It's basically a cross between a micro-blog and Non Sequitur for the web. You are limited to 140 characters at a time (including spaces and punctuation) for your posts; people can follow you to have your "tweets" included in their Twitter home page. A lot of celebrities use it as an ego boost, but there are also a good number of Twitter feeds with useful information in them, such as breaking news headlines and alerts on good deals that people have found. Overall, it's harmless; I'd suggest opening an account and finding a few feeds to follow, and seeing if you find it interesting.
Thanks, Keith. I'm following this advice to have a smattering of pages to follow and see what it's like. If I can keep it to something I can check a few times a day, it sounds like a smaller LJ thing and of interest for quick breaks at work. But, if I feel like I need to check it every 30 minutes or I miss something, then that's probably something I will cut out just to save my sanity. :)
This seems like it would be neat for the text message bits, but I don't have a texting package, so I have to pay for each text. (Also my phone doesn't have nifty software since it's not a spiffy PDA-type phone.) Of course, that also sounds incredibly distracting for someone as easily distracted as I am. *laughs* Maybe it's just better this way anyway.
I use Twitter as a sort of asynchronous group IM platform. It helps me to feel connected to people I don't get to spend time with nearly enough.
I run TweetDeck, which lets me track the tweets of the people I follow AND the Facebook status updates of my friends (JUST status updates - no quizzes or crap like that). From Tweetdeck, I can post tweets, reply to tweets, or even post a new Facebook status.
I don't really use my phone with Twitter at all, except for receiving "Direct Messages" (which are private, person-to-person tweets).
Best advice I can offer is not t try and find the "right" way to use Twitter, but rather to find a way of using it that's enjoyable for you.
I will second (or third?) the recommendation to use something like Tweetdeck to twitter. You can set up groups and limit the signal to noise ratio fairly quickly. For example, I have all my "breaking news" updates sent to one group, my friends updates are in another, etc. That way, it's simple to pick and choose what I read at any given time.
Thanks for the clarification. It sounded like a Twitter/Facebook merge, and since I don't use Facebook, I didn't even check it out. :) It sounds like filters, which is actually something I was wondering if it supported yesterday. I might have to set that up. Thanks, Robin.
Heh. I didn't even know about the facebook part of the application until Duane mentioned it. I've been using it for the filters all along. :)
Sometimes, I have time to read the back and forth twittering between everyone and their brother and other times, I just want to read a certain group of friends/coworkers/etc. That's the main selling point of TweetDeck, IMO.
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I run TweetDeck, which lets me track the tweets of the people I follow AND the Facebook status updates of my friends (JUST status updates - no quizzes or crap like that). From Tweetdeck, I can post tweets, reply to tweets, or even post a new Facebook status.
I don't really use my phone with Twitter at all, except for receiving "Direct Messages" (which are private, person-to-person tweets).
Best advice I can offer is not t try and find the "right" way to use Twitter, but rather to find a way of using it that's enjoyable for you.
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Sometimes, I have time to read the back and forth twittering between everyone and their brother and other times, I just want to read a certain group of friends/coworkers/etc. That's the main selling point of TweetDeck, IMO.
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