Thing 12: Twitter

He rocks in the treetops all day long
Hoppin’ and a-boppin’ and a-singing his song
All the little birds on Jaybird Street
Love to hear the robin go tweet tweet tweet.
--Rockin’ Robin (Jimmie Thomas and Leon Rene, songwriters)

Twitter. It’s a pretty simple concept. Keep your social circle updated on what you’re doing in under 140 characters, using your mobile device (phone, PDA, etc.), instant messenger, or the Twitter website.

It’s a lot like Facebook’s “What’s on your mind?” feature, only Twitter asks “What are you doing?”

For this Thing, you will need to create a Twitter account at twitter.com. Twitter, like other services, will ask you to submit the password to your email account so it can find out if your friends are already on Twitter. Again…not advisable. You can find your friends on Twitter later without giving Twitter access to your e-mail account. There's a "Skip this step" link at the bottom of the page to bypass giving your e-mail account password.

If you receive Twitter messages (“tweets”) from someone, you are “following” them. If they read your tweets, they’re your follower. We all need someone to listen to our song, right?

Once you get your account set up, find some Twitter users to follow. I highly recommend reading the Twitter help page to get acquainted with some of the hidden Twitter features.

One technique that is quite valuable in sorting through the array of information available on Twitter is using hashtags to follow discussions. Hashtags are the number sign (#) followed by a word or phrase. These are not standardized and are assigned by Twitter users. So you may hear that tweets related to ALA’s annual conference next year are being “hashtagged” with #ALA2009. That just means that somewhere in the tweet, the tweeter has inserted “#ALA2009” so that all of the tweets about that particular subject can be found by searching for that phrase. Try it and see.

Write a blog post with your thoughts about Twitter and, if you want to, give your Twitter account name so other NT23 participants can follow you. Also in your blog post, try to remember the last time you heard about Twitter (it’s everywhere) before reading this Thing and tell everyone where that was.