PurpleCar

(If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, hop on over to Common Craft and watch this video.)

How to Start Using Twitter.

So you’ve gone over to Twitter.com and signed up.  Congratulations, you’re a Tweeter!  Now what?  What do you use it for?  How do you find people to follow?  How to get people to follow back?

First things first.  You must do the following 3 things when you sign up to Twitter:

1. Upload a picture (any picture will do, but one of your face is best.  G-rated helps too).
2. Fill out a bio, including Location.
3. Provide a URL, even if it is your MySpace page.

A picture, a bio, and a URL go a long way in making you appear to be someone who wants to join the community.  (I also advise new users to keep away from putting numbers in their username as this tends to look spammy.)

TIP: Don’t be afraid to change your bio sometimes.  I personally change my bio every few weeks.  It gives my followers some variety and a way to learn a little bit more about me with every tweak.  Still, I keep the common elements in the bio field (e.g. “writer” and “techie geek”).

OK, you’re all set up.  Now what?

Now you start following people.  To follow a person means that you subscribe to their feed; you see everything they tweet out in the public timeline.

Hopefully you know a person or two to follow to get you started.  If you don’t know a soul on Twitter, follow me!  If that isn’t enough for you (which, I can’t imagine), then start searching for people who share your interests.  You can do this in a few ways.

Search locally.  An ADOBE AIR application called TwitterLocal will show you tweets from people in whatever area you specify.   It doesn’t work that well but it does work enough for you to find some local people.

TIP: After you’ve downloaded the free AIR application, check out Twhirl and Tweetdeck for great Twitter interfaces.

Search Google with the following syntax to find a bunch of people to follow:  Term location site:twitter.com (replace “term” with “writer” “doctor” “juggler” or whatever you’re looking for, and put your city in the “location” part.  My favorite search is writer philadelphia site:twitter.com).

Twitter Grader allows you to put in your city and see the top Tweeters (I’m usually around #12 for Philly).  Follow a few that sound interesting.  Tweet them (type @ then their username, no spaces.  Type your message, then hit send).  Start conversations.  Most people usually follow back.

Twellow is a service that helps people find niches on Twitter.  There are so many of these types of sites popping up everyday.  Just look for them.

TIP:  Under the Notices tab in your Twitter Settings is the word “@Replies” next to a little pulldown menu.  [See picture].  Until you are very familiar with Twitter, I suggest that you set it to “Show me all @replies.”  This helps you find new people to follow.  If someone sends an @reply to someone else that seems interesting, check out the person they are @replying to.  Do this by clicking on the username or typing http://twitter.com/username in your browser’s URL (replace “username” with whatever came after the @ in the person’s tweet).  You may find that the person on the other side of the conversation may be just the kind of person you’re looking for.  Once you are comfortable with Twitter and have found enough interesting people to follow, then you can change this setting to “Show me @replies to people I’m following.”  Doing so will keep the noise in your stream to a minimum.

How to get people to follow back?

Usually people will follow back once you follow them.  If they don’t, don’t worry about it.  There’s way too much emphasis in the social media world about number of followers.  Follower numbers are not trustworthy; as cool as Twitter is, spammers abound, which send follower rates through the roof but make those rates totally bogus.  Don’t waste your 140 characters per tweet on desperate pleas for followers either.  Just Tweet out things that interest you: links, quotes, musings, etc.

TIP: Under settings at the very bottom of the page is a checkbox next to Protect My Updates.  Don’t check this box.  If you protect your updates right away, you won’t get any followers and it will be nearly impossible for people to have conversations with you.  Private tweeting is more of an advanced Twitter function and requires a little learning curve.

Don’t follow thousands of people.  To start out, try about 20 people on for size.  See how the timeline suits you.  See if people are following back.  One of the biggest mistakes that I see constantly is the Major Follow Move.  Newbies start on Twitter then click follow buttons all up and down the timeline like a squirrel hoarding nuts in November.  DO NOT DO THIS.  That’s a dead give-away for “spammer.”  In fact, the spammer Major Follow Move had gotten to be such a problem that the Twitter.com staff have now put a 2,000 person cap on new follows.  You can’t follow more than 2000 people if your follower::followee ratio is too out of whack.

So, as people follow you back, follow more people.  Grow your network slowly.  You can always watch the humongous public timeline if you’re bored (Japanese kids are writing novels on Twitter, so be forewarned if you want to absorb the world’s public tweets).

Last but not least, the big question:  What the heck do I use this for?

Great question.  Once you are familiar with tweeting, you’ll have learned that the simple answers to “What are you doing?” don’t really elicit intellectually stimulating conversations.  I don’t use that prompt much anymore myself.  Telling my followers “I’m getting my roots done” doesn’t really keep my anyone interested.   As a freelancer and stay-at-home mom, I use Twitter as my water-cooler, my board room, my lunch table, and my happy hour.  I send out questions to the group that sometime roll into heated debates among many users.  Sometimes I retweet a funny link someone else sent me.  Just wing it for now.  You’ll get into the swing of things.

TIP: Search the internet for 3rd party tools that work with Twitter (it’s ok to give your password to the apps, just make sure your Twitter password isn’t the same as your banking or email or any other password).  The Twitter search functions may help you figure out what you want to do with your account and who you may want to follow.  Check out this wiki to get started.

Twitter is one of those litmus tests in life: what you put into it will be what you get out of it.  Find your people.  Start connecting.

And try your hardest to avoid addiction. 

Here’s the Better Philly video segment. It’s definitely a very cursory introduction and it is geared toward stay-at-home moms:

Second video, learn about Joey Fortman’s bubble tweet:

Tags: how to, how to use twitter, Media, New media, personality, psychology, social networking, start, technology, Twitter, twitter tools, websites

Dear Reader,

As many of my family and close friends know, I have joined the ranks of the caring men and women who have military pen pals currently serving tours in Iraq. Through Twitter, I learned of Email Our Military (@MailOurMilitary), a volunteer service that grew out of a national security measure that banned all mail addressed to “Any Serviceman.” I took on two pen pals. We’ve been exchanging emails for about two or three weeks now.

For security reasons, I cannot go into details about these two service people or the content of our emails. But I do have a lot to say about writing and using our hobby for good things. If you are a writer, like me, why not take on a pen pal? You can send fiction, poetry, your shopping list, whatever. But you shouldn’t write ‘anything.’ Let me explain.

A controversy seems to be stirring on Twitter. One of my online contacts, a pretty staunch conservative as far as I can tell, appears to have publicly criticized the eMOM program. I didn’t bother to look up all the entries because I want to assume the best in everyone. The best I am assuming for the critic is this: Perhaps he is, at heart, worried that some Viet Nam throwback liberal will get an eMOM pal and spew vitriol about the war and politics. The concern is that any serviceman who gets such an email can be put in a diminished psychological state, and therefore be put in danger. The critic may also worry about how ‘regular’ people may not be trained to deal with the stress that comes along with being deployed in a war zone, and that well-meaning writers, hawk or dove, can say the wrong thing and amplify the stress.

I’m hoping the eMOM people will see this post and respond with their own views, because they are the experts. I’m not. I’m just a peppy person who thinks I could brighten someone’s day, even with my plain picked-fence descriptions of daily life in the ‘burbs. I am also, by chance, a person who has seen a lot of trauma in her life and feels strong enough to listen if my penpals need me to. Any person who has ever been a friend to anyone else in life can do that.

I’m a ‘bleeding heart liberal’ who writes poetry and hates sitting in church. I breast fed my children and carried them around in slings and am married to a person with a PhD in Philosophy. Those few facts should give you enough ammo to make up all the stereotypes you want about me and my political beliefs. It doesn’t matter. I have enough of a brain to realize that I am writing to people employed as soldiers in a war zone. I know that anything I write can be misconstrued and weigh heavily on the mind of a soldier who may go into combat. I also realize this isn’t rocket science, and American soldiers, although human, are highly trained professionals that are taught to block out stupidity when they are in the line of fire. They aren’t children, and neither are the eMOM civilian participants.

As a creative and professional person, I write. As an American, I see it as my duty to write to a soldier or two in Iraq. We need to wake up, people. We are one country. This war and those soldiers are our responsibility. Yes, “OUR,” which includes you. You sitting right there reading this. Write what you can. Your emails don’t have to be perfect. If you are too shy or afraid, recruit your best outgoing friends. Find someone who is sending care packages and donate something. Whatever. Those service people just want to be remembered and respected. That’s it! How EASY is that?

And you know what? You may take away more value than you can ever dream of. I get a little misty-eyed when I read how deeply grateful my penpals are just for a mere shout out. It’s a big huge piece of humble pie that ALL of us Americans, blue, red, or PURPLE, could eat. Twice.

Love,

-PurpleCar

A Proud eMailOurMilitary.com Member

http://www.emailourmilitary.com/

Tags: email our military, eMOM, iraq, Media, New media, obligation, pen pal, servicemen, soldiers, write

As a fiction writer (a.k.a. story-teller), I want to take a moment to remind us all of that (hopefully) familiar feeling of immersion when reading a great book. I’m not being a luddite. Just take a second and think back to that experience. The writing was so good you lost track of time. The fictional characters were real people, perhaps just like you or your neighbor down the street. You could hardly wait to turn the page. Your foot was tapping. Your heart rate went up. You let yourself be whisked away, and that was the point. Remember? Good.

Now ask yourself, what could make that better? Perhaps being a part of the story yourself?

“Immersive Entertainment” is a term being thrown around by everyone from plasma screen TV manufacturers to mom-and-pop podcasters. Like the term “new media,” there is no solid, agreed-upon definition of the term, but the buzzword still peaks interest in the media-worn consumer.

Any sci-fi fan worth their salt can name a dozen hedonistic planets, solid holograms, or pleasure robots that portray our human fantasies of virtual reality. I call these ‘entertainment realities,’ and they seem to be our goal. We take small steps toward these entertainment edens. Today’s developers are concentrating on previously ignored senses in order to make the story experience seem “more real.”

Storytelling, the mother of all entertainment, first relied on sound. Printed media came, relying on sight. The vistas and the music became enveloping, whisking us away further into the story. Now there are high-definition flat screens that add special backlighting to supposedly increase depth perception, which the manufacturers boast will make you feel “like you’re there” more than ever before. Movement and touch are being added; Your chair or at the very least your game controller can vibrate when your avatar takes a hit or there is an explosion in a TV show. Smell-o-vision will probably soon emerge, and every show will have code that activates certain chemicals in the connected surround-smell modules in the room. Turn it up to superblast and you’ll be able to taste it too. Most of the top Googles on “Immersive Entertainment” are about these mock virtual reality video gaming or extra bells and whistles (lights, sounds, chair buzzing) added to your living room.

Entertainment has moved far beyond the lonely one-hour-a-week episode on TV or console game. Now, you can read blogs “written by” the fictional characters in that TV show, you can watch extra footage on websites, you can join in discussions and post video tributes on YouTube or Viddler, you can game on-line with strangers. Just recently I noticed that members of Twitter, a free on-line instant-message type of service, can now follow Chuck Bartowski, the main character of this season’s break-out hit “Chuck.” Chuck is a mild-mannered tech support guy who is forced into international spying.

I follow Chuck on Twitter.

I don’t know what I’m expecting out of it. Chuck doesn’t reply to any messages, he just puts them out, and infrequently at that. He doesn’t read anyone else’s messages. Basically, the writers of the show are using social networking media to promote the show. I know this. But I have to admit, when I was browsing the Twitter site and I found “Chuck Bartowski” listed as if he were a living, breathing person and not just a character with an actor’s face, I was excited. I love that show. Plus, Chuck is exactly my type of guy: geeky, yet handsome; masculine, but empathetic (he’s a bit of an underachiever, but I could work on that!) It excited me that I could be exposed to this quirkily dreamy anti-hero in an extra, seemingly more personal way than just watching him on my DVR or reading a fake blog post. I can pretend that Chuck is in my small social network, that Chuck is messaging me personally, that we used to work together but now live in separate states but we keep in touch. I know the instant messages, called “Tweets” on Twitter, are just as fake as a fictional character blog post, but somehow Twitter and tweets as social media are still so new and fresh that Chuck’s messages just seem more real. This makes my heart speed up.

I’m sure it will get old. My heart will slow down. Reading a thriller is a lot different the second time around. Chuck is the lucky character to be the first to send me all a-Twitter. My first fictional love was Phineas of John Knowles’ A Separate Peace; he stole my teenage soul. Phineas still holds a special place in my heart. But A Separate Peace was one of “those” books for me, an entertainment reality that I will never forget. Will instant messages and a silly TV show compare to that experience? Only time will tell. But I intend to keep my mind and eyes open to Chuck, to keep my preferences for the printed novel in check, and give the new social media world a chance to whisk me away.

Tags: Chuck, Chuck Bartowski, Media, New media, story, storytelling, Twitter, virtual reality