So, twitter!

So, the thing is you don't know you're hooked on twitter till you're waking up everyday and unwittingly checking twitter before proceeding with the rest of the days business... twitter can be useful in many ways, some of which have been highlighted in this article. Some of them are:

Getting Feedback: like you want to ask what the best phone in the 15-25k price range is, and someone (I'm willing to bet on Jerry) would instantly send a tweet your way giving you some info on the matter...

Direct traffic: using your twitter account to get more people to visit your latest blogpost or something... overdoing this is usually frowned upon (that doesn't stop *SOME* people though). Sharing links can also be listed under this category, so if you see a funny article or listen to a good song, you'd tweet the link and send peeps that way. Can also be used to rickroll someone! lol ;)

Read News: when a natural disaster happens, twitter knows first! when an important government announcement happens, twitter knows first! twitter users tweet from the ends of the world, so you know everything that's going on first hand...

Make New Friends: yeah, I can testify to the fact that your twitter buddies will prolly end up as real-world friends! :)

also something they haven't mentioned: twitter relieves stress! trust me on this, you get stuff like this sent at you, bam in the middle of a depressing day at work, and you just look at it and ROFL! instant stress reliever! :D

So, how do I get started?

First, follow people: Most bloggers and websites display the link to their twitter account prominently. Follow the likes of @cracked for ROFL tweets, @mashable for news on social networks and the internet, @cnnbrk for breaking news stories, @kottufeed for the latest posts from Kottu, and also follow our blogging community! Click on the reply button to send replies to any of their tweets that you find interesting, start a conversation! Retweet (which is basically repeat a tweet) any tweets that you feel you want to share! twitter is all about interaction, you have to actively tweet for it to be fun...

What Client Should I use?

Well, when I first started tweeting, I used their website mostly... and stuck with for ages, till I moved to my ever-faithful twitterfox (now called Echofon). I chose it over the other contender (TweetDeck) because it was lightweight and it sits neatly in the bottom corner of your Firefox window:

see, the little blue circle in the corner

The only major complain you'd hear from a Firefox user is the fact that it only updates every 3 minutes (which is waaay too slow in the twitter world) and that when you close your browser, twitter is gone too (minor concern since most people never close their browsers these days), and the most common complain you'd hear from users of other browsers is that they can't use it 'coz they don't use Firefox! well good for them! :P

Now we come to the stand-alone twitter applications: DestroyTwitter, TweetDeck (which I personally used and disliked) and Spaz are 3 that seem to be popular among our bloggers... Seesmic (which also has a desktop app) and Brizzly (still invitation only, but those aren't hard to come by) are 2 popular and easy-to-use web based clients, which means you can access them from anywhere and everywhere! I'd recomend Brizzly if you're already used to the twitter web interface and only looking for more functionality... You may also like to check out the recent Lifehacker poll on the most popular twitter clients.

Caution: Twitter is extremely addictive! Use with care! ;) :D

If you need any assistance feel free to send a tweet my way to @darthchavie! :)

(and no I didn't type this out at 2 in the morning, just trying out scheduled posts to see if it works! lol)