This month we look at Twitter, the communication tool used by many, including the famous to communicate with millions of people.
You may, or may not have heard of it, but this month we look at how you can use it, why you would want to use it and what applications you need in order to access or post your tweets.
Twitter is an Internet based application that allows people to communicate short messages, it is a two way communication tool but is predominantly used one way – i.e. you use it to communicate your message to those that are interested in hearing what you have to say. Once setup you can invite people to “follow” you on twitter and when you send a message, it’s those “followers” that receive it.
Twitter is used in predominantly three ways..
1. For people or organisations to get their message or general useful information out to those that are interested in receiving it (this is one of the ways in which BlueMoon send out useful computer information to our followers).
2. For groups of friends or likeminded individuals to share information.
3. For famous people to communicate information about themselves.
Thereare many famous tweeters, probably the most prevalent is Stephen Fry, the British actor, and his tweets are followed by well over a million people, you can see his posts at http://twitter.com/STEPHENFRY
Other famous twitter users include John Cleese http://twitter.com/JohnCleese with over 400,000 followers, Russell Brand http://twitter.com/rustyrockets with over 100,000 followers and down with a paltry 80,000 followers we have the Boris Johnson http://twitter.com/MayorOfLondon
You can get your own twitter account by going to www.twitter.com and clicking on the “join today” button, once you have completed your registration there are a number of programs that you can use to send and receive messages, probably the best that I have used is TweetDeck, it’s easy to use and free to download from www.tweetdeck.com
BlueMoon uses Twitter to keep our customers up to date with all kinds of information, you can follow us easily by going to our website at www.bluemoonsolutions.es and clicking on the “follow me on twitter” button, you can also see our recent postings together with all of our previous articles.
Once you get used to using twitter, you will become more familiar with terms like “hash tags”, trends and re-tweeting, the first are ways of tagging words within your message for example #BBC or #GranAlacant these tags can then be used to help find information on the Twitter network.
Trends are easily available from the twitter website, they are the hot topics of the moment and re-tweeting is a way of sending tweeted information on that you have recieved.
And finally, Twitter is mobile, pretty much all of the current mobile phones with Internet access have the ability to send and receive twitter messages.