Twitter – Getting started…

Twitter has my name listed for less than 24 hours, however I spent quite some time today playing around, reading and investigating this phenomenon.

For a long long time I had a very strong objection to sign up. “Hey ain’t that just another one of those tools which will take away my time?” is a sample of the thoughts I had, or perhaps better phrase as my fears from Twitter.
As an Internet “addict” for more than 10 years, there comes a time when you do want to stop, think and hold on – but then again curiosity and the sense for new technology usually wins.

So in this post I’d like to share my first Twitter day, and perhaps share a few of my actions on Twitter trying to understand it better, where I looked, what I found – and what the future may hold.

So my first Twitter day began with the sign up process and setting up my profile. That part was relatively fast and easy. Twitter is a very simple and intuitive web site, no where to really get lost to, which in the first part is very good.

Finding & Adding Friends to Twitter

The challenges began on the second stage – of adding some friends and interact with the system. Twitter’s search is not very sophisticated. It allows simple search only, with very little room for mistakes. Just this last hour when I got back home and continued my research did I find some cool tools to help finding friends.

So here are the places and techniques I found to work:

1. Twitter’s simple search

for this you need either the full name of your friend or their Twitter name. It’s the hardest and slowst way, however very targeted.

2. TwitDir – Twitter Directory

this cool web site offers the ability to search Twitter friends by their location, popularity, description and show their details in a nifty catalog.
Strength: fast, robust
Weakness: must click the user link to go to their Twitter page to follow
Coolness: their #1 most popular is Barack Obama featuring some ~60,000 followers 🙂 (not sure it’s his real profile though)

http://twitdir.com

3. Twits like me

cool search engine which queries the Twitter database and comes up with relevant Twits (short for Twitter members). I think I don’t have enough history to let it map my profile properly though.
Strength: automatic
Weakness: relevance

http://www.chrisfinke.com/twitslikeme/

4. Rand’s Whiteboard Friday on Twitter

Rand from SEOmoz explains about the twitter concept is 4+ minutes. Cool piece.


SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – Adopting Twitter from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Well, My list is getting longer and there are many more tools I’m sure I will fond along the way – but this is certainly a good start. Of course- comments, remarks etc. are more than welcome 🙂

OC

P.S – I’m at http://twitter.com/ophirc

3 thoughts on “Twitter – Getting started…”

  1. Hi Tal,
    1. Thanks for the tips – seems very interesting
    2. I got the ‘subscribe to commenys’ plugin though it won’t work 🙁 I guess I’ll debug it tomorrow

    OC

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