Tweet dreams: Scotland's Twitter addicts meet at the Edinburgh Twestival

Published on Sunday 15 February 2009 19:26

WHAT was the first thing you did this morning? Yawn? Stretch? Shout at the Today programme? I tweeted. Seriously, my feet weren't even out from under the duvet but my iPhone was in my hand just so I could see how many followers I'd manage to get and whether any of them had tweeted at me.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, let me enlighten you. Twitter is the new social networking phenomenon. You've heard of Bebo, MySpace, Facebook, right? Well now it's all about Twitter, a website founded in 2006 where users post details (in 140 characters or less) of their every move. Getting in the shower? Tweet it. Good bacon butty? Tweet it. Found something interesting on the web you want to share… you get the idea. Nothing is too trivial for the worldwide audience, nothing too mundane.

Barack Obama, Gordon Brown (or rather Number 10 Downing St), Jonathan Ross, Stephen Fry, they all do it. Churning out gobbets of wit and wisdom for Twitter-users to read. News of the Chinese earthquake broke on Twitter, as did the first images of the American Airlines plane afloat in New York's Hudson River. And there's less earth-shattering news, too: Stephen Fry got stuck in a lift and sent pics to prove it.

More than three million tweets are currently being sent every day. The number of people who visited the site has increased by more than 600 per cent in the last year and, although founded and based in San Francisco, 10 per cent of Twitter's traffic now comes from the UK. And, as it turns out, a fair bit of that probably comes from Edinburgh.

Beneath the capital's reserved exterior this city is all a-twitter. I know because a few days ago I saw at least 250 of the city's McTwitterati gathered together for the first Edinburgh Twestival. Part of a global event involving 180 cities world-wide in support of charity:water, the aim was to unite the city's Tweeters for a night of live music and entertainment and to support a charity that provides clean drinking water to people in developing countries. It worked, too. In just a few hours, the target of 3,000 was beaten with ease.

So who was there? Geek boys and techie nerds? Well yes, I'm sure there were some, but there were also plenty of women and, most unexpectedly, a real mix of ages. "I'm surprised," says Dr Hazel Hall (@hazelh on Twitter) a lecturer at Napier University and avid Tweeter. "I thought I'd be the oldest person here. In fact, it's the very young ones who aren't here. When I think about the profile of the students in the School of Computing where I teach, I'd say that they're not really switched on to Twitter at the moment. It will happen, but it hasn't happened yet."

According to research by the Pew Centre in America, the average age of Twitter users is 31, compared to 27 for MySpace and 26 for Facebook. For James Spence (@sillybeggar), here with his wife, Tiffany, Twitter is fun. "I've only been on Twitter for about a month or so and I've got about 2,000 followers," he says. "I go on, I write something ridiculously stupid, people respond with something equally stupid and it just goes back and forth. I've got a book coming out in a couple of months, so I went on because I thought it'd be a good avenue to promote it. But I haven't even mentioned the book because I just enjoy talking to the people who are there."

Tiffany is a different kind of tweeter. "I'm far more into Facebook than Twitter but because they interlink now, I find it easier to use them together." Do they tweet at each other I ask, imagining them tweeting "pass the remote" as they sit on the sofa. "No," says Tiffany. "That would be a bit sad."

Looking around the packed bar, there are people standing with their friends, silently tapping away at laptops and mobile phones. But there's plenty of chat and business card swapping, too. If new technology is sometimes blamed for alienating us from our real community, Twitter, it seems, can at least be used to merge the virtual and the real. Richard Kernaghan (@Kerneth) and Graeme Spence (@Trekkie101) sit side by side, faces illuminated in the glow from their laptops.

"I've been on Twitter for a couple of months," says Kernaghan. "Now it's life. You think you're not going to get addicted, but then you're on the train, on it, lying in the bath, on it. First thing in the morning you're checking to see if anyone has tweeted at you. It's so easy to do."

But aren't you afraid you're addicted? "I don't really worry about becoming addicted. At one point I was addicted to Bebo, then addicted to MSN, addicted to MySpace, addicted to Facebook and now Twitter. People follow you because they're interested in what you've got to say," he says. "On Facebook people just want to look at your pictures."

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