Twitter is most informative and entertaining. I have found over 800 interesting people to "Follow" and, somehow I have over 400 "Followers" though I don't say much.
Our 23 Things guides have us look at Tweet Effect to see what we might have said to gain or lose followers.
My "Tweet Effect" says: "In the last 200 updates you had no changes in your follower numbers. Loyal readers, you have." Yoda!
Actually, since I subscribe to yet another such service, called Qwitter I know I lost 5 followers on Income Tax night with a cheery Tweet that common tax forms were outside the front door for the late and desperately taxed.
Tweet Viewers
It looks like there are several Twitter aids that help manage your Twitter displays. They require downloads. I wonder if viewing through these readers is as ponderously slow as Twitter itself has become. They look more heavily graphical so I am not sure it is a good thing to add anything in.
Betwittered has a nice blog page called 32 Hours that explains their service and Twitter itself.
Tweet Deck's display looks slick, dividing the screen into four columns, including one with Facebook freinds status so you can keep tabs 24/7.
I was installing this at home and doing so let me know that the application would give the software complete system access. "Unrestricted Access" was the term. I don't think a piece of software that organizes Twitter needs access to all of my files. So no Tweet Deck for me.
Mobile Twittering
Maybe ok if you're stuck in the airport or under the drill at the dentist's but otherwise...I picture this girl I saw driving down the road last week, head turned to the side thumbing her phone rather than watching the road even a little. Scary.
I looked at some of the other sites on the More Things site, but they aren't useful for my purposes. I have more followers than I need, and now I've reached my secret goal of 400, I'm going to start Tweeting one of these days and that might clear the decks faster than Tax Form notes!
In the meantime, here are the More Things "Do" and Blog about questions and answers.
1. Explore some different ways to view and post to Twitter. What works best for you and why? I did take a look at Tweet Deck and Betwittered, but they don't add enough to be useful, and that "unrestricted access" for Tweet Deck is a bad idea.
2. Have you made Twitter part of your social networking plan? Not really. Why or why not? It is more of an entertaining newsite for me so I don't feel it is a problem to miss anything that might fly by. So I am not getting it sent to my email or phone or anyplace but where it naturally resides. Have you integrated Twitter into any of your other socialmedia sites? Again no, I see it as a standalone application. What do you use it for? I have many interests and I find it relaxing to look through a few pages of updates now and then. That is it!
3. Choose several of the fun things, try them out, and use at least one of them as the basis for a blog post. Include something visual in your post as an example. See visuals above in this long long post.
4. Add your name to the Tweeter Directory and tell us more about it in your blog. I added myself under "bloggers" in the directory rather than in the librarian section because I have three blogs, all different and heaven forbid I should be pigeonholed.
5. Use one of the the alerting or scheduling tools for Twitter. How did it work for you? Can you see how this might be useful? I refuse!
6. Read this post from The Next Web and use it as a Blog Prompt to tell us where you are in the stages of Twitter. Interesting post. I am at stage two still, I think.
7. Here's a long list of what other people think Twitter is. What do you think Twitter is? Include this in your blog post about this thing. I think Twitter is a great place to get little bytes of information. I do think that for many who want to get the word out about themselves, this is a very easy to use, low tech way of doing it. The learning curve and tech saavy required is so minimal, and the potential for reaching a wide readership is phenomenal.
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