It’s the Friday between Christmas and New Year’s in newsrooms all over the world, and apparently, everyone’s reading Romenesko, clicking through on the link to a post by Howard Owens (full disclosure, y’all: he’s my boss), and jamming on his link tagging me as a Twit-vangelist.
So, here are a few places to start if you want to know what Twitter is all about:
- Social media guy Dan York on “The 10 ways I learned to use Twitter in 2007” (found via Zac Echola’s delicious links)
- My own Twitter-related posts on this here blog you’re reading now.
- My own Delicious bookmarks related to Twitter.
- Web strategist Jeremiah Owyang’s “Some conversations have shifted to Twitter”
- Search Google Blogsearch for recent posts about Twitter. Today you’ll find a lot of talk about how news of the Bhutto assassination spread on Twitter yesterday. (Hint: Early adopters now check their Twitter streams in the morning before they check your news site.)
The most important thing you can do to learn about Twitter is to sign up now. Come on in and play, the water’s fine. I’ll be your first friend. Even better, sign up, then leave a comment here with a link to your profile. (http://twitter.com/username)
Comments
4 responses to “What’s this new Twitter thing I keep hearing about?”
I started my twitter account a couple of months ago and ended it in a week. It feels like spam, all this vast amount of useless, superficial information. Did you just start a twitter account, because I’m interested to see your reactions to it.
I started a twitter account earlier in the year while it was all the rage at SXSW and didn’t see the value in it. Then I came back to it a few months ago and really took the time to figure out how to cancel out the noise and make it useful to me.
I use it to post to my tumblelog, update my facebook status and chat asynchronously about a wide range of topics. I occassionally follow breaking news with it too.
But I can easily see how it’s not for everybody.
You can find me at http://twitter.com/zacechola
It is amusing to me to look at how the online conversation and status updates have evolved.
For instance, I used to have a .plan, back when I was involved in game dev work. I’m not that old, either, but I guess it’s that old *nix user soul in me (*BSDs for servers, Slackware for hybrids and rock-solid workstations, Ubuntu for the desktop). I always liked the simple delivery of it – just toss a little finger to the right number, and you had your update.
(PS: for those of you who don’t know the history of the .plan, scroll down on this article: http://tinyurl.com/yo392m )
-WFL
Btw – http://twitter.com/wfl
-WFL