twitter

[rickshaw92]

so whats this twitter all about?

[flipflop]

Easier to use than Facebook, but still shite

[joel_harding]

Twitter is another useful tool but it depends on what you want out of it.

By just Tweeting out “I’m stepping outside” your close friends who follow you can understand that you are not at home. If your followers include someone who knows your cell phone number, they know how to contact you, but this gives limited information to only a few people.

If you are interested in one specific topic and find a terrific article, you can ‘tweet’ the URL for the article and a very brief description. Chances are your followers include people with the same interest – if they ‘ReTweet’ then a second network, their followers, receives the information and you usually get a head nod for Tweeting it in the first place. So far, all this does is pass out information, which by itself is not all that useful.

There are a number of free tools out there that can be used now… TweetDeck is one. This arranges all the Tweets from those folks you are following, one column for incoming Tweets, one where you are mentioned, one for direct messages and one for suggested friends. But Tweet Deck gives you a brief pop-up and allows you to briefly see suggested articles for you to read, pictures, etc… and you can read and gain insight faster than your peers, and if you retweet, then people will start noticing you have a certain expertise in this field.

Using a website called TweetGrid you can follow a bunch of subjects at one time. Say you want to research or follow the topic of Polo’s Bastards, you’d type this into the subject line and whenever that topic comes up it would appear. By doing a search this way you’d find others with similar interests, and so on…

I use these and other tools to get rapidly developing information in and out, I’ve learned who is full of it and who is a good source… Twitter is a good tool, not great, at least not yet, but we’re only scratching the surface of the new “Now Media”.

[Lee Ridley]

Joel,

Thanks for that very useful explanation. I have never used Twitter, because I just didn’t understand what it was actually meant to do.

Now I know…

… I probably still won’t use it!

Cheers.

[ROB]

I am on there @Rat_Bastard and so far it’s been quite interesting. Seems a lot easier to find folks with related inetrests on there than most places. Plenty of DP travellers on there for example.

[Author]

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