past, non-KERS cars very effectively: I believe Brawn are the only team with no plans to run KERS at all this year, so could this leave them with a problem by the end of the season, assuming other teams catch up to their pace more generally in that time?

Alonso seems to be slipping into a Trulli or Webber role this year: he’s quick enough to muscle the car further up the grid than it should be, but in the races he ends up having a train behind him. Meanwhile his team-mate Piquet is undoubtedly being made to look even worse by having such a strong team-mate, but even so I wasn’t surprised to hear Eddie Jordan repeating my speculation that he might be replaced mid-season (hi Eddie!).

Jenson’s race was once again highly accomplished: he has the fastest car, but he is able to pump in fast laps when necessary, can take places to make up for an iffy start, and retains his composure in the most difficult of circumstances. The received wisdom from many pundits that he’s “not quite in the top class” of F1 drivers is, in my view, extremely harsh: the attributes above can equally be applied to Michael Schumacher.

The Brawn car, however, does seem to have some niggly problems, most notably the gearbox: Barrichello has needed a replacement, and Button had an iffy start this weekend and a dodgy pitstop last weekend, apparently for the same reason. And the reliability fears expressed ahead of this weekend didn’t emerge, but only because  we didn’t get a full race distance. Still, Ross Brawn will no doubt ensure the team is well across these minor concerns.

Meanwhile, Heikki Kovaleinen needs to start having a good season: two first-lap exits is not good, particularly when the second was wholly self-inflicted. Nick Heidfeld’s lucky podium also belies what may be the start of a difficult season for him, as his qualifying wobble from the middle of last year seemed to reappear. Both drivers may need to make shoring up their positions within their respective teams their main priorities this season; the fact that neither team seems to be mounting the championship challenge they had anticipated may just take the pressure off slightly.

Two races in, we now have a slightly better view of the relative paces of the teams. Toyota, Red Bull and perhaps BMW will be disappointed if they don’t take race wins this year; Ferrari may also be able to do it, although they seem to be making some wayward calls just now. I was also intrigued to notice that their “traffic light” system for pit stops has been reinstated, which I actually think makes sense; mistakes can happen with lollipops as well as with automated systems, so it never struck me as right to blame that system alone for Ferrari’s late-summer difficulties last year.

It has been a breathless start to the season, with F1 alternately providing high class drama and low-rent farce. Let’s hope the diffuser row does not provide more of the latter by banning the “trick diffuser” solution, and that we will have chance to get our breath back befoe China in two weeks’ time.