By now most of us know what Twitter is. Of do we? I spent more than a few months with a Twitter account and no real idea how to use it. At first it seemed a lot like re-branded Instant Messaging and I already have plenty of choices for that. Did I really need another one? My business partner Nick kept telling me, “Dude, you need to get on this. It’s big.” I wasn’t initially moved.

And then came the revelation: Twitter is not about instant messging. It is about promoting yourself to others. You can do it for business reasons or for personal ones, but one simple fact is true: Sell yourself 140 characters at a time. I’m not talking about spamming people. We’ve got plenty of that via other avenues (and Twitter is a victim, too). It’s about saying things that are quick, concise, relevant and interesting about what is happening in your world. If you say things that are not boring, people will follow you. You don’t have to find followers, they will find you. All you need to do is tweet. Dare I say it? “Tweet, and they will come.”

To date I have three Twitter accounts, each for a different facet of me. Admittedly I use one more than the others but I don’t like to cross-brand who I am. But that works for me. I tweet about business things with my business Twitter account. I tweet about more personal things with my personal twitter accounts. I don’t like to muddy the waters (which is the primary reason I despise Facebook). That may not work for you. Do what feels right.

The single biggest thing you can do for yourself on Twitter is to make sure you don’t get lured into using it as another IM client. I follow more than a few people who use it to chat about where to go to lunch or what time a movie starts, etc. That’s annoying. To them I suggest a little app called Skype. If you use Twitter as an IM client you are likely to lose followers in a hurry.

Twitter is a phenomon. It’s still misunderstood by many, though. More famous twitterer’s like Ashton Kutcher have increased their celebrity by making them more accessible to their fans. Having a direct line like that to people who have historically been so unattainable is a powerful, powerful thing. While you may not be hooking up with Demi you still may have interesting things to say. Tweet them. You will develop a following of your own.

A final note: Just because someone follows you does not mean you have to follow them in return. If you get a new follower, look them up. See what they tweet about. Read their bio. Are they interesting to you? If so, follow back. If not, that’s cool, too. If you do follow someone, see who else is following them. You will find that many of their followers are interesting to you. Follow them. Some of them will follow you in return. It’s viral.

Now go. Tweet.

Cheers,

Colin Weaver

I love Twitter.  I’m addicted to it.  I tweet from my laptop all day at work.  I tweet from my desktop PC when I get home at night.  I tweet from my iPhone while I’m at traffic lights, standing in line in the grocery store and waiting in the doctor’s office.  I tweet when I’m in the bathroom and when I’m watching Battlestar Galactica.  So, yeah, I love to tweet.    And that’s saying a lot.  I usually don’t get into any of this social networking stuff.  MySpace is an abomination and Facebook is becoming more and like MySpace every day.  LinkedIn seems to be holding its own as a gathering of professionals but I fear for its long-term viability (fear may not be the right word).

But I’m getting a little irked with the direction I see Twitter going.  A micro-blogging mechanism for friends and people with common interests to send a maximum of 140 characters is what Twitter is all about.  But now, more and more people are starting to follow me that have no interest in me other than getting me to follow them in return.  It’s the expected courtesy; you follow me so I follow you.  It would be rude for me not to reciprocate, right?  But they don’t follow me because they like what I have to say.  They follow me because if they can con me into following them in return they can then begin to spam me with their veiled  (or not so veiled) advertisements.  In the past 24 hours I’ve had several people start to follow me that don’t know me and don’t have any interest in what I tweet about.  The most recent is a guy trying to peddle skateboards and skateboarding gear.  Uh, what was it I said in one of my tweets that made you think that I was interested in your wares?  Poser.

It’s too bad, really.  There is no place to hide from spammers.  There is a fine line between getting people to know what you do and just being a pest.

So today I am coining a new term:  spitter;  a twitter spammer.  I think I’m the first to use it.

Some time in early 2008 Nick introduced me to Twitter.  I tried to to see the potential but I have to admit that for the first several weeks I kept thinking, “This is the dumbest thing to come along in a while.”  I seriously thought it sucked.  But it doesn’t.  What sucked at first was me.  I hadn’t fully embraced what was going on.  I wasn’t really following anybody and not many people were following me.  With so few people looking at what I was doing I never really felt compelled to tweet.  But now I have three different twitter accounts that represent three different facets of who I am.  I follow multiple different people and most of them follow me in return.  Now I tweet multiple times per day and check to see what others are doing on a regular basis.  I’m kind of addicted to it.  It’s another in a long line of time suckers but I love to search such things out and attach them like little leeches to my body.  Twitter, not that I’ve got my mojo working, is right up my alley.

Twitter is still fairly new so a client with which to tweet is not built into Fedora 10 (or I don’t know where it is).  That will change over time I suppose.  The Firefox add-on called TwitterFox is probably the easises way to get tweeting because Firefox is already installed and add-in installation is usually simple.  But for tonight I want either Twhirl or Spaz.  Both clients require AdobeAIR and I got that installed a little earlier this evening.  You can read about installing AdobeAIR by clicking here.  You can download twhirl here and you can download Spaz here.  When you download them using Firefox you will see a window like this:

Because AdobeAIR is installed you might think you can just open the download with AdobeAIR and start the install.  And you’d be right if you wanted the install to fail.  The AdobeAIR installer doesn’t seem to work unless it is running as root.  I haven’t done any research on why but it’s the solution I found multiple times on other sites.  I do know that I tried repeatedly to install using my user account and failed each time.

To successfully get twhirl (or spaz) installed, follow these steps:

Step 1 -Save the installation file to your computer.  I saved it to /home/colin/Download
Step 2 - Open a terminal window and su to root.
Step 3 - From the terminal window type “/usr/bin/Adobe AIR Application Installer” (with the quotes).  The GUI app will open.
Step 4 - Navigate using the tree-view to the directory where your installation file is located (the one you downloaded).
Step 5 - Select the installation package, click OK and the follow the install steps in the interface.

The twhirl install should place an icon under Applications > Accessories.  The spaz install should place a shortcut link directly under Applications.  You should now be good to go!  Send me a tweet to let me know how it goes.