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What is a Twitter Group Chat?

When you first start out with Twitter, you find that you can post status updates, and your followers will (may?) see them. Then you learn that putting an “@” sign before someone’s Twitter name creates a reply. Conversations with more than a couple of people get pretty awkward with only these tools.

Luckily, some folks figured out that by adding a “hashtag” (#), you create a unique phrase that is easy for Twitter Search to find. This is what enables Twitter Group Chats to work. For instance, searching for #hockey will find an on-going stream of Tweets about hockey.

It didn’t take long for people to realize that you could organize a group chats with hashtags. Twitter Group Chats are highly socially viral. They encourage lots of social interaction, and spread quickly, assuming the topic is interesting.

Twitter Group Chats are socially viral in a big way, and here are the six reasons they spread so quickly!

1) Starting a Twitter Group Chat is “Too Easy” Read more…

A question appeared in tonight’s #blogchat discussion asking how to get automatic reminders of the start times of Twitter chats. I shared my way of doing this, and got many positive comments about it, so I figured I’d blog it to help out a broader audience.

Warning – this is a really easy solution, and it doesn’t involve any bright, shiny new tools!

Whenever I hear about an on-going chat on Twitter, or a chat-enabled blog site, or in a virtual world (I am involved with several projects in Second Life™ and other virtual worlds) I just add it as a recurring appointment to my calendar, and set a reminder in the calendar! In my case, this is Google Calendar, so it is available everywhere and syncs to my phone, but this trick should work just as well for most calendaring applications.

For a Twitter hashtag-style chat, I start the calendar entry with a #, for example #blogchat, and then follow that up with a space and the full URL, so that a click will open a brower tab pointed at the chat in progress. I tend to use TweetChat for Twitter chat discussions, so the calendar entry for this example looks like this:

#blogchat http://tweetchat.com/room/blogchat, with a reminder set for 15 minutes ahead.

A few clicks, and it’s done. I hope this is useful for someone else as well. It’s been pretty valuable for me to keep track of how various chats relate to other appointments, and to remember to get online when chats of interest are about to start.