The Twitter feed collects your thoughts and activity for friends to share
Perhaps the hottest of the hot amongst social networks right now, Twitter is gaining members all over the globe. It is the simplest thing: You can type up to 140 text characters and, with a click of a button, publish that micro-posting to the world. Twitter allows friends to follow one another, so your own home page on the site will display both your postings and those of your friends. With only a few dozen friends in your list, the site can become very busy, as people will “tweet” (that’s what posting on Twitter is called by members) everything from ideas they have to what they are having for lunch.
If you join Twitter, begin by searching for people using Twitter’s Find People tools. Drop by my page and add me as a friend by going to http://twitter.com/godsdog, to get started. Then send me a message, by writing a tweet to “@godsdog” saying you found me on LenovoSocial. Over time, we’ll assemble a list of all LenovoSocial members’ Twitter names. Commenters Cory O’Brien and Brian McNely, too, invite you to follow them at http://twitter.com/CoryOBrien and http://twitter.com/polycontextual, respectively. Also, check out Lenovo’s David Churbuck (at http://twitter.com/dchurbuck) and Esteban Glas (at http://twitter.com/stevie_glas).
Many news services and companies now use Twitter to send alerts to readers, as well. For example, CNN, the BBC, and the Guardian provide Twitter feeds. However, Twitter has had bouts of severe growing pains, failing catastrophically sometimes and often experiencing technical problems that prevent posting from desktop applications.
Also, check out TwitPic, which lets you share photos through Twitter.
Just how much Twitter is enough? That’s a question for you, based on your interest in and tolerance for minutia about your friends’ lives. My preference is for substance, but I do find that there are some people who drop very meaningful information in between “I am on the bus!” or “going to lunch, think I’ll have a sandwich” that make their feeds worthwhile to me. But don’t mistake this for conversation. Twitter is the open channel where you find topics that you may want to read and write about elsewhere, including email, instant messaging and on a blog.
If you are interested in business uses of Twitter, Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley evangelist and investor delivers the goods on using Twitter to market your business, yourself or your brand here:
“Reliance on influentials is flawed because the Internet has flattened and democratized information. Influentials don’t have as much special access, special knowledge, and distribution as you might think because of the growth of websites, blogs, and, of course, Twitter.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care about influentials—if nothing else they can help you get to what some consider “nobodies.” But mark my words: (a) Nobodies are the new somebodies, and (b) it’s better to have army of committed nobodies and than a few drive-by somebodies. The most somebodies can usually do for you is a one day bump in traffic.”
Home page: Twitter.com
A micro-blogging service for sharing activity with friends, colleagues and family.
As with other popular social applications, Twitter is becoming a popular feature in desktop applications. Mashable has a list of 140 Twitter tools, both online and desktop. Here are some of the Twitter-enabled applications for PC to try out (each has its benefits and problems):
Cross-platform Adobe AIR Twitter clients
Shareaholic (requires Firefox 2.0)
TweetDeck (Tweetdeck breaks tweets into categories, making it easier to follow the whole conversation and individual responses to one’s own messages, as well as providing support for group messages, built-in TwitPic and URL shortening by bit.ly. The current beta version does use too much memory, which will not affect most PCs with more than 1GB of RAM unless you are running many applications simultaneously.)
For Windows
Twitbin (a browser plug-in, it requires Firefox 2.0 or later)
OutTwit (a Microsoft Outlook plug-in app)
Togi (Turkish-language client)
Twitterlights (lets you select text on a Web page and post it to Twitter with a link to the original)
Pwytter (you can choose English and French versions, other languages expected soon)
TwittMe (requires Microsoft’s .NET Framework 2.0)
What’s Up? (a Windows Vista gadget)
Yahoo Messenger Twitter Sync (pulls Twitter messages into the Yahoo Instant Messenger client)
TwApp (inserts Twitter messages in the Windows taskbar)
Twessenger (integrates Twitter messages into Windows Live Messenger 8.1 or later, Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 required)
Twitter chirrup (Japanese language Twitter application)
For Linux
twitux (available in packages for Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and OpenSUSE)
Have you ever wondered how to download a complete record of your Twitter messsages? Mashable’s Pete Cashmore points to TweetScan, a site that will assemble your tweets into a .CSV file for download. Once you have the file, it can be loaded into a database using a comma-delimited import utility.
Tags: activity tracking, lifestreaming, micro-blogging
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If you’re looking to get into social media, then definitely give Twitter a try, because it’s one of the fastest, easiest ways to get involved. Plus, there are already plenty of people on Twitter discussing just about everything there is to discuss, so with a little searching (try http://search.twitter.com/) you can follow your way to a fantastic community of people that will be talking about the things you enjoy talking about, and you’ll be hooked in no time!
My Twitter account: http://twitter.com/CoryOBrien
I see Twitter as a particularly robust research platform–as a way to both share and aggregate knowledge in a variety of areas. For an example of Twitter as a knowledge sharing platform, I recommend having a look at WestPeter’s Twitter stream, a collection of peer-reviewed academic journal articles and books in knowledge management and a variety of other areas.
If your interests involve social network analysis, I highly recommend following Valdis Krebs. For commentary on technology and world events, one would do well to follow the author of this very post, @godsdog.Finally, if you have an interest in higher education, professional or technical communication, rhetoric and writing studies, and ubiquitous computing, you might follow the Rhetoric and Writing Studies Program at UTEP, and Brian McNely (that’s me!).