Twitter

Wise Words: twitter

I would never normally use “in a twitter” – it’s too old-fashioned. So why am I telling you about it? Twitter is the sound that birds make, but if someone is “in a twitter”, that person is nervously excited, as in “the girls were in a twitter about the party on Saturday night”. Can’t you just picture them – giggling, laughing, and chatting with excitement as they paint their nails? (I have a teenage daughter so I know what I’m talking about.)

Enough about birds and girls, however, as I want to focus on the computing world. It’s in a twitter at the moment, too, but about a micro-blogging social networking site. It’s in a twitter about Twitter.

What is Twitter? It’s a new tool that allows people to communicate to anyone around the world — but limits them to sending short, 140-character messages. It’s instant messaging to everyone – and maybe to no one.

It’s so new, that it needs a whole new set of words. And these are the words I am using:

• Twitter – the micro-blogging site
• a tweet – the message
  
• to tweet – to send a tweet/tweets
  
• to twitter – to send a tweet/tweets
  
• twitterati – people who use twitter
• twitterhea – a problem many of the twitterrati suffer from when they send too many tweets
  

Some people prefer to use old words to talk about the people who love this new trend: they’re twits – fools – who twitter about every second in their day. There are many twits on Twitter, twittering about their lunch, their breakfast, their snacks and their cups of coffee.

And then there are the doctors at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who twitter about life-saving surgery — as they perform it. (Read how in our News section.) They’re no fools.

We’ve also found a way to put Twitter to good use. Go to www.twitter.com/busspot to find out just how.

Let us know if you twitter — or if you think it’s just for twits. What would you like Business Spotlight to tweet about?

How to make the most out of Twitter.

• Use Firefox as your browser, download and install TwitterFox. They are both free.
  
• Sign up for a free Twitter account. 
• Ignore the questions about your mobile phone details, unless you want to send tweets via your phone. Remember, it's free to use the internet, but you will have to pay to send text messages via your mobile.
• Search for people or companies on Twitter, watch out for the Twitter symbol on websites and sign up to “follow” them.
• If you use TwitterFox you don't have to go to the Twitter website to see the tweets you’ve signed up for — they’ll appear in a pop-up box in the browser window.
• With TwitterFox you can also tweet really easily, too. Why don't you twitter in English? Send us your feedback and we'll tweet back. 
• The pop-up box can be distracting, but you can often learn something interesting too — such as our Word of the Day.
  
• If you have an iPhone, you can twitter all day long. Just download the Twitterific application to get started.