anyone here have twitter??? what is it all about?

[jewel-55]

[LexiSan]

It's just a micro-blogging service. You just update it with your thoughts, what you're doing, some cool article you found, etc. Whatever you want really. I've seen that some people use it to log their exercise and calories. There are really tons of uses for it if you get creative.

I personally use it to practice my Chinese. I also follow bands, musicians, artists, and companies that I like. Many companies and artists have twitters. Some artist's twitters are just promotional but others do use it for themselves. John Mayer is the first one that comes to mind (twitter.com/johncmayer). Shaq, Ashton, Demi Moore/Lovato, etc. are other celebrities that use it. So if you're into that, you might like following them on Twitter. John Mayer actually held a couple of contests last week and gave some free stuff to fans. I think one of them was a handwritten copy of the lyrics to one of his songs or something. There are a lot of contests that go on on Twitter, so you might enjoy that. My friend won some concert tickets on Twitter from a radio station personality she follows, so that was pretty cool.

Some people create fictional accounts on there for fun. Darthvader is one.

There are a lot of news twitters as well. CNN and FOX have Twitter accounts and they post news updates.

A lot of news nowadays breaks out on Twitter first, before it hits any of the news stations. Examples of this include the earthquake in China and the plane crash in Colorado. And what I mean by that is people experiencing it post it on Twitter and that's where the news first breaks out. The first anyone heard of the Colorado plane crash was from a passenger on the plane that update his Twitter account with what was going on. Same with the earthquake.

Last week Gmail went down and I wasn't sure it was just me, so I searched twitter (search.twitter.com) to see if anyone else was experiencing problems. It's just a good way to find out what's going on at the moment.

Here's a good article of the 10 most extraordinary Twitter updates: http://mashable.com/2009/04/10/extraordi...r-updates/

Also, hashtags are a good part of twitter. You use them to categorize tweets. So if you write a tweet about college, you would add the hash tag #college to it. You can use hashtags to see what everyone else is writing about in a certain category. I like to use #jobadvice and #college.