the little birdies twittering in the trees

Technology happens in this day and age. It moves forward relentlessly as hungry people engorged by the thought that ‘there is money in them thar tubes’ write ever more code, powering new and oblique technologies to bring people onto their web sites. Some of the applications try to help people like donorschoose.com while others are just trying to create some type of experience that will keep people coming back and attract more people month after month. Some web sites like myspace or facebook do this under the guise of ‘bringing people together’. Lately we have been using one of these web sites to vom our most important thoughts on the internet. This web site is twitter.com.

Have you heard of it? If you haven’t, go ahead and take a look at it, I’ll be waiting right here for you. Did you look at it? Did you think ‘what the hell does this do?’ or ‘why would people waste their precious time on this?’. Welcome to the club. Actually, no, I’m not in that club. I’m in the club that has glommed onto the service like a barnacle on a whale. More than year ago I read about twitter on a microsite run by the venerable Andre Torrez. (I don’t know him, but I’ve found his site to be a nice source of dependable good links. So good that it lives on my bloglines reader.) I didn’t really get it, but I signed up for the service. Days or weeks later, I goaded my brother and fellow organic mutant into signing up and if you go back far enough in the timeline you’ll see we fooled around with it intermittently, but it didn’t really ’stick’ at first.

Weeks or months later one or another of Rick’s compadres at the bank signed up and started tweeting (yup, that’s what we call it, but the official terminology is ‘twittering’. (I say Blech on that term)). Suddenly, there was more to read and more connection and more direct messaging and more friending and following…o, wait lost myself for a moment, I just remembered you might be wondering ‘what the heck?’. Suffice it to say that until you sign up for the service, there’s not a lot to get. To someone without an account the twitter homepage looks pretty stale. If you use the search bar and look up people you know or people whose blogs you read, you find individual feeds. This is one aspect of twitter. Right now I’ll encourage you to sign up for an account, add me as a friend, and start searching for people you know IRL or thru their words and/or pictures on the web. Just trust me on this, okay? It won’t take very much time and there’s no need to wait for an invite. Did you? Okay, now when you return to the twitter homepage, it looks different, right? Congratulations! You’ve entered the twitterverse!

The magic thing about twitter is the ability to check in with your tweeps on a daily (or more often) basis. There are a few people I’d recommend following if you have a certain sense of humor i.e. Merlin Mann, Joshua Green Allen, Jenny Holzer and there are more, but the great thing is that you can customize your feed to reflect your interests. The best way to do this is to use the utilities like Summize or Tweetscan to search for key words that reflect your interest or even your location. I follow a few fellow twitterers who have nothing more in common with me than they happen to live in the same region. Sometimes they recommend something local that plants a seed that doesn’t bear fruit until many moons later. Feel free to follow and unfollow as need be. Some people are very polite and forward about this. I am more stealthy as that is my style, so feel free to try whatever works for you.

There are more than a few utilities to round out the twitter experience. Try them out as you are wont. I am used to a pretty bare bones experience. Until a few weeks ago, I tweeted from either my browser (my twitter.com homepage) or occasionally from my phone. Now that I have added Twitterfox to my Firefox, twitter lives in my browser. My tweets have seen an uptick and my use of the site is far more enjoyable as I don’t have to be on twitter to read people’s tweets. Twitter has suffered some instability from its raging popularity so there are a few pages to deal with twitter outages. You also need to use twitter a fair amount to notice the problems. Fortunately, those outages have been fewer and farther between.

Once you’ve used twitter for a few months, you may want to read further. I think that twitter will be fun for those who often think in one liners or those who have blogged in the past, but found it too cumbersome. I myself enjoy the bits of humor and insight that flit past my sight on the hours that I might be logged into the matrix. At this point twitter doesn’t have an income stream, so there are no ads or stupid flash things jumping at you trying to get your attention. For being ‘web 2.0′ company, things are very basic.

Thanks to @claynewton and @nothatwasyou who definitely make twitter more fun with their stream of wit and links and observations. I hope that you’ve found this informative and that we’ll see your tweets real soon.