I enjoyed finding Twitter recently. I had known about it for some time, but couldn’t imagine why I would want to know what anyone was doing at any moment of the day. Then, one of our NLab partners, Vijay Riyait, posted his twitter profile url in his blog and I went to investigate.
My early experiences were a mixture of delight (so simple, so playful) and violent frustration (having learned how to do it, how do you engage)?
For anyone who hasn’t joined yet, Twitter has several easy neat things you can do. I'm just going to talk about two here:
Twitter asks you the question: “What are you doing?”
You can reply by posting a small message with up to 140 characters, including spaces.
You can find and follow other people. Others can also find and follow you.
I started by going to Vijay’s profile and adding myself as one of his followers. This means that Vijay’s miniposts will show up in the stream of posts on my page. Then I had a look to see if I knew anyone that Vijay was following. Sure enough, there was Sue Thomas and JP Rangaswami. I’ve been following JP’s blog about information, Confused of Calcutta, for about six months now.
I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to use Twitter, but it seemed to be about making and joining in conversations. I’ve been on Facebook for a while, and although it has some useful features (more about those in another post) I wasn’t engaging in conversations as I had expected.
Deep in my Facebook “friends” were people I had come into contact with through obscure or tenuous means because I was interested in knowing more about them and what they did - but it just hadn’t seemed to happen through Facebook.
One of these was Chris Hambly. Twitter seemed to offer new opportunities for creating links and conversations and sharing ideas with him. Sure enough, up popped Do You Fall for Buzz Words? helping me to think about social networking processes and skills.
If you’d like to try Twitter, follow me and I’ll follow you.
x-posted from Shani Lee
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