This past weekend I did an interview with Arian Karimian for USA Today about Twitter. He created an article and posted it online, here’s a link. It was interesting to remember why we started using Twitter and seeing now where we’re at.

We started using Twitter in 2007 right after we got the #1 pick in the NBA Draft. Immediately I knew we would be getting a TON of more traffic to the site. I wanted to create an extremely robust experience for new fans that were curious about the team. The big question that people would be coming to ask, Will it be Oden or Durant. I went to the guys at Substance and asked, how fast can we create a microsite for this subject.

The guys at Substance rocked and created an amazing microsite that took about 14 days to create. One of the features was a Twitter Feed. I had heard about Twitter, but saw the application for us immediately when they framed it in the site. It totally makes sense as a way to pull back the curtain and let them know what is going on, especially during closed door events like draft workouts.

Back in 2007, there wasn’t @replies, only broadcasting. But as soon as those became functional bringing in conversation into the application made sense. We had a period where we didn’t use it as much as we do now, but I would say 50% of our Tweets now are @ replies.

Another feature that wasn’t around in 2k7 was Twitpics and the like. A picture tells 1,000 words, let alone 140 characters. If that was available during the draft, that would have gone a long way.

We plan on continuing Tweeting, during the playoffs we’re using it to keep the conversation going with fans and also promotion different pieces of engaging content on our site (like live game blogging, play-by-play modules, and post game live video stream). We’ve promoted the hashtag #uprise and you can see the Tweets from the people using it to showcase if they’re talking about Trail Blazers Playoffs 2009.

I see us continue to use Twitter and integrating it more into the design of trailblazers.com and especially the new version of our social network iamatrailblazersfan.com. Being able to push content out of iama, or bring Tweets in is a project for the summer to get ready for the 09-10 season. Seeing such a mainstream influx of Twitter users (1,382% year over year in February) we’ll need to incorporate the ease of use of that platform into iama. Even for my own sake, I don’t want to have to update two or three different sites. I want to update one, Twitter, and have that update iama and Facebook. Or vice versa, update Iama and have that update Twitter and Facebook.

I wonder about Twitter being such a mainstream phenomenon. I think that a lot of people are going to check it out, see their favorite celebrity Tweeting and leave about a couple of months. I’ve heard a lot of people that “don’t get it”. Not all people are content contributors. Even celebrities aren’t content contributors unless it is good content. Now you’ll be more engaged in the mundane content that they create (ate some cake for example) than a random person, but after awhile, that won’t become interesting. That’s why Shaq has been so successful. He’s an interesting person. He writes interesting content. Not all people can carry that… that’s why when people really really want our players to Tweet. If they can’t do it consistently or make it interesting, I don’t see why they would want to on either side.

Here’s an old post from June 2007 about using Twitter.

Great post on TechCrunch today talking about the future of social networking (I Saw The Future Of Social Networking The Other Day)

Mike Arrington talks about a company that he has seen that could be diving into waters that Facebook and MySpace have yet to fully embrace, Mobile Social Networking. Yes, there are mobile version of both of these sites, but neither harness the power of your mobile phone.

The mobile phone is an amazing device that continues to get crazy cooler as the months go by. Not once have I ever regretted waiting in line and dropping cash on my iphone. There are few things these days that I at least don’t double guess myself from purchasing later (ahem, Netflix… at times). Back to my point… mobile phones are no longer your phone, they are your microcomputer. You can do a run a ton of apps on your smartphone that eliminate having to use your laptop. So this is quickly becoming a replacement in someways, and in others an augmentation to people’s digital experience (web, video, photos email).

If you have this microcomputer everywhere, why not have your web experience be in relation to where you are at. You see more and more mobile phones tying in GPS (Boost does this, iPhones Google Maps has a triangulation feature). Having contextual information of the people that you are having online relationships while you are interacting physically. Arrington’s thoughts:

Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

So picture being in arena at a Trail Blazers game and you fire up your iPhone. You are able to do a multitude of things on your phone, watch instant replays from different angles than what was on the big screen, get coupons for the merch store, and firing up your social network to see who in the arena is there that night. A map comes up  and shows all your friends’ thumbnails and where they’re sitting in relation to you…  so you can say “hey”! You could also see in general others at the game that you might not have met yet, or the guy who sits next to you that you’ve become friends with is on iamatrailblazersfan.com, but you never knew.

The game operations people can see use this to create a better experience based on the psychographics of the people in the arena that night. A snapshot of tonight’s crowd might say that 85% of the people sitting there that night are fans of Jay-Z, so they’ll play more Jay-Z that night. All of this could be possible.

It sounds like Arrington saw a start-up that is harnessing the iPhone SDK to make this happen. I’m really excited to see what happens. I really think this could be an awesome addition to existing social networks for Facebook, LinkedIN, MySpace, Flickr and also niche sites like our iamatrailblazersfan.com or MyColts.net.

Having something like this only available for one phone is a problem. It would need to be cross carrier/cross model. Alas, that is a problem with our system in the states, standardization is lousy on mobile phones. That’s for another post.