Do You Twitter?

Monday, March 26th, 2007...6:13 am

Do You Twitter?

I joined Twitter the other day. It’s going to be huge.

Everyone has their own take on what Twitter is exactly but essentially it is a combination of microblogging and instant messaging.

You’ve only got 140 characters to get your thoughts out so you have to be succinct and to the point. But that’s the beauty of it. You don’t have to worry about grammar or composition. Just put it out there. It’s quite a liberating experience not being shackled by the need to reread, and edit, and second guess what I’m writing.

I’m not one to jump on the bandwagon but when people like Kottke and Jason Calacanis get excited about something then it makes me take notice. Even John Edwards is using Twitter.

Did I mention it’s going to be huge?

I’ve mentioned before that it is important to network. Making connections and forming relationships is key to building an awareness of your blog. Twitter is another great social tool you can use to network but for a blogger it can be much more than that.

Say you’ve built a network of friends on Twitter. Maybe a few hundred people. And you’ve just finished your latest blog post on whatever. Time to update Twitter. You write something like: “Just finished latest blog post on [insert topic here].” then you follow it up with a small description and a link to your post. You’ve just reached out to quite an audience and you can do it on a regular basis, and best of all it’s absolutely in the spirit of what Twitter is.

I can’t help but see the massive potential in this and that’s why I’ve joined. The earlier you get in on the action the sooner you’ll see the benefits, and when it’s popularity explodes you won’t feel left behind.

Here are a few other Twitter links you may want to check out.

A list of people with the most followers on Twitter.
Two plugins to post Twitter updates from your toolbar. Twitterbar and Tweetbar.
Windows Vista sidebar widget, and a dashboard widget for OSX.
Add a Twitter widget to your blog.
A wiki all about Twitter.

If any of you are already on Twitter or if you decide to join up you can find me here.

15 Comments

Filed under Blogging, Internet

Tags: blog, Blogging, im, instant-messaging, jason-calacanis, john-edwards, kottke, microblogging, networking, The-Web, twadget, tweetbar, twidget, twitter, twitterbar, widget

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15 Comments

Madhur Kapoor
March 26th, 2007 at 9:40 am

Nice info man , btw which plugin are you using to display random posts on the homepage .
dan
March 26th, 2007 at 9:58 am

Madhur are you talking about the ticker at the top of the page?

If so its called Zazz Post Ticker. It’s a nice little plugin.
George C.
March 26th, 2007 at 11:11 am

Hi! Good post. Thanks for sharing.
broc
March 26th, 2007 at 5:21 pm

i guess i’ll end up having to join this thing
The Man of Silver
March 27th, 2007 at 7:34 am

I’m still sitting on the fence on this one. Right now it just seems like one more time-waster I’m probably better off without (I’m still somewhat regretting recently jumping on the Facebook bandwagon … about 9 months after everyone else).

I’ll be curious to see if this sticks or becomes a fad and fades away.
broc
March 27th, 2007 at 9:56 am

made the account:
twitter.com/broc
RyanB
March 27th, 2007 at 7:59 pm

not too bad of write up. You didn’t link to my post lol. I don’t think Twitter was actually meant to be an IM client, but people started to naturally started talking to each other, they implemented it. If you think about it, the home page says to let others know what you are doing. “@{username}: aw that is so cute” isn’t really something you are doing… but “looking at pics of @{username}’s cute dog.” is…
Dave
March 27th, 2007 at 11:22 pm

I haven’t really looked really far into it, but my initial impression was who cares? I really could care less what people are doing every second of the day, nor do I have the time to update what I’m doing each and every second. Maybe it’s just me missing the Twitter bandwagon, but I don’t really get it.
dan
March 28th, 2007 at 1:12 am

Dave I can understand where your coming from but looking at it from the perspective of a blogger it can be a powerful promotional tool. Techcrunch and Google News are already on there doing exactly that.
Sean
March 29th, 2007 at 3:56 pm

ive been using Twitter and another service called Jaiku ( http://jaiku.com ) and i can honestly say that Jaiku is so much better than twitter, apart from the fact that twitter has a much larger user base at the moment. There are a few things i would like to see appear in Jaiku such as http://ibox-security.net/seanprice/blog/10-jaiku-features-i-would-like/ but i recommend any one that likes the idea of twitter should try jaiku.com out and while your there add me as a contact http://seanprice.jaiku.com
david
March 30th, 2007 at 4:33 am

hey dan,

thanks for the twitter add -> http://twitter.com/dlinsin !

regards, david
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May 7th, 2007 at 1:41 am

Just joined so I’m officially a twit.

From what I’ve been reading it could be a good way to get your message out to more people.
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