Sunday, January 31, 2010

Twitter 101

This post is for all of my non-techie friends who have not discovered the wonders of Twitter.  The opening page at Twitter.com reads "share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world," and "popular topics by the minute, day, and week."  Twitter requires that everyone post in 140 characters or less so information is delivered in short "tweets."  Where Facebook has walls, news feeds, photo albums and applications, Twitter is what's happening right now.  They are in competition as different types of social media, but I think they complement each other.

If you want to check it out, go to Twitter.com and there will be a search bar.  There are some nuances of searching on Twitter that you should know about.  Everything is shortened.  American Idol becomes americanidol or even better, idol. When people want to have a conversation on Twitter, they add the subject of the conversation to each one of their tweets with a hashtag.  (Have I lost you yet?)  A hashtag is a different name for the number sign so hashtag= #.  If I wanted to search for what people were saying about American Idol, I would search for #idol.  I am going to a conference soon, so to follow what people are saying about it, I search for #Blissdom.  Immediately after the earthquake in Haiti you could search #haiti and get up to the minute reports about what was happening.


Who is doing all of this tweeting?  Anybody, anywhere.  On the left of each tweet will be the person's profile photo, and every tweet will start with their twitter handle.  All twitter handles start with @.  My handle is @tsandjmom.  Since I have an account on twitter (anyone can, go get one!), I can follow other twitter users.  What that means is when I sign on, the tweets of everyone I follow show up on my page.  Your page is also known as your twitter stream, and it does move as quickly as a mountain stream.  I love the television show survivor so I follow @Jeff_Probst, the host of survivor, and he tweeted about @TheRealBuzz, Buzz Aldrin so now I am following him.  Seriously, Buzz Aldrin, how weird is that!?!  Since I have become more serious about blogging, I have been finding and following all kinds of awesome bloggers.  I need to have a post just for them because there are so many.  There is even @1stcot, the First Church of Twitter where they have a worship service online every Sunday.  You can find tweets about whatever your interests are!  My one caveat is that because this is anyone/anywhere tweeting you can find some very questionable and offensive things, so search carefully.

That my friends is Twitter 101.  Welcome to the Twitterverse!

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