»When I first signed up for twitter it was just me and my girlfriend following each other. Nobody we knew had heard of it but we wanted to try it out. We used it for about 2 weeks and decided it was worthless if you didn’t know anyone else on it so our screen names were abandoned. About 3 months later when I found myself single again, I had a ton of time on my hands and decided I wanted to start building a bigger online presence. Finally, I decided to give Twitter another try. After some hyping and begging I got a few of my friends at work to join over time too. The trick here is to get past twitter’s face value: that it makes you a narcissist to post your daily happenings in a micro blog. A lot of people say, “My life just isn’t that interesting” or “I honestly don’t care what other people are doing”, or “Who are you and why are you talking to me?”. At that point, I usually show them the intro video twitter has on their front page. After watching that, people either say “awesome, maybe I’ll try it” or continue to say “I don’t care what my friends are doing”. Anyone who says the latter tends to be the kind of person you want to avoid being friends with- I mean seriously who isn’t at all interested in what is going on in their friends’ lives?
That being said, there are so many ways to use twitter and a lot of them can make new friends, catch up with old ones, teach you new things, organize “gatherings” or whatever they kids call them these days- even make you some extra cash!
On mobile uses…
One of the coolest elements of twitter is the ability to link it up with your phone so you can use SMS to post a tweet. If you choose to, you can even pick from the people you’re following on twitter and decide whose updates will be delivered via SMS and whose updates will only show up on your twitter home page. Even better, is the metric ton of twitter apps for iPhone, blackberry etc. Those will make it easier to reconcile the difference between SMS updates and homepage updates on the mobile platform. Some also let you update you location or post pictures to share with your followers. Which of course leads to the mobile codes you can use either on the road or just from the website.
On the Visual Twitterverse…
Following just your friends is pretty awesome, but what if you want to see what’s goin’ on outside your own twitter sandbox? The public timeline can have some really interesting info floating around in it. The elections were a great example of that. Here are a few great way’s to watch the public feed:
- Green Space’s Twitter Stream
- TwitterVision.com -be sure to check out the 3d view. They support flickr and twitpic too..
- Twitter Search- search for keywords in the public stream. For example: search “Cyber Monday” to find out what those deals are lookin’ like on stuff you really need like a zune, kindle or something else that sucks as badly as those two pieces of wasted plastic made to be given as presents by socially unaware parents or grandparents. Hell, while you’re buying crappy versions of cool stuff, rent a copy of Transmorphers and try to keep yourself from stabbing yourself in the face with a soldering iron.
On social networking…
Some people might say “Twitter is basically the same thing as my status on facebook, so why don’t I just use facebook?”. My answer to this is: “because facebook is f*cking lame”. Twitter doesn’t use your information to spam you with insulting ads like the one on the right. I’m 24 years old what the F*ck does facebook mean “STILL single?”. Should I be married, moved into a house and have 2.5 kids already? Get off my back, facespace. Even without he ads, Facebook bugs you with applications from your less busy friends, like superpoke’s famous “sheep throwing”. Lame. If you want to network socially, get your friends to communicate with you over twitter instead of just throwing sheep at you or sending you some “flair” which is essentially 150x150px jpegs of random crap.
On the API…
There are lots of other applications people have found for twitter that are useful on different levels. Here’s just a few:
- Mantis Bugtracker- built into this web-based ticketing system for IT sheeple is a way to update a twitter account with bug id’s and statuses of open tickets. Very cool idea.
- Tweet from the terminal - all you need is a few one-liners and you can build your own scripts that update twitter for different reasons. Making your house tweet is a project I’m dying to work on myself.
So have at it. Give it an honest try- a lot of nay-sayers have changed their mind after a few eureka moments in my experience….
