Twitter.com what is it and how do I use it

Wed, 03/04/2009 - 19:32 — pdjohnson

Suddenly everyone is talking about Twitter. Seem a lot of people dont quite get it so here are a few pointers on what it's all about.

Your twitter page consists of a stream of short 140 character tweets. You might use it like you do your facebook status "Paul is watching the big game with his mates". Howevever there is more to it than that.

Introducing the hash tag

Before too long you will notice a few users having tweets with strange # characters, this is the hash key. For example #Obama . What this does is enable Twitter to use this 'hash tag' to group similar tweets together. Searching on Twitter for #obama will return all recent posts having that hash tag contained. Simple really when you know how.

Referencing other users

By including @pdjohnson in your Tweet you are making a clickable link to a Twitter user pdjohnson. This means you can quote another user, pay them a complement and other users Reading the tweet can click and go view that users profile or posts.

Inserting web links into a tweet

With just 140 characters to play with, putting a web link into a tweet might seem to use too many valuable characters. Fortunately there are ways to shorten web links using services like Http://www.tinyurl.com. You simply provide them with your long URL into a form, they then generate a short version (an alias) of it which passes through their servers in order to reach the web link. All you do is copy and paste the short web link into your Tweet.

Twitter Applications

For many the Twitted web site is a little clunky and does not deliver the richest interface to Twitter. Fortunately there are a host of superb Applications freely downloadable from the Twitter web site Apps Section.

These include Twitteriffic, Spaz and Blogo. My favourite desktop application is Tweetdeck which allows any twitter addict to keep updated and write tweets far more effectively than via twitter.com. For instance it offers integrated web link shortening services, live searches with alerts, response and friends lists plus much more. Destroy Twitter and Tweetie are superb desktop applications for power users.

Tweeting on the iPhone

Several applications like Twitteriffic and tweetie have be launched for the iPhone. Whilst free versions are available the more advanced features of paid apps like Tweetie are well worth the money.