So if you have not heard of Twitter, you can move on now and get back to your regular life. If you are new to Twitter then you may want to read on as I have some things that I have found that will either make your life wonderful, or have you pulling out your hair by the fistful.
I don't want to do a newbie guide to Twitter, there are a ton of them around, think of this as an advanced beginner roadmap to some of the places I have found along the way in the past 72 hours. Telling you about them may help you on your Twitter journey.
IPhone Apps
I worked with Twitterific from the time I got my Twitter account until this weekend when I loaded up Twitterverse. Hands down a 1000% improvement. If you have the iPhone, you need this.
Web-based Apps
I have a Twitter gadget installed on my iGoogle page, but it requires that I have that page open, and I don't want to be SO obsessive as to be refreshing that page over and over and over. So, I got a clue from @moehlert about finding good Twitter clients (what you call anything that lets you Tweet that is not at Twitter.com). If you look at a tweet and pay attention to the line at the bottom that says:
Mark Sylvester about 5h ago via twhirl
If you click on the last word it will take you to the web page of that client and you can go from there. So, I started paying attention to the people I follow to see which clients they use. I thought that if @timoreilly was using a specific client that would be a great start. He is. When he is not posting from the web, he uses an AIR application called twhirl. I love it. I can leave it open on my desktop and it is nice and unobtrusive, in fact, you can set transparency on it, so it fades back even better. Try it.
Twitter Chat and Groups
Ok, this is where it starts to get really scary (I mean interesting). Remember chat rooms? Sure you do, but you may or may not admit being in them. This is the same idea but on steroids. There is something called a hashtag in Twitter that lets others search on a word easily. There are tons of search tools, both built in to the clients and at Twitter itself. But both of these are childs play if you really want to seriously drink from a firehose.
People are starting to set up Groups (more on that later) and organize times when they all get online and chat. Each tweet has a #hashtag in it so that it will show up in the various search tools that people use. It is a mad free-for-all during the online chat, with archives posted for those that miss the melee. For example. I checked on the #journchat this week and wow it was amazing. I only had an hour for each, and just watching the activity was inspiring. You can join in a Chat at this site but you have to know the #hashtag. (Try typing anything in the search box).
These are serious and fun at the same time - professionals taking an hour out of their week to discuss their profession or avocation or general interests. There are 100's of them (who knew?). You can find these groups here. But I didn't even know this site existed until today. I found that several of the people I follow had the #journchat tag in their posts on Monday evenings, so I checked it out. Really interesting.
Great thing here is that you can jump in, or not, and learn a lot, which is what Twitter is so good at, right?
I am sure that there are more sites devoted to Chat and Groups
Tweet Grid
Ok, so let's say that you stop everything, join a bunch of groups, start following a ton of people, embed #hashtags in your tweets and generally give up the majority of your day doing so, then what. Well, you can then sign up to get the NORAD display of all this activity and put it on your biggest monitor and completely give in. NORAD display? Have you seen the wall to wall monitors in the command centers in the news, movies or TV? Well, there is a site that you can go to and put in all of these #hashtags and have a realtime update on all of them at the same time. Go to TweetGrid and click on example grid on the far left, that will give you an idea of what you can do. So, imagine tracking everything you are interested in all at once.
I asked @marciamarcia last night how she did it, as I have noticed her tweets are cogent, inspired, thoughtful and fast. She said that she is an accomplished multitasker and says that this is the best source of lateral thinking she knows of. Well said Marcia.
Summary
So, this is just in the past 72 hours that I have updated my phone, my desktop, my #hashtags, my Twitter Groups and Chat and I am feeling a bit overwhelmed but in a good way. I feel like I am more connected than ever before and coincidentally I run a networking company, so have not ever had a feeling like I was not connected.
Twitter Chat and Groups
Ok, this is where it starts to get really scary (I mean interesting). Remember chat rooms? Sure you do, but you may or may not admit being in them. This is the same idea but on steroids. There is something called a hashtag in Twitter that lets others search on a word easily. There are tons of search tools, both built in to the clients and at Twitter itself. But both of these are childs play if you really want to seriously drink from a firehose.
People are starting to set up Groups (more on that later) and organize times when they all get online and chat. Each tweet has a #hashtag in it so that it will show up in the various search tools that people use. It is a mad free-for-all during the online chat, with archives posted for those that miss the melee. For example. I checked on the #journchat this week and wow it was amazing. I only had an hour for each, and just watching the activity was inspiring. You can join in a Chat at this site but you have to know the #hashtag. (Try typing anything in the search box).
These are serious and fun at the same time - professionals taking an hour out of their week to discuss their profession or avocation or general interests. There are 100's of them (who knew?). You can find these groups here. But I didn't even know this site existed until today. I found that several of the people I follow had the #journchat tag in their posts on Monday evenings, so I checked it out. Really interesting.
Great thing here is that you can jump in, or not, and learn a lot, which is what Twitter is so good at, right?
I am sure that there are more sites devoted to Chat and Groups
Tweet Grid
Ok, so let's say that you stop everything, join a bunch of groups, start following a ton of people, embed #hashtags in your tweets and generally give up the majority of your day doing so, then what. Well, you can then sign up to get the NORAD display of all this activity and put it on your biggest monitor and completely give in. NORAD display? Have you seen the wall to wall monitors in the command centers in the news, movies or TV? Well, there is a site that you can go to and put in all of these #hashtags and have a realtime update on all of them at the same time. Go to TweetGrid and click on example grid on the far left, that will give you an idea of what you can do. So, imagine tracking everything you are interested in all at once.
I asked @marciamarcia last night how she did it, as I have noticed her tweets are cogent, inspired, thoughtful and fast. She said that she is an accomplished multitasker and says that this is the best source of lateral thinking she knows of. Well said Marcia.
Summary
So, this is just in the past 72 hours that I have updated my phone, my desktop, my #hashtags, my Twitter Groups and Chat and I am feeling a bit overwhelmed but in a good way. I feel like I am more connected than ever before and coincidentally I run a networking company, so have not ever had a feeling like I was not connected.
