Twitter Me Fun
In found Twitter as a social networking site, another way to waste my time, it’s higly addictive. Though unlike Facebook and Myspace where you can search for names, with photos, for the regular stalking, Twitter is a bit more limited. I found that th people you “follow” (friends you add) are usually people you know, have interests in common, or are referred to you by other people. According to Author and Technologist Nicholas Carr, “Twitter is the telegraph system of Web 2.0” Or as Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, reported in the New York Times “It’s one of the fastest-growing phenomena on the Internet”
Slate magazine, Michael Agger suggests that “… Twitter is not a mere procrastination tool. It acts as a mental escape hatch. When answering the Twitter prompt — ‘What are you doing?’ — people have a way of checking in with their essential nonwork selves: ‘thinking about fried pickles for lunch’ or ‘daydreamng about a boy that i fancy and how i can snog him.’ It’s the 21st-century equivalent of passing notes in class.”
This twitter phenomenon of micro-blogging allows you to write brief text updates about your life on the go, and send them to friends and interested observers via text messaging, instant messaging, email or the web. Though sometimes it can be overwhelming and you can limit your daily feeds of updates.
Aside from sharing your faily posts with friends and networking, Twitter is also a great way to stay in touch with news outlets through only one medium. The BBC, The New York Times and Al Jazeera among other news outlets are trying out Twitter as a way to send headlines and links to stories. A good example of the Twitter mania is that the presidential campaign of Barack Obama, who also has a Twitter profile, with thousands of “followers” who check out updates.
For BBC technology editor Darren Waters, “users are not just sending texts and e-mails, but are “lifecasting” words and video 24 hours a day”. An increasing number of applications has been launched that take advantage of “always on” connections, either over the net or on mobile devices.
According to Mark Glasses author of Media Shift blog, one of the great things about Twitter is that fans can create their own add-on applications or visualizations. In terms of design and usability, Twitter is fairly easy to use, navigate and create applications. Check some out:
Twittervision lets you see each Twitter as it happens based on the location of the Twitterer. The web page literally scrolls around a world map to point out where the user is sending the post, and includes the text of the post and profile photo.
Twitterholic is a Top 100 Billboard-like chart for the Twitterers who have the most “followers.” Most of the chart is dominated by tech personalities such as Robert Scoble (3,690 followers) and Twitter founder Evan Williams (2,487), though CNN Breaking News has a decent showing as well (1,664).
Twitterment allows you to search for specific terms such as beer to see who has written a post with that term. You can even see a graph that shows the hours of the day when that term is used most (beer comes in on the later side, naturally), or compare terms such as Mac vs. PC.
Basic Twitter Search helps you search through Twitter blog posts and even search for people. Because Twitter doesn’t have a search engine (yet), PR blogger Steve Rubel created the engine using Google Co-Op tools.
Twitterrific and Twitteroo are computer programs that let you post to Twitter from your Mac or PC, respectively.
The Twitter community is constantly growing and coming ever so popular. Try it for yourself. At the moment the main functions are to follow people, and they can also follow you, you can receive peoples’ ‘what are you doing’ postings by sms. You can customize your profile adding photos, changing layout designs, writing an about you section and linking to your work.
Twitter inspires you to keep up to trend with the latest social networking sites. At the same time, it allowd you to know about other peoples work through networking. A recent example is rock critic and online journalism lecturer at UTS Elmo Keep who has been very popular in her protest for being banned in Facebook, causing headlines in the front page of the SMH online. I’ve found very interesting people, that work in the same industry and every day you learn something new about them, their ideas and have fun.
Twitter, a social tech phenomenon even has it’s own vocabulary ( from the special Twitter Fan Wiki page).
mistweet: a micro-blog post someone regrets. You can delete posts from your Twitter profile page but you can’t edit them or take them back.
tweet: a micro-blog post via Twitter.
Twitterer: one who Twitters.
Twittermob: a group of people who organize a spontaneous real-world gathering via Twitter.
Twitterrhea: sending too many Twitter messages.
Twitterverse or Twitosphere: the universe of Twitter users.
Twitter is also a great for increasing readers, driving traffic to your blog. You can incorporate Twitter widget into your blog’s sidebar, this brings in conversations from outside of your blog, connecting your blog with different microblogging and social networking applications. It’s a great way of promoting yourself to others and combining all the different online tools available. Remember, that the words that sit there in the sidebar are important to creating a strong first impression. They should support and represent the content found within the blog and its purpose. Also, these words from the microblogs become content on your blog, thus they are scooped up by search engine web crawlers and stored in their databases, turning up in search results. Many people want to combine everything they are doing on the web within their blog. It’s up to you to evaluate the benefits of these to your readers and your own privacy.
