Twitter…
Twitter is a class of website called a “social networking” site. It allows you to see what other people are doing or currently find interesting, while allowing others to do the same with you. It has its advantages and disadvantages, but we’ll get to that shortly.
Twitter? What a hilarious name!
If you like the name twitter, you are going to love that when you post it is called tweeting. Your tweets are a sort of tiny, little blog post. For that reason, Twitter is known as micro-blogging.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. Blogging?
Blog is short for Web Log. What you are currently reading is a blog. It is a space for a person to write whatever they like. I’ve chosen to write about technology. More specifically, those who are new to technology.
In my day to day, real life, I occasionally write on a personal blog, but it is very time consuming. Between family, work, exercise, this blog, and the hundreds of other things I do everyday, it is tough to sit down and journal the tiny details of my life. It would be much easier if I could just take little notes instead of writing full chapters.
Twitter is like a note-taking blog. You can write posts like:
- In line at the post office. The guy in front of me just farted.
- I think I just might have fallen asleep eating my lunch.
- Does anyone know if sheep can see in color?
None of these are worth firing up the computer and pounding out 200 words about. All they really need is a little blurb so people can get the gist of things. And note that your little blurb must be 140 characters or less. Twitter even gives you a character counter to manage your character usage. It really makes you think before you post!
Ok, I’ll try it out, how do I sign up?
Its easy. Head to Twitter, hit the big green “GET STARTED — JOIN!” button. You enter your information (first and last name, username, password), fill out the form, and create your account.
Once you are signed up, the first thing you will want to do is edit your profile. You can add a little bit about yourself, add a picture, change your background.
Next, you need to find people to “follow.” Following just means you get to see posts by that person. The first place to look is to find some celebrities and businesses that you enjoy. On my Digitante Twitter account, I follow the tweets of a bunch of companies and blogs that might be of interest to those reading my blog. This includes T-Mobile, Boy Genius Report, and Dell Outlet. On my personal account, I follow some beer distributors, friends of mine, and a number of celebrities such as Rainn Wilson (Dwight K. Schrute from The Office) and Weird Al Yankovic. One of the great things about Twitter is that there is no approval process, so you can follow anyone you want (occasionally there are restricted accounts, but they are rare). There is also a link in the upper right corner to Find People, so you may check some of your friends’ names.
This is great, but my computer still has to be “fired up” as you put it.
If you have a phone with an unlimited texting plan, you can get set up so you can send tweets directly from your phone. This allows you to let people know the kooky things happening in your life when you are away from your computer. To tweet on the go, you can use programs like Tweetie for the iPhone or TwitterBerry for the Blackberry.
Alright, I’m all set up and tweeting like a crazy person, what next?
Well, you can do a number of interesting things on Twitter:
- Follow a particular person via RSS feed. Just head to their feed and click the orange striped icon to the right below all the person’s personal info and following information. It can then be added to your favorite feed reader.
- You can talk to specific people on Twitter. You do so by using the @ symbol before their name. To tweet directly to me you would type, “@thedigitante Hey, awesome blog!” I can then find all the posts that have @thedigitante in them.
- You can “retweet” any postings you find that are especially interesting. If you tweeted, “Hey, I love this blog by @thedigitante!”, I would then copy your tweet and add a few things to the beginning such as RT (for re-tweet) and your name with an @ symbol. It would look like this: “RT @mybestbuddy Hey, I love this blog by @thedigitante!”
One last feature of interest is the search box. You can search all tweets to find information about current events or other information. There have been multiple occasions on which Twitter broke news coverage quicker than any other media outlet. One occasion was last year’s Los Angeles earthquake and another was the plane crash into the Hudson River earlier this year.
I’m a tweetin’ fool!
Now that you are tweeting and using Twitter like a pro, let me know by following The Digitante. If you would still like some assistance getting set up and tweeting, feel free to head to The Digitante homepage and use the contact link to get in touch by email or feel free to call.
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