Don't be overwhelmed by Twitter. It's easy, it's fun and it's free. But...... what is it?People all over are twittering. WTF is twitter anyway? Most heavy duty techies and electronic device users know this, but still new to most of the world is this quickly rising phenomenon called "twittering", the verb that describes the use of the application called Twitter.Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that has changed the way many people communicate. Twitter allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, from their computer at home or work, or through a third-party application.Some see this as a way to simply report their 'status' to friends, some use it to post interesting links, some use it as a savvy marketing tool and still there are countless ways to utilize this real time quick messaging application.It's very easy to do. You just sign up (free registration), pick a user name (your site will be www.twitter.com/your name here), and you can 'design' your twitter home page by uploading an image or choosing web colors.
Well, you can search for other twitterers by using the search box or browse other twitter users and choose to 'follow' their tweets if you wish. You can make your tweets private or public and even send messages direct to other twitterers, as opposed to publicly posting yours.Once you've signed up on twitter, how do you best utilize this program? Well, as you can imagine, with the millions of tech people and web app creators out there, there's no shortage of twitter applications, add-ons and advice.Here are a few a newbie might find helpful:Twhirl-probably the most popular, it's a desktop twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform. Some of twhirl’s features:
Well, you can search for other twitterers by using the search box or browse other twitter users and choose to 'follow' their tweets if you wish. You can make your tweets private or public and even send messages direct to other twitterers, as opposed to publicly posting yours.Once you've signed up on twitter, how do you best utilize this program? Well, as you can imagine, with the millions of tech people and web app creators out there, there's no shortage of twitter applications, add-ons and advice.Here are a few a newbie might find helpful:Twhirl-probably the most popular, it's a desktop twitter client, based on the Adobe AIR platform. Some of twhirl’s features:
- runs on both Windows (2000/XP/Vista) and Mac OSX
- notifications on new tweets
- shorten long URLs (using snurl or is.gd)
- cross-post updates to Pownce and Jaiku
- post images to TwitPic
- search tweets (using TweetScan or terraminds)
- timeline filtering
- localized to English, German, Italian and Spanish
- color schemes
- automatically check for new versions
2. How To Use Twitter: Another video on instructions for using Twitter.
3. Twitter Tutorial: A tutorial for Twitter newbies.
4. Share YouTube videos on Twitter: A video showing how to share a video from YouTube.com to your Twitter account using MessageDance.
5. How to Configure Google Talk With Twitter: Since you can use Twitter with Jabber client, this videos show how to configure Google Talk to be used with Twitter.
6. Group Messaging with Twitter: This video shows how to use a project named Twitter Groups at JazzyChad website for group messaging.
7. Find Twitter Friends With Google: Locate your friends using advanced Google search. The video might be obsolete now with Twitter’s own search engine but Google still can give more relevant results.
8. Twitter for Lotus Notes: The video shows how to use Twitter with Lotus Notes.
9. Connect Utterz with Twitter: The video shows how to add connections in your Utterz account to Twitter.
10. Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts: This video demonstrates how to easily use and manage multiple Twitter accounts for different activities.
11. Twitter with Fring: Video showing how to update your Twitter status using Fring.
12. Twitter on iPhone: A video demonstration of Twitter iPhone application.
13. Using Twitter Within FireFox: This video shows how to use FireFox add-ons Twitbin and Twitterbar to post messages to your Twitter account.
Of course, in the time it's taken me to write this, there have probably been 20 more cool twitter apps created, but for now, this list will have to do.Here is an article titled "How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients"by Josh Catone that gives some pertinent info and data.
