You might or might not know that I’ve been trying to be very active in my favorite social media network, Twitter, for the last years. I joined Twitter in 2011 just to promote my Spanish blog “El Lobo Rayado“, that is why my username still is @El_Lobo_Rayado (*)
In some way, micro-posting in Twitter has had a huge impact on the way I do science communication. For example, I used to write long posts in my Spanish blog explaining or discussing astronomy news, but now I do that in Twitter, and almost everything in English. Twitter drastically changed my presence in the web, also helping me to promote science communication events, and at the same time contacting very interesting people.
Social media and science communication have evolved A LOT between 2011 and 2019, that’s for sure.
Twitter has been increasingly popular for researchers, astronomers in particular, and a bit of “networking” is also done there. Conferences usually have a hashtag to follow, sometimes even a full twitter account, and that has been my way of capturing and summarizing the talks, sometimes providing comments or discussions to the topics that were discussed. And even, I must confess, writing Twitter posts including some photos of the talk is now the way I’m taking notes during the Conference.
I’m doing that using threads, that is, connecting all my tweets one after the other. Some people of Twitter use threads to tell a story as if it was a post in a conventional blog… but breaking the post in many (10-50 or even more) independent tweets. I don’t like that. In my personal opinion, if you want to tell that much, just write a post in a blog and provide the link in a single tweet! But that is my humble opinion, I can understand that other people DO LOVE to write threads (and even they first prepare them in a separate document to know how many tweets are needed and/or schedule the individual tweets seeking the highest impact).
What was missing? Compiling all those tweets in an easy way! If you are familiar to Twitter you know that, after some few days (it depends on how active you are) it is not that easy to find a particular tweet. In the past we had Storify to collect tweets, not necessarily from the same account. It was quite good, although it involved a bit of extra work compiling tweets and sorting them. But Storify was closed a year ago (and with that some of us lost plenty of useful information, as the tens of #AskAAO sessions we used to have in the old “Australian Astronomical Observatory”).
Luckily recently a new tool came into play to help us with that. It is the Thread Reader App, that allows the user to get a full post compiling all the tweets in a thread. How to do it? Easy: just send a tweet to @threadreaderapp at the end of your Twitter thread including the word “unroll“… and magic happens!
And that is what I’ve done today to compile my tweets of Monday and Tuesday… busy as I’m both attending the “ASTRO-3D Science Meeting 2019” #A3Dscimeet19 AND helping in the international science communication festival “Pint of Science” #PintAU19 #Pint19AU in the evenings…
Here they are the posts with all my tweets during the week:
I have to say… I should be at the #A3Dscimeet19 right now but I had some few “urgent” things to do at the university, and later I got some few emails and… well… here I am in my office writing this.
But I’ll update it later with today’s thread. Done!
(*) I say “still” because I’m seriously considering changing it to a “more English-speakers friendly” username…
Dr Ángel R. López-Sánchez 