Sue Waters

Well thanks to the help from friends, I have started “to get” Twitter . Thanks especially to Kate, Alex and Sean. We all know I needed another addiction – twitteraholic?

One criteria that I have mentioned in the past is the more intuitive an application the more likely I will use it – i.e. if I can work out what to do without wanting to read instructions on “how to” then it passes this test. Unfortunately with Twitter , for me, they made the site so simplistic and uncluttered (with very little information on the site) that it actually made it less intuitive and less obvious for me to work out what I could do with it.

Any way one of the most impressive aspects of Twitter is the fact that you can set it up (Go to Settings>Notifications) so that if any of your friends twitters it is sent immediately to your IM service – in my case this means they immediately appear in Google Talk. I can also type my own twitter or response in Google Talk instead of going to my twitter page.

Okay – so that does not appear such a big deal – but it is if you want to sent the same message very quickly instantly to a large number of people. For example: you have set up your Learnscope project. Trained all your participants on how to use Google Talk and are making them using Google Talk for communication. All you need to do is set up a Twitter account for your project e.g. Learnscope07, get all your participants to set up a twitter account and change their setting notification to Google Talk. As the manager of the project you could log into Twitter as Learnscope07 and send mass IM to all participants via Google Talk without any fuss.

Thankfully Alex educated me on the fact you could actually really personalise your twitter site – by showing me examples of sites. So I immediately twittered “I did not realise that you could set up your twitter page to look cool – thanks Alex – I will have to think about coolness now”. Kate immediately responded with a link to read about coolness is not always cool.

So after my education I have gone for pretty is better than cool:

And final point I don’t know why I tried to Google information on “how to” use twitter. I was looking at the answers the whole time – Help section!!!!

BTW I did get work done as well today – have finally finished the section on “how to create audio podcasts“.