Probably easier if I just show you...
Posted on 09/14/2011 8:25:18 AM PDT by US Navy Vet
I'm not stupid just uninformed regarding "Twitter".
140 not 80.
It’s gay. I’d avoid it.
Was = Were
(wish we could edit our posts)
Thanks for the reply. That is the conclusion I came to. One of my friends was urged to open a facebook account as a marketing strategy for her home business. She told me she totally regrets it.
What is the difference between Twitter and Facebook?
I signed up for facebook and within thirty minutes I was getting lots of spam. I had never had that problem before. I stopped using it.
So I have a twitter account but I really don’t use it. I can however tell you what it’s for (and this might border a little on the glib side).
Twitter is fundamentally based on the concept of SMS Texting fro myour cell phone. There’s a 140 character limit on length which is what your cell carrier limits text messages to. Cell carriers will split up longer messages and send multiples to send the entire message. Twitter will simply chop off any message longer than that.
So what do you use twitter for? You pretty much get to “shout to the world” your 140 character thoughts and ideas. You can ask the world a question with it, like: “Does any one know where I can find a 20’ extension ladder” and your followers (and followers of them, and their followers and so on) have the POTENTIAL to read your query. So people might tweet you back that “Hey, I have a ladder you can borrow, you just have to pick it up cuz I can’t help on that”
Or they may say “XXX rents them for $20 for a day!”
What else does twitter offer? Will, it’s also sort of a headline news scroller/repeater, as people will tweet events as a blurb, so for instance, when the earthquake happened last month, some of the first verifications of the event’s actual happening were the tweets of the folks in the areas affected.
Lastly, there is a conversation and tagging aspect that are directed by special characters like “@” and “#”. I might say: Hey, @US_Navy_Vet (if that was your twitter account), did you see the #DUmmieFunnies today?
LOL!
(greetings fellow okie!)
Probably easier if I just show you...
This thread has been tweeted.
If you want to find out what some guy you went to high school with but weren’t really friends with is having for lunch today, sign up for Facebook.
If you want to find out what Kim Kardashian is having for lunch today, sign up for Twitter.
If you are so narcissistic to think that other people care what you’re having for lunch today, sign up for both and post stuff like crazy.
bttt
THanks for the clarification.
I think all of you have given me enough info to know that I believe I’ll stay in JimRob’s living room. I dont have time (at least presently) for what I believe would be the aggravation of FB or Twitter. I can see it has its constructive uses, but I am not presently in a position to need its structure.
Yes, very similar actually. Instead of pings from the “To:” box there are inline “@user” directives that do sort of the same thing. The main differences are, first and most evident, that the comments are length limited. That may be a technical limitation, but actually contributed to Twitter’s popularity since it eased both writing and reading for people on the go.
Second, in Twitter there is no real concept of “threads” or any real kind of flow control. Comments come one after another, and the only way to guess a relationship between them is either through the “@user” directive, suggesting a response, or the “#topic” directive, that kind of groups together tweets that are supposed to be, say, on the same page. Therefore, to choose what to see, having no way to click on a thread, you activate some “users” and “topics” and those define what appears on your feed.
Perfect example. THAT is when Twitter is worth it’s salt. When there’s actually stuff happening and someone on our side is there with a mobile giving everyone the non-MSM sanitized lodown, before the MSM even knows what’s going on to set the narrative.
If I follow someone, do the tweets come to my phone as a text message?
I like pie. Let’s do lunch.
The speed of the updates is breakneck so beware. There are a ton of good "lists" or groups of people to follow. They are mostly identified by "hashtags" which are words or acronyms preceeded with a "#" sign.
As an example, you can go to twitter.com and search for #tcot which stands for "top conservatives on twitter". You will immediately get a list of tweets from anybody tagging that hashtag to their responses. Many of those responses include URL's or tinyURL's which are simply shortened to fit in the Twitter character limitation. Those URL's will point to the recommended or discussed article.
I really find it useful and can get a ton of information on breaking news or streaming stories very very quickly. Most of the candidates are out there as well and post pretty darn often.
If you have more questions, feel free to reply with any you might have.
Twitter is a service where anyone can post information up to 140 characters.
I don’t post on Twitter but I follow several dozen people, mainly because news seems to break faster on twitter than the services. So, if you are an information junkie, you can beat the crowd by 5 minutes. Many tweets will have a link to an article so you can follow up on the information.
The fact that news breaks quicker on twitter can be very useful if you play fantasy football or baseball.
Twtitter is also useful for finding out things like the status of Netflix. If netflix goes down, you can find out on twitter much faster than you can anywhere else.
Twitter is great service for smart phones. If you have five minutes to kill sitting in the car waiting for the kids, you can open twitter and see what is going on.
To find people to follow, simply go to twitter and search for a person such as Sarah Palin or Herman Cain or John Boehnoer. Click Follow. Then check out who they follow.
Finally, if you have an ipad, you can download flipboard for free and link it to your twitter account. It will convert the tweets into an electronic magazine with the tweet as a title and link in the tweet as an article. Very cool.
Iowahawk is my favorite! Funny, yet penetrating. I like the news on Twitter because it is up-to-date, more so than on Drudge.
They can if you choose. It all depends on your phone and choices for being notified. Any smartphone will typically have a twitter app you can download and use as well.
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