Review

This is a reference manual for twitter. You might think that a twitter reference manual would be on the list of shortest books ever, but there is now a substantial ecosystem built around twitter, well documented in this guide. As a casual and occasional user of twitter I found this to be a useful guide - assuming I ever decide to be more than a casual user.

The book starts with four chapters on the basics of using twitter: signing up, customizing your profile, sending updates, and following others. Then there is a longish chapter on how to use twitter from your mobile phone, covering both SMS and non-SMS interfaces, a nice summary of twitter text commands, twitter mobile applications, and external mobile-friendly sites. Then there’s a chapter on twitter searches, including a nice discussion of hashtags, location searches, people search, how to turn searches into favorites, and numerous external twitter search sites.

The book concludes with two chapters on how to extend and improve the twitter experience, including desktop clients, gadgets and widgets, url shorteners and tools for previewing shortened urls, integration with facebook and linked-in, and twitter tracking and trending tools.

The book is well-indexed and has a detailed table of contents, making it easy to use as a reference manual. It also covers tools that you might not know about, suggesting ways of using twitter that are only obvious after you’ve seen them (much like twitter itself).

I would recommend this book if you plan to use twitter to drive traffic to your site, enhance your social network, or drive your consulting business. And on a more general level, the wealth of tools and uses that has grown up around such a simple concept - a concept so simple that most of us wondered early on why anyone would bother - is instructive at a deep level about the power of social networking. This book serves as a good introduction to that world.

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