You may have heard about Twitter – but if it sounds to you like everyone’s taken up bird watching, don’t worry, you’re not alone in wondering what it is all about.
Twitter isn’t about birds at all but is one of an ever growing number of social networking websites that allows you to communicate with other people using your computer or your mobile phone. Twitter is different to Facebook or Myspace because it does not allow you to put up a lot of information about yourself, instead it asks one simple question: ‘What are you doing?’ and dictates you answer that in 140 characters!
When you use Twitter you send your message or ‘Tweet’ out into the Twitter world. People that are interested in what you have to say can ‘follow’ you (like making friends on Facebook) and you can in turn ‘follow’ them and see their Tweets when you login to your Twitter account. Twitter describes itself as a way to ‘stay connected with friends, relatives, and co-workers [so] that you have a sense of what folks are up to but you are not expected to respond to any updates unless you want to. This means you can step in and out of the flow of information as it suits you…’
Here at Axis we started using Twitter after hearing about it at Futuresonic 2008. We thought it would be a great way to let our members and audience know about what we get up to. Since then we’ve got quite keen on it and we use our Tweets to let our followers know about breaking news, exhibitions, conferences, opportunities, jobs, gossip and links to things we find on the web, as well as ‘what we are doing’. We include our Tweets on the Art Talk Homepage and you can see them on our Twitter home page www.twitter.com/axisweb.
To start using Twitter you need to visit www.twitter.com and set up an account. Then you need to find some people to follow – try looking through our followers and the people we follow to get you started www.twitter.com/axisweb .
To find out more about Twitter watch this short but informative ‘Howcast’ tutorial which gives you the basics and a bit more.
Finally, if you are sending a Tweet to Axis or relating to something we’d be interested in, don’t forget to put @axisweb in your tweet – that way we are sure to see it. We might even ‘re-tweet’ it, which means your message goes out to even more people.
