On the Search for the Genuine

From wefunction.com

Until yesterday at 9:00 a.m., I had A LOT of trouble taking Twitter seriously.  I’d been introduced to it about 10 months ago at an academic conference, but it just seemed…noisy.  Stupid.  Redundant with Facebook.

That all changed because of Chris Myers, the web guy at UM’s Ford School of Public Policy.  Yesterday morning, he gave a presentation titled “Taking Twitter Seriously”  during UM’s Enriching Scholarship 2009 conference (follow him on Twitter @myersca).  I now see Twitter in a very different way and have been having tons of fun reading other people’s Tweets (and occasionally tweeting myself, of course!).

Chris’ presentation was so helpful that I decided to blog about it.  All of the links below come from Chris’ great online Google Doc of Twitter Resources, so if you’re looking for exhaustive Twitter resources, here it is.  But I’ll try to hit the high points.

First, if you have no idea what Twitter is and need a crash course, click here. Or, if you’re a visual learner, click here for a Youtube vid about Twitter.

Regarding Twitter accounts, you can have as many as you want.  Chris Myers suggested having one “professional” account and one for personal use, but I’m going to stick with one account for now.  If I have something really personal to say, I say it on Facebook to my “real friends”.  As Chris Myers said, Twitter shines when you have an idea or piece of information to spread, not necessarily when you want to tell the world what you ate for breakfast.

If you need to find worthwhile people to follow on Twitter but don’t know where to start, try the search at Twitter.Grader, WeFollow, and Twellow.com.  Don’t forget to look up important people in your academic or career field and follow them!  And of course, whenever you follow someone, don’t forget to check their followers/following, where you can often find some excellent additional people to follow.

If you’re wondering who’s following you, or maybe you’re following someone like @mashable who has jillions of followers and you want to identify just the most enticing ones, try Twitual.com.

If you want to be able to see your Facebook status updates and Tweets in one place without having to switch back and forth between the two web sites, download a free desktop management piece like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop.  Both allow you to post Facebook status updates and Tweets from the same desktop-based interface.  I tried both, and ultimately I went with Seesmic Desktop because I felt its group-making capabilities were better, and sometimes I only want to see a fraction of available tweets on my following list (for example, maybe I want to see just the tweets from news organizations or just the tweets from my real-life personal friends.) Seesmic was also more seamlessly integrated with Facebook–it showed me pictures and links in addition to Facebook status updates whereas TweetDeck only showed the status updates.

If you prefer to Tweet from an iPod Touch or an iPhone, I have done just fine on my iPod Touch with Twitterfon (a free App), but Kevin Rose at my favorite podcast Diggnation likes Tweetie (a paid App), and the blogosphere seems to like Twitteriffic (a paid App that lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts at once).  For you crackberry addicts out there, try Twitterberry.  You can also tweet via text message, so no excuses for those of us with “regular” phones.

By the time I peeled through those resources, I was already a Twittering maniac.  My newly improved Twitter feed, which jumped from following about 10 people to about 40 people, was pumping out tons of amazing links and ideas that I would have never found without Twitter.  And that made me hungry for more Twitter Toys, but I’m just barely scratching the surface there.

For example, I would love to use Twitter interactively in a presentation or in one of my classes. For that, Tweetchat.com is a great resource–it will show you only the Twitters that include a certain hashmark.  For example, here’s the Tweetchat room from Chris Myers’ presentation (you’ll have to log in using a Twitter name and ID, but you didn’t need to be at the meeting to see the Tweetchat).

There’s lots of good advice on the Internet about how to dig deeper with Twitter.  I’m slowly peeling my way through “7 ways to use twitter to engage your audience”, “Twitter for Academia”, “How to present while people are twittering”, “5 Terriffic Twitter Research Tools”, and most awesomely of all, “99 Essential Twitter Tools and Applications”.

Whew!  I’m ex-tweet-austed after all that.  Two last things, and off you go to Twittervillle: Thanks to Wefunction.com for the cute Twitter bird in this post, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!