All I know about Twitter...

I learned from Kenie and Steph...DANKE!

As promised in my last post, here is everything I learned (so far) about Twitter...

My lovely mentors covered the following items with me over the phone:

- purpose of twitter
- twitter core functionality: status updates, @replies, retweet (RT), and direct message (DM), tagging (#hashtag), and trending topics
- sharing links and imparting knowledge within a 140 character limit (bit.ly)
- twitter and other social networking platforms (tweetdeck)
- other topics? ;)

Purpose of Twitter:
Twitter is a Mikroblog - a way to share information quick and real time. It is limited to 140 characters which forces you to think and share the essence of information. Great way of bottom lining :) It's an aggregator of information (love that word, it's new to me). You can follow individuals and find out what they are up to. You can also follow e.g. businesses and find out about special deals. Or your favorite band. Or you can find out everything about one topic (more on that later).
There is almost no privacy on Twitter, so everybody can see what you wrote - with the exception of direct messages. So there is also a Twitter etiquette. Which I will not discuss here because there are great articles about that all over the web. Google it!

Status updates:
After you created your Twitter account, you are ready to go. The easiest thing is to send updates - pretty much like the status on Facebook, but limited to 140 characters.

@replies:
If you see a Tweet you like and you would like to respond to the person, you choose @reply. So, let's say you read my Tweet: 'writing my blog' - and you want to reply to me by saying: @nicolegruen - way to go!

Retweet:
If you would like to repost something you read, it's good manners to pay tribute to the person that posted it. You are re-tweeting and you label it. So let's say I posted a really interesting link to an article. If you retweet it, you would do so by typing: @nicolegruen cool article ....

DM:
Direct messages. This is self-explanatory

Tagging:
Now that is cool: You can look up any word you want and then see all the Tweets that are currently posted that include that word. You do this by 'hashtagging'. If I would like to see everything about life coaching, I enter #coaching in the search field and there you go!

Trending topics:
That's the most talked about topics on Twitter. You can see them on the right side of the home page...

Sharing links:
Because there is a character limit on Twitter, you need to make it short and sweet. That includes the links you would like to send out. And of course there are tools you can use to do so. One of them is: http://bit.ly/ You just go to the web site, enter the URL you would like to shorten and the tool will return a shortened link which you then can post.

Tweetdeck:
Another tool! That one pretty much combines Facebook and Twitter. Meaning that you can read all status updates there and that you can also send status updates to both. Twitter and Facebook simultaneously.

That's all I learned and I am using it. Today I installed TwitterFon. It's an application for the Iphone that allows you to do pretty much everything you can do on Twitter.

So I am still all fresh but for now I will play with Twitter and see how much fun I can have with it. It is already a lot of fun for me to go online and see the statuses of everybody I am following...

So - follow me on Twitter and I will follow you ;-)

Attemps on staying young

So it all started with a radio show a couple of months ago: http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R901300900 . The guest William Deresiewicz had written an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education about modern technology http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-Solitude/3708). I will leave the interpretation of what was said and written to you.


For me it was clear: Facebook (FB) and texting are the devil and if I didn't want to be in the category of superficial, disconnected people, I'd better go and do something about it.


So I did - I went on to FB and I 'unfriended' all contacts that weren't my friends. I felt great.

And then I heard about Twitter - and dismissed it as another one of Satan's ways to destroy all deep communication between humans.


And on it went: I was anti-Iphone and whenever I saw a 'young' person text, I sneered....


It felt good to be self-righteous and on the path less traveled. It also felt a bit alone. And not so much fun. But hey, feeling right can't be beat - Right??


And then I learned a new word: LUDDITE. This is what I was told: Luddites where people that pretty much resisted modern Technology. And this is what Wikipedia is saying: "The Luddites were a social movement of British textile artisans in the early nineteenth century who protested—often by destroying mechanized looms—against the changes produced by the Industrial Revolution, which they felt were leaving them without work and changing their entire way of life."

OK - I was one of them and I also realized something else: I was getting OLD. Not my looks (of course...yet), but my views. My resistance to change and to go with the flow. This really bothered me. One of my best friends Agnes, passed away 2 years ago at the age of 94. I loved Agnes for her connectedness with all generations and her openness to pretty much everything.

And this is when I decided to ask my friends Kenie and Stephanie from Brooklyn (both in their 20's) to be my mentors. They gladly accepted and we had our first phone conference (with agenda and all) yesterday. Topic: Twitter.



I will blog about everything I learned in my next entry - just in case some Luddites are reading this.

Oh - and I am back full blast on Facebook, own an Iphone and started to Tweet.... it feels good to be reconnected.

A quote I read this morning in my daily mailings from 'Abraham' (a manifested entity, channeled through Esther Hicks....): "We must have objects of attention, that are ringing our bells, in order to feel the fullness of who we are"

This rings so true with me and fits another quote I love:
"People don't need to be taught, they need to be reminded".

It is so easy to get disconnected. On many different levels.

Now I want to focus on being disconnected from oneself. For me it means, that I don't know what to do. I wake up in the morning without direction and a little bit heavy already. Voices race through my head, making lists and plans. Tons of 'shoulds and 'have-to's...

The moment I can focus, the voices dissipate. And the way I focus is simple:
today I journaled. But other things help as well: making a list of what you are grateful for, workout, be quiet - and I am sure that each person has their own way of getting reconnected.

Focus is nothing else but 'objects of attention'. I will pay more attention to what gets me connected and maybe share in future.

For now - enjoy your day!