Twitter

As you may have noticed, all of the date/timestamps on my blogs have disappeared. I don't know why, and I can't figure out how to get them back. They're still checked correctly in my settings/layout, so no idea. I'll get my husband to look at the html later and see if he can figure it out.

Anyway, on to today's topic. It's Twitter.

Twitter is yet another social networking tool. But it's pretty streamlined. No lists of favorite movies or birthdays to remember. Your profile is pretty much your name, location, a pic, a website, and a sentence about yourself. What it is that you frequently update is your status. It defaults by suggesting you write about "what you're doing" but many people add in links to news articles, write about songs on the radio or books that they're reading, or quotes that they've heard. You can follow certain people so that their updates (known as tweets) show up on your page (think Facebook's old-school wall). The catch? you only have 140 characters. :)

Your username gets an '@' in front of it, and that's how people refer to you. For instance, I'm @AmyKB. When you write a tweet and want to reference someone, using the @ will make it act as a reply to that person. So you can respond to tweets this way, or even through direct message (which don't go out to everyone like the @ messages do).

There are a ton of applications to make it more user-friendly, for your iphone or firefox, and you can even update via text message from your cell phone. You can link them, as my twitter status shows up here on my blog (and on my other blog) and my facebook. Lots of famous people are on twitter, including the Dalai Lama (@OHHDLInfo). I've found a bunch of friends to follow, as well as people I admire (like those who are developers of my favorite online game). You can also find people tweeting about a specific topic, marked by hashes, like #election or #SF (for San Francisco).

It's not something for everyone, and if you stop paying attention to it, you could quite possibly forget about it and that'll be it. My husband has been on it for probably close to a year by now, and I joined up last summer, just before "conference season." I would totally recommend it to anyone. If you haven't heard of it, I'm not sure what rock you've been under. We're already at the point where there are regional "tweet-ups" and "twestivals" (of which there was one in Mountain View just last night, and one in Charlotte last week), and it is doing a fair job of taking over some attention from various organizations. Several universities and even some K-12 schools have implemented Twitter for various purposes. It's pretty awesome when you think about it that way.

it's twitter.com if you want to check it out!