Tweet, Tweet, Yeah!

Twitter and Twitterific are changing the way I work the Web. If you have been under the same rock as me, you may not know what Twitter is. It's sort of like IM (instant messaging) except that it's more of a "party line" concept in that the messages or "tweets" go out to the whole world in a public stream by default and individuals whom you may or may not know can select to "follow" your tweets. If someone selects to follow you, you have the option to follow them, or not. This can be confusing sometimes, because I'll get a post from someone I follow and post a reply but they don't get it because they don't follow me. Adding "@" followed by the person's user name should deliver your reply to them, however.

Back to my statement. How has Twitter changed the way I work the Web? I'm a big fan of blogs and some of my favorite bloggers are also Twitters. This means that as the post new items to their blog, they tend to alert the Twittersphere. Plus, breaking news and random comments that don't make the blogs or show up much later sometimes spontaneously erupt on Twitter. Some people use Twitter to post where they are at any given moment, but this gets old pretty darn fast. For those with unlimited text messages on their cell phone plans, Twitter can be configured to forward selected Tweets to your phone and you can reply in the same way.

There are blogs, micro-blogs, and there's Twitter. Twitter messages are limited to 140 characters so you have to make your point with as few words as possible. Tweets often include links to other sites with full-blown articles, web sites, photos. You can turn on and off who you follow if they get annoying.

I recently watched streams of Chris Pirillo's Gnomedex conference online thanks to his Ustream.tv uplink. Twitter added an interesting "back channel" discussion to this conference as attendees posted their realtime reactions to the conference speakers on Twitter and shared comments not only with each other but with their "followers" at home as well. It made for a very interesting conference, both for the attendees and the followers.

Twitter appears to be going through some growing pains as it gains in popularity. The site is sometimes down for brief periods, or at least that has been my experience. Other alternatives to Twitter are popping up as well such as Jaiku and Pownce. I haven't tried those yet, so I can't really comment.

So that's been my experience on Twitter. What's yours? Please send me a comment or look me up on Twitter as Taxman45.