BJP on Twitter - Let's share some Tweets
For the past three months, the British Journal of Photography has been available through Twitter. Now, what's Twitter? Officially, it's a micro-blogging website, in the sense that posts can only be 140-characters long. Another way to look at it is to compare it to Facebook's status message functionality. Users basically updates their contacts on what they are doing now, up-to-the-minute. Sounds trivial and boring? Far from it. Twitter creates more than a one-way or two-way conversation. Instead, you get an entire community talking to each other. Twitter becomes an indispensable tool to learn live what is going on in your field of expertise, and allows you to broaden your list of contacts.
Twitter can be accessed from a variety of devices. Either through a web browser on any computer, or using a phone application – such as Twitterific on the iPhone, or simply through text messages.
By following BJP on Twitter you can be kept updated to the latest news anywhere you are, and we can report from any event with live Tweets – for example, BJP editor Simon Bainbridge reported live from the Prix Pictet ceremony in Paris, effectively announcing the prize's winner before anyone else.
Last year, Twitter was one of the fastest growing websites in the UK. It experienced a ten-fold increase, making it the 291st most visited site this site of the Atlantic. Thousands of photographers are already using Twitter to update their followers – including picture editors, curators and galleries – about their latest work.
On Twitter, you'll find the National Media Museum, or the J. Paul Getty Museum and ThinkTankPhoto, for example. You will even find Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross!
Follow BJP and 1854 here: twitter.com/1854
For more about Twitter, read these articles:
Twitter traffic up 974 per cent in a year
Why Photographers Should Care About Twitter
Twittering Tips for Beginners
Watching Obama's Inauguration with Twitter
That last article shows the power of Twitter as a source of real-time news. This is how news organisations such as CNN learned of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last year, for example. It's also an excellent way to judge the impact of an event on everyday people using the search.twitter.com functionalities.
