Been using twitter for a couple of months now.  At first I couldn’t get into it but after I spent some time finding people to follow I realised what a useful tool it is.  There’s a lot of people out there with astronomy (and astro related) interests tweeting away. 

So, for all you readers new to Twitter, what’s it all about?  Twitter is a service that allows you to receive short messages (140 chars max) from people that you ‘follow’.  So you go onto Twitter create yourself an account and then look for people via on-line contacts or by using the search facility; you might even know someone on Twitter and know their Twitter name, like me ‘whyastronomy‘.  Then click on the Follow button under their username and you start to see their updates.  Put lots of information in the Bio of your Twitter account and then people will find and then start following you; often people you start to follow will reciprocate and begin following you.

I started finding people by looking at the list of people that follow or are followers of the first person I found and so on…

So, what kind of tweets (the messages are called tweets…) do you receive?  The tweets I receive fall into one of four categories;

1) Personal status e.g. “Can’t get to sleep. must stop drinking so much coffee

2) News/Notifications

3) Opinion e.g. “Just tried the new Blah from Blah Ltd and didn’t like it”

4) Links to web resources

I find 2) and 4) useful; 1) and 3) can get annoying unless you really know the person and get the ‘in’ joke.

You can receive tweets by viewing your account in a web browser or you can use one of a growing number of Twitter applications I use Twirl; I’ve not evaluated all the applications but Twirl seems to work OK for me.

So, is it best to follow or be followed?  Well, I read this article at scobleizer.com and for me learning is the most important thing, but I also want to give too.  To date I’m following 156 people and 26 people are following me; it’s a great way of finding new resources and keeping up to speed with what’s going on in the world.

I’ve really only touched on the kind of things you can do with Twitter; go to their help pages for more information.

So, why not follow me (and I’ll probably follow you)

Until the next post… Clear Skies!

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