Saturday, May 17, 2008

All the world's a Twitter - join the conversation!

Hey there folks, it's been quite a while between posts, with Megan back at University studying full time, a busy work/family life, and Twitter, writing on my blogs has been affected. Not that I haven't been spending time online - there's plenty of good reason to do so, and Twitter is one of them.

Twitter? This site is increasingly becoming a daily port of call in my online travels. I joined this interesting social networking site a few months ago (hat tip to my mate Aaron Saikovski who first mentioned it to me over coffee late last year - Aaron will be presenting at the next SBTUG, and just announced he will be joining Microsoft from 4th July - congratulations Aaron.

I find Twitter fascinating because it connects me in to a "conversation" - you get to control who you listen to, talk to, and it happens in near real-time. If you "listen" to people you are interested in, it can yield great benefits - access to current breaking news, interesting links, and new connections with people across diverse geographies.

It reminds me of LinkedIn Answers but "turbo-charged" in that you're likely to get responses to a question in minutes rather than hours.

I recommend you visit http://www.twitter.com/ and create an account. Even before doing that, check out this post which provides an easy-to-read guide to Twitter.

For an even quicker overview of Twitter, check out the CommonCraft video below here.

Recently people have been talking about http://www.plurk.com/ - Plurk seems to be similar to Twitter, only more graphical in that it shows posts on a timeline, with categories for each post designed to show a posts intention or mood in greater clarity. One to watch for now - if anyone has tried it please let me know.