{ StevenHaddox.com }

So I’ve had several friends and coworkers join Twitter or ask about Twitter as of late. As a result I decided to write a quick blog from my #iPhone while I’m watching an episode of #SVU and laptopless.

First things first, several different sites use different terminology about Twitter. From what I can tell the most commonly used terminology is as follows:

Tweet: A new message posted to Twitter (eg: ‘That tweet by @sunnythaper was hilarious!’)
Retweet (RT): Prefixing ‘RT’ or ‘Retweet’ in front of a tweet of importance to you allows you to give credit to the original author (eg: RT @sunnythaper: Nobody’s beard is as cool as mine. Not even @santaclaus).
Overheard (OH): If something is particularly hilarious to you that someone else said you can overhear it (eg: OH: @sunnythaper, unless it’s about the KKK on twitter I’m good!)
@username: Prefixing a username with the @ symbol (usually at the beginning of the tweet) is a public reply in response to another person’s tweet (eg: @sunnythaper Are we still on for sushi next Tuesday?)
Direct Message (DM): A direct message is used to send a private message to another user. To send a direct message to a user prefix the username with a ‘d’ and a space (eg: d sunnythaper Do you mind if I use your Twitter handle for examples in a blog post about Twitter?)

Once you get the basic usage down you’ll find that Twitter can be very useful, relaxing, hilarious, time-consuming, productive, or any combination of the above. No matter what how you use Twitter you may want to find easier ways to interface with it than just twitter.com/home. Personally I use Twitterific on my Macs and iPhone (although I use TwitFon for my second phone application and I’ve heard Tweetie is amazing on the iPhone). There are tons of desktop clients but Tweetdeck seems to be the most common for cross-platform use as it runs on Adobe Air and is very customizable. You’ll probably want to look around and see what works best for you.

So what’s the point in investing all this time into learning all of these use-cases, learning the new terminology, and picking up yet another social networking tool? That’s entirely up to you. Twitter is what you make of it. For me Twitter is a way to keep in touch with my friends and find new ones (real or virtual). It’s a way to share and get ideas for activities and projects. It’s a way to follow great thinkers in web development and hence the newest trends. It’s a way to help others and in turn seek help on that stupid CSS bug I’m banging my head against the desk on.

What’s with the #hashtags earlier in the post you ask? Well hashtags are just one of the cool things about Twitter. They aren’t actually part of Twitter itself, but like all good things on the web as of late, they extend Twitter’s API over at www.hashtags.org and show you all tweets from users that have the same hashtag. Many third party Twitter clients support hashtags and automatically link to the appropriate URL to show you other tweets.

If you’re a developer you can find out how to extend Twitter by looking at their API.

Hopefully this post has helped to serve as a very basic introduction to Twitter and how it can be of use to you. If you haven’t yet, you’re more than welcome to follow me at: http://www.twitter.com/stevenhaddox

Also a special thanks to Sunny (http://www.twitter.com/sunnythaper) for letting me use his handle in my examples. If you’re looking for someone humorous to follow, he’s even more funny than I am serious ;)

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