If asked the question “do you have a Twitter account?” most people’s answer would probably be yes. Ask the question “what do you use it for?”, and many people have no idea. Until very recently (just before I decided to try out blogging in fact) I thought that it was a big waste of time, however I’ve seen the light (yeah I know I’m about a year late – leave me alone, I’m special!). Please remember that I’m still relatively new to Twitter, so if you think I’ve got the wrong idea about something please feel free to tell me what you think in the comments.
For those of you that have heard of Twitter but don’t really know what it is, you essentially have an username and the ability to ‘tweet’ a 140 character long post – yep, thats it! These tweets are somewhat like a Facebook ’status’, however many people use them to highlight new articles for blogs (like we do!), report on news, current trends etc. You then have the ability to follow someone you think has something worthwhile to say and obviously others can do likewise to you.
What put me off for such a long time is that an awful lot of people don’t use twitter ‘properly’ – well at least what I now view as properly. For the longest time I was looking at accounts following maybe 1000 people and being followed by similar – and it seemed a little silly. How on earth are you meant to keep up with what everyone is saying, especially if those people update their feeds 10 times a day? To this day I still don’t see the benefit, I like to follow a select few people so that when I check Twitter I get the information I want. This tends to be feeds of tech sites, good friends etc. For those of you that do follow thousands of people please tell me why, I’d love to know! Surely you can’t be interested in what that many people have to say,anyway unless you’re permanently reading – I don’t see how you could keep up with them… without overlooking something good anyway.
For me the the strongest case for Twitter is the fact that its real time, something I didn’t think about when I first tried the service. As I’m sure you know Google isn’t exactly up to date, in fact it tends to work the wrong way around with old articles coming higher up the list. This tends to be due to the fact that an old article has had more time to be indexed, gain back-links etc. All the things a search engine like Google looks for when deciding on the placement of a site for a certain search. You can put filters on to display more recent news but still, Google doesn’t refresh what it knows about a site or subject every second, day or even week in some cases. For instance, if you look at what it has ‘cached’ (essentially what it knows) about Gizunk at the moment you’ll notice that it still shows the old design. This is fine for general information but if you’re looking for breaking news Twitter is certainly the place to go.
There’re a couple of ways to sift through the huge amount of tweets, one is to take advantage of ‘hash-tagging’. By putting a # in front of a keyword you think defines the post, you can effectively post to a topic. The front page of Twitter then shows the most talked about topics, you can then click on it to see a constantly updating stream of information. Your other option is to use their search box (the search results are now features on Google and Bing as well). In my opinion this is more useful if you have something specific you want to find out about.
So that’s about all I know about Twitter at the moment but it’s definitely something I wish to research further. What are your experiences with Twitter, or were you like me and didn’t think it was worthwhile, have I helped to change you mind? Let me know plus any tips or suggestions you have for me when it comes to using Twitter in the comments below
P.s Make sure you follow us!
Tags: tweet, twitter, what is twitter
Posted under Internet, Reviews, Tutorials
