Key functionality
The ability to send quick status updates and let others see what you are doing, it has proved useful with business people who are known to use it instead of business cards. Easy to use and set up online and update via mobile phone. Not unlike the status updates on Facebook but dedicated to that alone.



Examples in Oxford

• Bodleian Law Library
• Nuffield College Library
• Vere Harmsworth Library
• Sainsbury Library (Saïd Business School)
  

Copyright and Intellectual Property
They have rather a nice copyright statement; basically it’s ‘What’s yours is yours’. They claim no rights to the intellectual property of the material anyone provides to Twitter. It remains yours. They do encourage use of contributing to the public domain if you create anything or ‘consider progressive licensing terms’ – I take that to mean, make it creative commons please! They will also chase up copyright infringements on your behalf. They say they’ve borrowed their copyright statement from Flickr.



Branding and advertising

• Can use the default twitter style or use your own and upload background images as well as changing text colours, name colour, link colour, sidebar filler colour and sidebar border colour. If you are changing colours, you should know the HEX codes for colours. It doesn’t deal with CSS.
• Also possible to change the picture used. Unlike Facebook they seem to have good alt text for the pictures. It admittedly reads out the username you registered with Twitter, but it’s better that than a list of numbers!
• It’s free to make changes to the look of Twitter in this way.
• There are a range of different widgets which no doubt could be incorporated into the website through the CMS and in other pages if they could take widgets: http://twitter.com/downloads.
• Currently none. Although it is a website, its main use is for quite updates and use with mobile phones, making advertising not particularly useful or wanted.

Stability, reliability and support “The Twitter service makes it possible to post images and text hosted on Twitter to outside websites. This use is accepted (and even encouraged!). However, pages on other websites which display data hosted on Twitter.com must provide a link back to Twitter.”

This, from the Terms of Service, does not suggest it can be locally hosted, but that we can link back to the information. As it is an immediate and for the most part ephemeral service, do we wish to locally host and keep all the status updates we have used?

No information on whether we can export information from it.

The Twitter website is (notoriously) often unavailable and there may naturally be delays with the delivery of text messages dependent on the network.

NB Twitter discontinued SMS notifications (in the UK) on 13 August, which reduces its advantage over existing ways to communicate with readers.


What key functionality does the application have?
Easy updates of information snippets – e.g perhaps the library has to close early, or books are due back on a particular day? Or a load of new books has come in that people have been asking you about all day?

Twitter for Librarians: the ultimate guide - Interesting article on libraries and Twitter:

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business - Some pointers on how to use Twitter. Although it comes from a business perspective it gives you an idea of what could be achieved.

A guide to Twitter: what it is, how to use it and Twitter tools

Is Twitter a must for academic libraries?


Known local alternatives? None.