Hey, Oprah's on Twitter? Here's how you use it, Oprah

[NYCGirl]

Great guide from the first person I followed on Twitter — Andy Ihnatko, Technology Reporter for the Chicago Sun Times

http://www.suntimes.com/business/1532392,ihnatko-oprah-twitter-041709.article

1) Think of Twitter as your own personalized version of the info ticker at the bottom of a 24-hour news channel. One single webpage collects the concise, snappy 140-word notices posted by your friends, family, and various information sources of interest

As someone who works alone in a home office, I tend to liken my Twitter window as that background chatter you’d find in an office. I’m not incredibly emotionally invested in everybody whom I follow…but don’t want to know what Cheryl thought of the band she saw last night?

Folks who write about technology and society make fun of Twitter when they first discover it. Just stay tuned. In 90 days they’ll write a followup, awkwardly admitting that now that they have a dozen friends Tweeting on a regular basis, Twitter is actually kind of sort of OK, more or less. And then a year later, they’ll be making fun of the next wave of commentators making fun of Twitter.

(I sense that your keen intellect has caught a glint of something in that preceding paragraph, and that you’ve tasked somebody to search the Sun-Times archives for my own first column about Twitter. I’m sure you will understand that the whole thing was wry, nicely-honed satire.)

2) Basic terminology: every one of these little 140-character messages is a Tweet. And although many of the people who use the service are indeed twits, the polite term is “twitterer.”

The “public timeline” is the full, raging, churning Colorado River of every Tweet ever posted by everybody. That’s too much for any sane person to bother with. Instead, you’ll want to “Follow” individual Twitterers who seem to post Tweets that are consistently interesting, informative, or funny. Over the course of a few days or weeks, you’ll have built up a nice little Twitter feed of great Twitterers, all mashed together into a single scrolling list.

LOTS MORE AT LINK, INCLUDING HOW TO FIND PEOPLE YOU WANT TO FOLLOW

[Lex]

1. Thanks for this info. It seems to be source of much confusion for people.

nt

[NYCGirl]

2. It is a bit daunting at first if you jump into the public timeline. But when you

start finding a nice list of folks you want to hear from and you get your own followers, it's really a nice, and often informative, experience.

[NYCGirl]

3. kick