So upfront, I'm reviewing this book after it was sent to me from O'reilly. However this is my honest opinion of the book.
The book has been talked about elsewhere quite a bit, so I came with a but of scepticism when reading the book. However I'm pleasantly surprised. The first part of the quite thick book is all about twitter as a idea and service. Even before you sign up you can get a feel for what its all about and what the etiquettes are. Actually the book does a very good job laying out the ground work of the culture around microblogging.
It could get very hippy or meta and how great this all is, but the book doesn't it actually goes into how to track trends, topics and generally use twitter as a service like google. For example theres a page called “Figure out who's influential on Twitter.” I actually decided to add myself to We Follow after reading it. Just when you had enough about whos top of the list we're back into the more meta stuff about how to have a great conversation. Lots of tips taken from places like the Cluetrain but served up in the notion of twitter. There's lot of useful stuff even for tweeters like myself who have been at it for years. For example I had no idea about the spam twitter user Lots of this stuff has come in over the last few years and totally bypass us old skool users. Again there's a few section for those wanting to use twitter for marketing and publishing. And again there's a more human section with advice about reveling yourself and how to retweet.
The pages of information are chunked up nicely and you can quickly skim read the pages you know and get a bit more depth out of the ones you don't. Every other page is a related large picture, which adds to the enjoyment of reading through this book. The only real negative thing I can see about this book is the price. It really quite high at about 14-16 pounds. Amazon actually have it for about 10 pounds. which is much more reasonable.
This book has everything in it and certainly earns the title of the twitter book, but the best thing about the book is the balance between those who want to use twitter to communicate and particpate, and those who want to leverage it for there own means. Excellent work O'reilly.
