Twitter

The big talk of the web lately seems to be Twitter. I have been using Twitter for about a year or should I say that I have been following Twitter for about a year. Just recently I have had some friends finally join me on the site and I have discoverd just how much fun Twitter can be when you have friends using it.

If you haven't seen Twitter (www.twitter.com) it is a social networking site that limits you to 140 characters per post. I had never thought of it but when my friend Mike pointed it out it made total sense---Twitter is just like being able to chat with a whole bunch of people. And the posts just stay there. It's kind of a combination of chat and e-mail. Chat because you can post whenever you want and carry on a conversation with a number of people and e-mail because you don't have to have the other people you are chatting with online to leave them a message. You can just post it and they will see it later.

And I have enjoyed Twitter a whole bunch more since I got TweetDeck, a fine piece of software that allows me to follow Twitter in a separate application and Twitterific on my iPhone. With TweetDeck I get an instant notification when someone posts an update (called Tweets) as opposed to accessing Twitter on the web where I have to refresh every time I want to see if someone else has updated.

One of my favorite things about Twitter is that it limits you to typing only 140 characters per post. It does two things. I think it makes me a better writer because I have to rework a single sentence or two to make it say what I want it to say in a small amount of space. The other reason is that it is much more like a conversation. I think that people who don't like it (like someone I know) are not used to chatting where you usually post even less than that.

One of the things you do with Twitter is follow people. Once you "follow" them then you see all their updates. That's another thing I like about TweetDeck. It lets me separate the different groups of people I follow. And I follow quite a few. I have heard of people who follow more than 100 tweeters. I don't know how you would do that because I have a hard enough time following the 45 or so I follow. So in TweetDeck I have a column called Friends which are all the people I follow. All 45 of them. And there is a column called Mates where I only follow Kathleen, Mike, Bob, Judy and Carol if she would come back to Twitter.

Who do I follow besides my close friends? Most are members of the greater Macintosh community. Lesa and Shawn King who run Your Mac Life as well as Sly who also keeps YML going. I also follow some national tech gurus most notably David Pogue of the NY Times and Andy Inatko of the Chicago Sun Times. Both are truly funny tweeters.

Kathleen and I both follow Heather and John Armstrong who run dooce.com
It is our favorite blog and Heather's infrequent tweets are hilarious and usually something that her daugther Leta has said.

Lastly I also follow a news feed that updates breaking news in less than 140 characters with links to updates if you want to know more. It really makes me feel like I am in touch with the world all day.

One of the things I have noticed of late is that Twitter goes down fairly often. I think that is because it is the new "thing." Which brings me to a comment I recently saw online. That baby boomers (that would be people of my generation) are taking over a lot stuff on the web that used to be the balliwick of younger generations. Things like MySpace, Facebook and now Twitter. I love that. I love taking back the web. See the big smile on my face?

Twitter would be down right perfect if we could get the sixth member of our mates to post and follow along as well but she doesn't like the limitations of 140 characers. I hope she takes on the challenge and jumps in with the rest of us.