Twitter Tidbits

By Janet Dodrill

I love Twitter! It lets you find out what your friends are doing, and allows you to let them know what you are doing in 140 characters. It is micro-blogging. One can follow others – up to 1000 per day. Others can follow you.

There are applications developed for Twitter, and Twitter Fans can post additional apps to a public wiki page. Other apps are available on Mashable [The Social Media Guide] site.

Twitter users ‘tweet’, like birds, to eachother, when they post to their profile page. Twitterers can send direct messages to eachother. They can also retweet other people’s posts if you find them of value or think other users will.

Wefollow.com is a user powered Twitter directory. You can find who’s on Twitter by popularity listed by category, such as celebrity, news, tv, radio, and more. You can add yourself (your Twitter username) to a category to be listed. Movie star Ashton Kutcher just topped the charts and some of the We Follow categories by reaching 1 million followers (and rising) in a competition against CNN.

Even social sites like Twitter can get infected with viruses and worms. The problem happens when you visit a site that is infected. There are ways fix the problem. For updates check the Twitter blog.

Oprah Winfrey recently joined Twitter. Evan Williams, CEO of  Twitter appeared on Oprah on 4/17/09, and Ashton Kutcher was interviewed for his new title of ‘Mr. Twitter’ via satellite. I follow all three on Twitter. Prior to the show Evan tweeted that he had forgotten to pack a clean pair of socks and would have to appear on the show wearing dirty socks, but nothing was mentioned during the show! Oprah must not have read her recent tweets! While the show was in progress, Oprah viewed a tweet to her from Ellen DeGeneres, where she asked, “Oprah Winfrey – what are you doing on here?! Shouldn’t you be working on our cover?!”

Ashton Kutcher and his wife, Demi Moore, tweet all the time, and post pictures and video of eachother and most recently of their trip to southern France, and of the set and other celebrities (including Tom Selleck), while Ashton filmed a movie.

In the Mashable article, The Fastest Growing Social Sites,  it states that Twitter is among ‘the big three’ (others being Facebook and MySpace) and has now grown by over 2,500 percent in the past year, and that number is expected to grow.

Feel free to follow me at www.twitter.com/janetdodrill.