Twitter isn’t new by any means. It’s new in the sense that it’s finally branching out from just the “in the know” people, to mainstream online users. MySpace is bloated with spam, and runs like crap. Facebook is cool, but the applications drive me crazy.
The whole point of these web sites is to find out what your friends are doing. That’s solely the purpose of Twitter. No annoying advertisments, no spam, no “applications”, no groups, no popularity contests – just simple, to the point status updates.
So How’s It Work?
It’s couldn’t be easier. You set up an account at Twitter.com. Upon signing up, you can search your e-mail contacts for friends who may also have a Twitter account. If none are found, you can e-mail them from Twitter and invite them to join the party!
If you do find someone you know, you can choose to “Follow” them. This is the equivalent of adding “Friends” on Facebook and MySpace. Now you will have a feed of all your friends’ status updates, and you will also be added to their feed.
So What Makes It Special?
Twitter is cool on it’s default settings, but it really hits it’s stride when you dig in a little deeper. The first thing to do is set up “Devices”. This also couldn’t be any easier. You simply give Twitter your phone number, and it will send you a text. When you reply, your phone, or device, is now “Active”.
So what’s this mean? This means you can send a text message from your phone to “40404″, and it will instantly update your Twitter account.
It also means you can choose to receive text message alerts every time a friend updates their Twitter account. To prevent you from receiving constant text messages, you can choose individual friends to receive alerts from, and you can also turn off alerts during certain hours of the day.
Digging Even Deeper…
So what if you have accounts on Twitter and Facebook? By adding the “Twitter Facebook App“, you can send a text update to Twitter at “40404″, then your Facebook will instantly change your status to your new Twitter post. MySpace has this functionality, but it’s currently only working in reverse. Meaning, you have to update your MySpace status, which will then update your Twitter and Facebook. I’m expecting this will change very soon.
If you have a WordPress blog, like yours truly, you can add even more functionality. By using the plugin “twitterDash“, you can view, and update your Twitter feed (and on down the line to Facebook…) directly from your Dashboard.
See that little “What I’m Doing” box on top of my blog menu? That’s another Wordpress plugin called “Twitter Javascript Widget”. This one pulls my Twitter updates every 15 minutes, and posts them on my blog sidebar. I can even have individual blog posts created for each Twitter, but I choose not to.
Summary
So here’s what happens. A couple days ago I was Urban Golfing at a friend of mines. I felt the need to spread the word. So I sent a text to ‘40404′ with “Urban Golfing at Karl’s house, stop by if you wanna get your ass kicked.” It instantly updated my Twitter account, texted everyone “following” me with text updates, updated my Facebook status to reflect my Twitter post, posted to my TwitterDash, and then posted to my blog side bar – all with one text message! In the future this will also include updating my MySpace, but as of right now, without doing some major work arounds, that’s not possible.
I highly suggest you give Twitter a test run! I made one a few months ago and never used it, just recently I decided to dig in and it completely blew me away! Make a account at Twitter.Com, then follow me at Twitter.com/djmac14!
Tags: Life, Networking, Web
