What is Twitter?

Twitter is an online service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Find out what Twitter is

Twitter is a real-time messaging system to broadcast short messages. It is a cross between blogging and instant messaging and social networking, and is also referred to as micro-blogging. You can stay right up to date with your field as it's more immediate than normal blogging.

Watch this video called Twitter in Plain English (from CommonCraft via YouTube)

The following article also explains how to use Twitter, so might be a good resource to review first:

• Newbie's guide to Twitter - Rafe Needleman, Webware, March 2007

Sign up for Twitter

Now sign up for a Twitter account:

• Go to www.twitter.com

1. Sign up for an account
2. You will need to have a username, and Twitter will first check to see if this is available
3. Once you are online, you can then edit your settings and include a photo
4. Your web twitter page is twitter.com/yourusername. This will display:
   • information about you as well as those people you are following (i.e. whose messages/tweets you are receiving) and your friends (those who are receiving your tweets). You have some control of the look of your twitter page too
   • your timeline (list of tweets) either just your own (Previous tab) or With Others

Send a tweet

• You can send a tweet from any of your registered devices (e.g. web browser, mobile phone, IM) but remember it can only be up to 140 characters long. You can choose whether you want your entries to be open or only available to the people you allow to see them.
• When you are on twitter.com, the input box looks like this - and you can see the characters count down from 140 as you type your message.

Follow someone

• To find out what someone is doing, you need to follow their tweets. Go to their twitter page, and click the Follow button below their image.
• If you are looking for people to follow:
  1. get twitter to search your contact list
  2. try typing in someone's name
  3. try the following people from the e-learning world:
     • DIrectory of Learning Professionals on Twitter
        
  4. try following some of the people who are following the people above.
  5. Try this site:
     • Who should I follow?
     
     "For some, Twitter may be just a bunch of noise. If that's the case, you're not following the right people." ReadWriteWeb, 13 April 2008

Notes:

• You can subscribe to the RSS feeds on your page to keep up to date with tweets from those you are following. (You could read the feeds in Firefox or Google Reader.)
• When someone follows you, you get an email telling you so - although you can of course turn emails off in your settings. [It seems to have become part of Tweet etiquette to follow someone when they follow you!]

Send a message to a specific person

• To direct a message at another person, this causes your message to save in their "replies" tab, use @username message e.g. @c4lpt thanks
• To send a person a private message that goes to their device, and saves in their web archive, use d username message e.g. d c4lpt thanks

For more Twitter commands, see The Official Twitter Commands

Add content to your tweets

If you are looking for something to twitter about, then here are two ways of adding content to your tweets:

1. Send your blog feed to your Twitter account.
   Go to www.twitterfeed.com and sign up for an account. You will then to provide the details of:

• your twitter account
• your blog's RSS feed
• how frequently your feed should be scanned

Entries are kept to 140 characters and the URL of the posting is shortened using tinyurl.com.

2. Include a poll
   PollDaddy provides a service to send a poll via Twitter. You can find out more at the PollDaddy Mini Tutorial.

Embed your Twitter feed on your blog or web page

Twitter provides a number of different types of badges to embed on your blog or web page. The badge you choose will depend upon if you can use Javascript on your site, or whether only Flash is allowed.

To get your badge, go to www.twitter.com/badges

Try out some other Twitter tools

If you like Twitter, you might enjoy some of these 3rd party applications:

• Twitter Applications List

Find out more about Twitter

Twitter ranked highly in our Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008. You can read the comments from the learning professionals who voted for it here:.

• Top 100 Tools for Learning : twitter

Consider how you could use Twitter for teaching, learning or performance support

Here are some ways people are using Twitter:

• Top 10 Uses of Twitter, Online Marketing Blog, 15 May 2008
• Twitter collaboration stories, Full Circle Associates

1. What do you think of Twitter?
2. Share your Twitter page with the other members of the Community.
3. How could you use Twitter within your organisation for learning or performance support?

Go to the 25Tools Community and add your thoughts to the Twitter Forum Discussion.

Read more about Twitter

• Twitter Reading List