If you’d read yesterday’s chinese papers, you would not have missed this huge photo of three black humans with two macbooks and an iPhone on the cover of zbNOW (Zaobao Now).
That’s @claudia10 (me), @howiec and @patlaw with our twitter page.
This interview happened when the journalist from Zao Bao contacted TDM to see if anyone of us are able to share more about Twitter with him. And after a few emails, Howie confirmed the interview with Fong Wei and we met at Geek Terminal one evening for the interview. Coincidentally, I’d met Fong Wei and his photographer previously at the Volvo Ocean Race with Puma.
When I saw the article on my desk yesterday (thanks to molemole), my jaws dropped. I had no idea it would be a cover story for zbNOW and such a long one too! To be honest, I had lots of problem trying to read past the first paragraph. Too many of the characters know me more than I know them. So thanks to @melvinkee and @shenheng, we had an english translated version, which was rather hilarious reading through it. You can also find the online copy of this article in mandarin here.
In brief, the part where I contributed is on how locals whom I’m following are using Twitter. Based on my researched while I try to find all Singapore Tweeters via @sgtweet.
Quoting from the article (with help from Google Translator and my own editing):
The local community media (social media) consultants Lin Yiling (28) as part of her job, she started to “follow” Singaporeans on Twitter whom she do not know, to understand how they use the latest craze in new media. According to her observation, the local Twitter users are between 20-year-old to 30-year-old, mostly joined because artists in the United States are using Twitter, there are also a lot of youths whom joined to follow their idols’ or artists’ tweets, this narrows the distance between fans and stars.
She said: “I found a lot of new members in fact do not know the purpose of Twitter, after they joined, most only have a one-way following of celebrities such as Ryan Seacrest, Britney Spears, but these tweeters do not have much (or any) followers. They are also not active in their tweet update.”
She also found that these new members are not making full use of Twitter interactive two-way communication capabilities (yet), instead only
shit like diarrheatweet about mundane things (that’s happening in their life). But over time, they will begin to enter the situation.Some people think that a lot of Twitter users are too vague and general and only “reported” themselves what has been done or where they went, but Lin Yiling believes that a lot of people being the “kaypoh” Singaporeans would want to find out what their friends are doing, and hence start to join Twitter.
The above I’m only quoting the part where I was mentioned. Pat’s part was about the recent #awaresg tweeting and trending and Howie shared about the use of Twitter as a crowd-sourcing tool. And the big portion of the article shared what Twitter is and the usual lingo used and how it works. In fact, the best way to learn about Twitter is to get an account and test it out yourself! If you need any help, and have a day to spare, we can meet up for a chat and let me share more with you. Of course coffee on you!
Will be sharing more about Twitter and the things I discover during my research soon over at 24seven blog. This post might not be out so soon, since my schedule is pretty packed for the next few weeks. Will be drafting the post in bits daily.
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