Twitter in Plain English - by Commoncraft

Posted by Rich on March 22nd, 2008

Twitter Explained

Lee LeFever and Sachi LeFever of Commoncraft have created yet another excellent video. This one helps to explain Twitter. If you have never used Twitter — or are still a bit confused about how it can be useful to you — this would be a great place to start.

Papercraft

I really enjoy the LeFever’s “papercraft” style of video creation. It hails back to the 8mm film shorts that my friends and I used to make. We did “stop-motion” animation using paper for our opening and closing film credits. I even created a “video” while in college of my song “Hooked on the TV” as part of a broadcast communications class. I used the 8mm camera and again ran my credits by using paper for the stop-motion sequences. I should dig that out somehow and convert it to video for sharing here.

So much more

Though I really enjoy the explanation of Twitter as presented in this video, there are so many other aspects that cannot be explained in the short time that they have to present the subject.

People are using Twitter to share their daily lives, but they are also sharing it to build business connections, to connect directly with their online community via phone and other portable devices (through the direct message feature) and they are carrying on threads of conversation that sometimes build entire communities, help with a cause (such as cancer relief) or that promote events and conventions (SxSW, New Media Expo, etc.). Read some of the comments at the video blog to realize just how in-depth the service can be.