Peg Kerr&#39;s Journal

It's useful for a few things other than "what are you doing right now," but it only gets really useful when all of your friends and/or just a lot of people are using it already. Ex:

- It's a better platform for liveblogging an event than a blog. My twitter was hopping during the debates, and I really enjoyed it - it was like watching it with all my friends across the country, without the frantic immediacy of a chatroom.

There were also some really cool tools put to this use during the election - you could create a page that would show whatever people were twittering that included certain words, like "Joe the Plumber" or "McCain" or "Obama". This could be done with blog posts, but Twitter is remarkably well suited to it because you can take in a 140-character message at a glance. So, while I wouldn't want to read 50 blog posts that all used the word "McCain," I could easily read 50 Twitters and get a sense of what a sample of the debate-watching population was thinking at that moment.

- It takes care of all the crap that I hate seeing in my LiveJournal ("I'm eating a PB&J!") and I expect that on Twitter. So things can be posted to LJ, then, that have some actual content.

- There are cell phone clients that let you see what everyone who is physically near you is twittering. This is my favorite use of twitter, because it allows people to connect with strangers who have similar interests to them as organized by place. This is aided by the fact that you can twitter "@soandso" which will make your twitter appear in their feed, even if they haven't friended you.

My favorite story about this geographically oriented use of Twitter is: I was sitting in a pub in Cambridge, MA, a city to which I had just moved. I was checking my iPhone while I waited to order. A person I didn't know walked by outside and saw me doing it, then decided to check if I was on Twitter. He found me by my profile photo and Twittered a menu suggestion to me. I felt like "the future is now!"

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dd-b.livejournal.com

Okay, that last is a cool story.

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Thank you! :D

This is actually one of the things that I'm really trying to evangelize to people, because I think there are a lot of new media tools where it's hard to see the awesome until you're already totally immersed in it (much like LJ, when you think about it...)

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What app is that? I want it! How cool!

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Twitterific on the iPhone. It changed my LIFE.

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I use AirMe to post photos, and usually just use Safari to post regular tweets. I'm downloading Twitterific right now!

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I think it lets you post photos too. :)

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Did you read about the American student who was arrested in Egypt, twittered that he was arrested, and his parents and school immediately started working on getting him out? He'd have been lost in the system for weeks or months without twitter.

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I had!!

I feel like I want to make a post about Twitter now: what it is and why you should bother.

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folk.livejournal.com

Do it!

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I'm going to! As soon as I can. *develops in brain*

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nmalfoy.livejournal.com

Please do... I'm intrigued.

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dd-b.livejournal.com

See, to me LJ is a poor substitute for Usenet, which most of my friends have moved away from. It has some awesome, but a lot of it didn't make the move.

Personally, I'm evangelizing reading people via RSS feed, so that you don't have to get all your friends to congregate in one "place".

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I already do that, but there are some problems that blogs have to overcome:

1. threaded comments are rare in blogs and they're extremely useful.
2. openID is, I suppose, okay but
3. LJ has way less spam than a separately hosted blog.

I have a real love/hate relationship with LJ, so.

I'm too young to really remember Usenet - I moved to LJ from Yahoo!Groups and similar discussion lists.

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I should add that I twitter at http://twitter.com/flourish if people want to look at my tweets to see some of the kind of thing that one might put up.

Within the past two days I've used it for professional development (discovering an online community for folks in my line & finding out that a website had launched within minutes) and for holding a NaNoWriMo word war with someone who I met through twitter.

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althea_valara

This explains it really well.

A lot of people have been saying it's for sending updates from a cellphone. You CAN do that, but 99% of my updates are done via the web interface.

I love Twitter. It actually has allowed me to be in closer contact with friends--and make new ones, too. Tweets can be read quickly, and they're just as quick to respond to.

Twitter is the fastest way to get news, IMO. I'm following @BreakingNewsOn, and it's from them that I first heard about the Georgia/Russia conflict and all the earthquakes in Asia. Also, like

flourish said, it's fun to watch the trending topics on search.twitter.com and see what everyone's talking about. For instance, during the election people were tweeting wait times at their local precincts and reporting problems with voting machines.

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schnoogle.livejournal.com

Very short blog posts, comments and personal messages all in one. Good for portability because it can work through text messaging. It's a way of never being out of contact. ^^ It's probably best to find a few friends who use it and looking at their Twitters to really understand it.

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ajodasso.livejournal.com

From one dumb-ass to another, I have no idea. But everybody seems to be doing it!

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tassie-gal.livejournal.com

Ditto that - it seems especially prevelent in the 25-30 age group....

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dd-b.livejournal.com

For values of "everybody" that look a lot like "one person I know".

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aome.livejournal.com

From one uninformed person to another, it appears to be a means of updating through your cell phone. You type in what you're doing at any given moment, and then it can post a collective "What I did today" post on LJ for you, with all those updates together. But I have to say, I'm not that interested in either doing it or reading it - it's weird to have this shorthand random list of things with no real explanation or elaboration. I suppose it saves time from having to recollect everything later, though. And if it works for YOU, to look back on as a summary of your day, then I suppose it has value for that alone.

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I twitter, though I know I'm not the best example of use of the technology.

For me, a twitter is something that doesn't quite warrant a weblog entry, that I want to tell people. Um. In 140 characters. I can follow my real-life and weblogging friends and get short updates from them in between actual entries, and I've found lots of people to follow who I never knew before.

Lots of times, a twitter is a link to a full-length article or post on a topic of interest, so in that context, it's a way of broadcasting interesting information. Other times, people use it to tell you where they are rightthisveryminute or what they had for breakfast. It runs the gamut, but just as there are those who very effectively use weblogs as a medium, and those who fill it up with drivel, there are twitterers of substance, and twitterers not of substance. It's a matter of finding the good ones.

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Yes, exactly. I use Twitter, and I don't do it to say, "At Taco Bell," or, "Just had coffee," or boring things like that. My friends don't care that I just had coffee; that's not interesting. I use it to post a thought I just had, or a weird thing I just saw. You can also use it to communicate directly with your friends who are also on Twitter, like texting them but through the website.

So, I can look back through my posts and reconstruct days I've had, thoughts, conversations, etc. My friends and I use it to make plans with each other, talk during work, and just generally stay on top of what everyone's up to. I resisted for ages because I thought it would be creepy to have people know what I'm doing every moment of every day, but now that I'm a convert I see that it doesn't have to be like that if you don't want it to.

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Agreed!

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And I love posting photos too. For instance, when I went to vote the line went out the building and all the way around the corner. Instead of describing it, all I had to do was take a picture with my phone and upload that to Twitter, and everyone could see what I was seeing at that moment. My cousin twitters photos of her baby when she's doing something especially cute, and it makes me glad because they live so far away, but I feel like I get to see her every day.

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http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

Yeah, absolutely - and in those cases you can lock your twitter posts, so only your friends can see them.

It gives you 1. a sense of immediacy unrivaled by blogs but also 2. an ability to put off viewing posts until you have a free moment (unlike IM or a chat room).

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jbru.livejournal.com

(deleted comment)

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You might want to delete this, hon ;)

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already did!

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*facepalm*

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*pets*

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Oops. Try this again.

Thanks, that was helpful.

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huladavid.livejournal.com

Twitter is da sound da birdies make.

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skg.livejournal.com

I'm glad you asked because I have only a vague idea myself, and this is very helpful!!

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swords-and-pens.livejournal.com

Digital over-sharing of the mundane (but that's just my take on it :).

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Oops. Try that again.

Yeah, I don't think I need to be quite that plugged in myself.

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swords-and-pens.livejournal.com

Pretty much. I don't even have the data package on my phone because, honestly, I am either around a computer or laptop enough that the added connectivity just isn't worth the added cost. I only got my smart phone for organizing my calendar, etc.

Someday I suspect I will cave and get connected at that level, but for right now, it just isn't worth the cost-to-cool factor.

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tartpants.livejournal.com

Eh, as much as people seem to be in favor of it in these comments, I was once signed up to twitter and was driven crazy by the pointless messages I got all day from my friends. "I'm drinking coffee, yay!" and "I'm bored." I'm sure it has its uses but I didn't get a thing out of it.

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cloudscudding.livejournal.com

There's a good article here about Twitter: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/media/magazine/15-07/st_thompson

What I like best about Twitter is that it lets me sum up all the little neat links or random interesting things or small comments about how I'm doing during the day into one LJ post, using LoudTwitter. This is also what some people hate most about Twitter, because then you get the "I bought pants," "I'm going to Taco bell" summary posts on your LJ friends page.

One of the bad things (for me) about Twitter is that it no longer lets you get updates IMed to you (instead of text messages on your cell). You call still IM in updates using other clients, though.

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folk.livejournal.com

Okay, I just got sucked back into Twitter, so here's a slightly skeptical view.

Twitter is a cross between a blog and a chat room where you choose whose posts you read, with a 140 character limit.

It may seem inane at first, but I actually like hearing about the things that people are up to. There's a thing where you can do @username and it will link back to that person's Twitter, or #subject and you can see all posts on that. So, I can type @flourish Hey, I loved that post on Alternity, awesome job or Evil Republicans denied me my right to vote #vote08.

But, really, as with all social networking apps, try it out and see whether it's for you.

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minnehaha.livejournal.com

Did that get any clearer for you, Peg? I'm as much in the dark as I ever was.

I see people publish their twitters for the day in LJ and I have the idea that this happens automatically. But! Do these originate on their phones or on their computers or both or either? Do they "subscribe" to other people? Is the subscription sent to a web page, to your phone or both or either? Do you have to see everything twice if you get the subscription on your phone but then also look at the web page?

To me, "instruct the Luddite" means describe how to make this work, including both "why" and "how". Most people have described the "why" more or less. And you're pretty clever at figuring stuff out, so if you're asking for help, it must be confusing.

Me, I haven't any idea about this stuff, or else I'd answer your question.

K.

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wintersweet.livejournal.com

>Do these originate on their phones or on their computers or both or either?

Whichever you want. I just use it on the computer because I'm on my laptop all the time, but I think you can set it up so that you use it on the phone when you're out and about, and then it switches to the computer when you log on there. On the computer, you can use it through a client or through the website (kind of annoying, just as it's easier to post to LJ through a client).

> Do they "subscribe" to other people?

Yes, you "follow" other users.

> Is the subscription sent to a web page, to your phone or both or either?

Both or either, whichever. Or to a client. You can even customize things, I think, so that you only get messages from certain people on your phone, but from everybody on your computer.

> Do you have to see everything twice if you get the subscription on your phone but then also look at the web page?

Someone who uses it on a phone should answer this, not me. :) But I think once you've viewed messages, they're marked as read, so they won't come up as new messages.

http://help.twitter.com/index.php?pg=kb.page&id=26
has a fair amount of this info, though a lot of it doesn't really makes sense till you start using it.

I guess that was clear as mud. :)

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laurel

Twitter is a website that you can think of like Livejournal or Blogger or something like that. People can create accounts there for free, just as on LJ. And then you can post to your twitter account and your posts show up on your twitter page. My main twitter account/page is windowseat.

To post there, I can do that from the twitter website in a little text box there or I can use a twitter client (on the Mac, I use Twitterrific). (Just like on Livejournal-- you can post to your journal on the website or you can use client software.) You can also configure your Twitter account so you can post updates from your cell phone or from an instant messaging client.

When you have a Twitter account, you can also select people you would like to "follow" and then all of the stuff posted by those folks to their twitter accounts is aggregated on a single page (yes, it's very much like looking at your friend's page on LJ). You can also read the people you follow in a Twitter client or as a feed.

Posts to twitter can only be up to 140 characters long-- the shortness is by design so that you can post/read messages on a cell phone and also because it's meant for quick comments or questions.

You can make your Twitter page/account a protected one so that only the folks you approve can "follow" you. It's all or nothing there, really, unlike LJ. Your updates are either all private (so only approved folks can see them) or public.

You can direct replies at people on Twitter. Since my Twitter account is windowseat, if a message someone posts starts with @windowseat than it's directed at me, usually in reply to something I said. Everyone can see it, though you can choose to only see posts made by folks you follow that aren't directed at anyone in particular and are directed at folks you also follow. You can see everything people post, but it can be a bit like seeing only half of a conversation if you don't follow the same people.

There is also the option of "direct messages" where you send a message and only the recipient will see it and it's not at all public. I use that when I need to tell someone something that really isn't of interest to anyone else who follows me (or them).

The posts of Twitter stuff to Livejournal are handled by separate services and sites that people built. All sorts of websites and bits of software have been created that hook into the Twitter API to do interesting things with the data. I use a service called Loudtwitter to ship a day's worth of my tweets to

laurel_twit. That's the service most folks are using to post their twitter stuff to Livejournal. (Since there's an RSS feed for my twitter account, I also created that feed on Livejournal as

windowseat_twit but I think the output is kinda ugly.)

I use a plug-in for Wordpress (blogging software) to automatically post to my tvpicks twitter account whenever a new edition of my TV picks is posted.

People use twitter in all sorts of interesting (and silly and strange) ways.

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laurel

How do I use twitter? What's it like for me?

Most of the time I read the folks I follow on Twitter and make my posts to twitter using Mac client software called Twitterrific. It's free, though you can pay $15 to get rid of the little non-annoying (IMHO) ads and I've done that for all my Macs. There's also a version for the iPhone that incorporates some other nifty features (like being able to see tweets from folks who are near you geographically).

The little tiny icon for the program sits in the top bar on my screen (menu bar, up where the clock is and other little icons). I can click on it and have a window pop up that shows the latest tweets from folks I follow. I hit the space bar to advance to read unread tweets. It's easy to breeze through these messages because they're short and my friends names or twitter account names are by them along with whatever icon they choose.

You can set the software so it checks for new messages as often as every three minutes or less frequently (every 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, half hour, one hour). You can set the software to pop up the window with new messages or alert you with a sound or you can just choose to look at messages whenever you feel like it. I leave my twitterific window in one of the "spaces" in Leopard and use a keystroke to switch to that space when I want to read or post twitter stuff.

You can click on any web links people post and it will open your browser to that page. It only takes a click to reply to a person publicly or privately. There's a little text box where you can enter your own posts easily enough.

I like the realtime aspect of it-- seeing what my friends are on about as they go about their days. There are times when I don't have time to follow what's going on, but no one really expects people to read everything on twitter or go back if they fall behind or aren't around.

It's a bit like instant messaging, but on a broadcast basis. Less real-time than instant messages or a chat room and there's no need to feel like you have to say "hello" and "goodbye"-- you just say something if you have something to contribute or that's on your mind and wander off if you get busy.

Most people I follow post funny things. Or links to interesting stuff they encounter. Commentary on what's going on that day (for just them or inthe world at large). Yes, sometimes people post about where they went for dinner or the errands they run, but most people talk about things other than just what they're doing. I've been terribly boring of late and I'm talking about the weather, but then I'm a Minnesotan.

It was fun to watch people all over the world reacting to stuff on election night as results rolled in. Twitter is always where I hear breaking news first (usually before it hits any news sites) and it's astounding to see how fast news travels over twitter. The last time there was an earthquake in California, I saw dozens of posts from folks as it happened.

It's great for figuring out what people are up to. Makes it easy to meet up with friends or strangers if you want to. Or if you have a question and post it, you usually get an answer from someone who follows you right away.

I don't usually use it on my cell phone, but can see how awesome it would be for meeting up when out and about if other friends use it that way. Rather than texting an individual, you'd text "hey, I'm heading over to Kieran's" or whatever and your friends would all get the message. Well, all who follow and are reading at that time. (I have a separate private twitter account for stuff like that actually, as I don't really want *everyone* to be able to stalk me!)

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thenines.livejournal.com

I actually made a presentation today about Twitter and it's uses, to my colleagues nationwide. I'll leave a longer comment from laptop later, but if you'd like to read a bit, my preliminary notes for today's meeting are on my blog (posted last Saturday) at <a href="http://utterings.wordpress.com>wordpress</a>. Have fun tweeting! (My handle is utterings, if you want to check out some tweets.)

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minnehaha.livejournal.com

Twitter is to LiveJournal as SMS or IM is to e-mail.

B

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