Just signed up for a Twitter account. The nice thing was that when we first registered the account, it politely told us that whatever funky username we chose would show up in our twitter url homepage. Obviously, we chose webdiggin, so accordingly our twitter page is http://twitter.com/webdiggin.
And then it politely told us that they could check to see if any of our friends already have a twitter account. It offered to check our email accounts to see if any of our friends wanted to come on board. Better yet, we could specifically invite some friends by inputting their email addresses to get this friendly mass mailing:
From: webdiggin
Subject: webdiggin wants to keep up with you on TwitterTo find out more about Twitter, visit the link below: …
Twitter is a unique approach to communication and networking based on the simple concept of status. What are you doing? What are your friends doing—right now? With Twitter, you may answer this question over SMS, IM, or the Web and the responses are shared between contacts.
We thought that perhaps our friends didn’t want to receive more spam in their lives… it took us a moment to find the skip button hiding in the top right corner.
Twitter then invited us to simply update our status and tell the world what we were doing. (Signing up for a twitter account.) So we did.
What to do now:
1. Tell us what you’re doing in the box above
2. Find some friends and follow what they’re doing
3. Turn on your mobile phone to update your friends on the go
And that’s it. Literally twitter reduces social networking sites like facebook to the current status line. What are you doing now? And in the same voyeuristic way that we like to see what other people are doing, you can click on the public timeline at the top right corner to see all of the updates from everybody. (I got stuck reading about Rachel Allen’s life. Apparently she’s fixing to do some presentation and is so nervous. She text messaged her status to twitter.)
Incredibly, you can set an RSS feed from your twitter account so people can get updates on their blogs or on their computers about your daily movements. I jest, but actually - this would have been a quick and easy way to update our current location on our travel blog. (You could just have a widget linked to your RSS feed).
Plus, you can add a badge on Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, and other platforms that allow you to use HTML or Flash. That way all of your little social networking buddies can have instantaneous updates of what you’re doing. A play-by-play of your life. (You can, by the way check a box in your settings that will protect your twitter updates: “Only let people whom I approve follow my updates. If this is checked, you WILL NOT be on the public timeline.” I think if you twit other people’s twitters, other people might be able to see your twitting history, but I’m not sure. (I think they call it tweets instead of twits when you update your status, but whatever.)
The only thing I can’t figure out is how to share badges or code from other social networking site on our twitter page. Twitter provides space for one website link from your twitter homepage. As for linking your MySpace and Facebook sites to your twitter sites, you might just have to insert an ugly html link in your twitter updates.
Bottom Line: Twitter has reduced social networking to your current status… and it’s still painfully interesting in a voyeuristic way. But can it boost the presence of your website? We’ll keep you posted.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading ...
Stumble It
Recent Comments