a short Twitter tutorial

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One perk of going to BlogHer was discovering I'm not the only person on the planet using Twitter. Now I just have to find all those great Twitter folks so I can follow them! I wasn't sure how I would take to Twitter, but so far I'm really enjoying it. I update almost exclusively from my phone and have been using it as a way to "micro-blog." My personal goal has been to type 140 characters or less that I might remotely care about the next day or later. I'm not really using it for updates like "headed to the pub, meet me if you can", but I'm twittering for myself right now and don't go to many pubs these days.

Without going into tedious detail repeating all the other great web sites out there explaining how to use it, Twitter is a way for you to send tiny updates via the web or SMS (text messages) as well as follow your friends via the same web and/or text messages interface. You can turn on or off the following at will via SMS commands (so you're not getting updates in meetings or while you're trying to sleep) or just read them all on the web.

I send text messages to 40404 from my phone and receive updates from that same number with the username preceeding the update. You can see my latest update on the right side bar of my blog and theres a link to my Twitter timeline.

I really enjoy the challenge of coming up with something meaningful to say in under 140 characters. It's like a haiku for my phone.

Some handy web sites are: Twitter FAQ Newbie's Guide to Twitter Remember the Milk - reminder service using Twitter How to send direct messages - very handy to coordinate with your new friends without necessarily knowing their cell phone numbers TwitterVision - live timeline of updates based on location. I could watch this for hours.

And for those LiveJournal users out there, you can read my Twitter updates in syndication at:

(although the updates are far from realtime)

EDIT: I also found this great Wired article about how Twitter creates a Social Sixth Sense by Clive Thompson that really does a great job of explaining why you would care about Twitter, or at least why I care.

So sign up if you haven't already and start following me so I can follow you too!