when Owl explains that age old moonstruck condition of infatuation and love to Bambi, Flower and Thumper, describing the condition with a single word? Twitterpated!I got onto Twitter several months ago, to see what all the hoopla was about and frankly at first I was unimpressed. It appeared to be pretty useless, kind of a glorified, temporary chalk board to leave notes to friends on. Then one of my Facebook friends, Mashable, who is big on Twitter and Facebook was posting interesting articles about Twitter, so I started following him and then I looked at the people he is following, thought some were interesting and started following them. Of course they followed me back and then I started learning about support sites and applications and pretty soon I was totally Twitterpated!
As I have learned more about the growing number of support applications and web sites surrounding Twitter I realized that Twitter was at the beginning stages of becoming gigantic on the net. Like EBay, Facebook, and Myspace kind of gigantic. With the potential to put a dent in Google's web dominance. Google has added a new word, it's name, to our language, Twitter has already added several.
What I have learned in these past couple of weeks has so changed my perspective about how individuals like you and me can make a living online and interconnect is networks of real time support that I've decided to take a detour in my planned blogging and write a series of articles about Twitter, related support applications, sites and hardware as I personally explore this emerging technosocial phenomenon.
When I try to tell my non tweeting friends about Twitter they often are just like I was before I got hooked, they can't imagine why they would want to tweet. So to start out here's a brief list of reasons to:
• You can discover many new, interesting people from all over the world who are active in the internet community.
• You can share your personal experience, wisdom and even quirks with others, connecting with others of like mind.
• You can make a living, make extra income or otherwise enhance your financial situation through wisdom received from others or the marketing of yourself and/or your goods and services.
• You can do extensive, free test marketing, perform a wide range of social experiments, follow trending in real time, study information data clouds, and other forms of research, essentially taking the pulse of the world of Twitter on any topic, phrase or word.
• You can quickly and effectively communicate with family members, friends, associates clients and businesses.
• You can provide a level of customer service that was unimaginable before Twitter, thereby developing a deep level of customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• You can inspire others, and be inspired.
I could go on and on. Like I said, I am totally Twitterpated!
So let's assume that you have signed up for a Twitter name. What's next? Well, that depends on if you are in it for social interaction or business.
I know this blog is about making money online, however every cent you ever receive will be given to you by other people, so let's look at the social side first.
Finding real world friends or family members on Twitter is easy if they have used their real name or you know what their Twitter name is. Just use Twitters built in friend finding search features.
If you want to find people of like mind you can do a hash tag (#) search on http://search.twitter.com/ for any word and find who is saying what about that topic.
For example let's suppose you are interested in gardening. You go to http://search.twitter.com/ and search for garden, or gardening, or landscaping, or any other related term you can think of and you immediately get a list of everyone who has recently tweeted about that term. You go to their pages, read their bio, look at their tweets and decide to follow them if you find them to be of interest to you.
This is a pretty amazing feature when you stop to think about it. You can find people all over the world who have tweeted something, in the past few minutes or hours, that is of interest to you and connect with them. You can DM (Direct Message) them if you want to discuss something off Twitters continuous, public feed, or you can publically message them by putting an @ sign and their Twitter name in your tweet, like you could tweet: "@drnice thanks for blogging about the advantages of Twitter. I liked what you wrote." and I would see that, as would all of your followers and anyone who does a hash tag or @ sign search for drnice.
There are several support sites to facilitate finding people, interest groups and topics on Twitter. There's http://wefollow.com/ which allows you to list yourself as being associated with three hash tags.
In our earlier example of you having an interest in gardening you might list yourself on http://wefollow.com/ under garden, gardening, & plants, and then new people searching we follow will find you listed with others who have selected each of the hash tag categories. You can also find people to follow who have done this under any topic of interest you may have.
On http://wefollow.com/ you can leave yourself in the three categories forever or you can periodically change the categories you list under. Once you select three new ones you will no longer show up under the previous ones. This allows you to put yourself in a position to meet a lot of people looking for your shared interest who you might otherwise never connect with.
In a category that could only be called "Cool Twitter Stuff":
http://twistori.com/This is nothing but cool! Twistori has 6 hash tag terms that you can choose from: "Love, Hate, Think, Believe, Fell, and Wish". You choose which word and Twistori feeds you a continuous stream of tweets with that word in it. The result is a pulse on humanity that is funny, insightful, depressing, invigorating and maybe a bit overwhelming, because it is such a peek inside the human psyche and so represents humanity at large.
http://www.twitscoop.com - A site that shows a real time date trends on Twitter.
As you can tell, there is a lot to Twitter. Probably the best explanation as to what Twitter is and how it is used is by listening to CEO Jack Dorsey talk about How Twitter came to be.
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