Well, I’m finally on Twitter.
I heard about Twitter a year or two ago, through the digital grapevine, and wasn’t impressed. I have a hard enough time maintaining two blogs, a wiki, three personal projects, stupid-burning, and reading/commenting on other blogs I follow — and now micro-blogging? Please…
But when I found out that I can update it with my cell phone, and receive updates in Firefox, I decided it was feasible to do, and signed up. (Although it didn’t help that half the people in my department at work signed up the same day. Peer pressure is a bitch.)
For those of you that still think the Internet is a “series of tubes“, Twitter works like this:
- Random thought pops in your head
- Txt random thought in 160 characters or fewer to the number: 40404 (seriously — although this assumes you have already set up your account)
- Profit!
I’ve seen everything from “Man I am so tired” to “Hey we’re at the bar, come join us” tweeted (the v.t. of “twitter”). I’ve even heard legends about people who were arrested and were able to quickly inform their friends to pick them up from jail via Twitter, or who had a car breakdown and tweeted for help. I don’t know these people personally, so they may as well be urban legends, but it could happen.
Some things to remember:
- You are limited to 160 characters per tweet. (This is due to the limitations of SMS, I think)
- EVERYONE WHO FOLLOWS YOU WILL RECEIVE YOUR TWEETS. (i.e. “There is no private tweeting”)
- You may want to think twice about receiving tweets on your cell phone, particularly if you pay per txt message. (You can set your account to only send tweets from your cell, and not receive them)
- No pics, videos, songs, etc. Just text. (and ASCII art doesn’t translate well to tweet)
- You only receive tweets from people you follow — so no need to worry about spam-tweets (“sweets”? “twamps”?)