Hi there!
Most of you who are following my blog at this point are friends and family, and not the hoards of devoted fans I expect to be reading my every word in the near future. You probably aren’t wanting to see just the professional updates I’ll be posting to this blog, but also want to hear how I’m doing, what I’m up to, and all the little things that make up my life while I’m far, far away.
That’s one reason I’ll be using Twitter. If you’ve never heard of Twitter, I’ll let this video explain, it does a better job than I could:
Twitter is a social internet service, in a way like a stripped down and simplified Facebook or other social network. It allows me to post simple messages of up to 140 characters (about the length of your average text message) to a timeline, which looks kind of like a blog. This is what my personal Twitter page looks like:
Twitter Screenshot
Now, that’s just the basics. Twitter is about more than just finding out what I had for breakfast or if I’m cleaning out the rain gutters. It’s a great way to communicate. If you are on Twitter as well, it becomes very easy for you to follow my updates (you can even have them delivered to your phone as text messages!) and I can likewise follow your updates, even when I’m away from the computer.
There are a few things you may see in my “tweets” (Twitter posts) that are a bit confusing at first. Tweets can be in reply to other tweets by people I am following; these are denoted by an @username at the beginning of the post. If I mention someone by name who is also on Twitter, I may use @ and their username in the same way, to provide a link and alert them that I’m talking about them.
Sorry if that got technical. The main point, however, is that since it’s very easy for me to “tweet” quite often about my life, from the computer, my phone, or even from instant messages, you’ll likely get a much more complete picture of what’s going on with me than if you were just following my blog posts. I’ve put in a sidebar feed so that my most recent twitter posts show up on this page, but you’ll probably want to see my main Twitter page.
Why don’t you give Twitter a try? You’re probably thinking “Why should I bother with this, it’s just one more site to check and I’m already on Facebook.” That’s exactly where Twitter shines, though. You can update quickly and easily from anywhere from your phone, and if you have a “smartphone” there’s almost certainly a Twitter program out there to give you the full features of the site from anywhere. I use Tweetie, for iPhone. Here’s a screenshot:
Tweetie Screenshot
There are lots of fascinating people on Twitter, from friends and family to minor celebrities, and following them on Twitter and having a dialogue with them about the things that matter to them in their daily lives makes me feel close to them and constantly connected to lives other than my own. Twitter does this better than any social or internet service I’ve ever experienced. I hope you’ll consider giving it a try, even if it seems goofy at first.
-Raygan
