twitter.zappos.com

I must confess that I've never really "got" Twitter, so today I went on a campaign to follow as many participants as I can to try and get a sense of the zeitgeist. The article belong is the best into I've seen and the first thing I noticed was that it seemed more useful via a mobile phone that a web browser. I've started using Google Talk as my main interface. When you type help into it you get a menu:

Reply with what you're doing.
'invite' to invite a friend.
'follow' to receive updates.
'track' to track interests.
'whois' for info.
'off' to silence.

Typing the commands gives more help. You can follow me by typing: follow CardHolder. You can silence me with: off CardHolder and unfollow me with: leave CardHolder.

Perhaps the most interesting feature was one i wasn't previously aware of, you can track keywords that you are interested in as they come up in peoples tweets. To track "yui" for instance you type: track yui. The opposite operation is: untrack yui.

I've set up a series of tracks on topics of interest to this blog, we'll see how it goes.

---MG

twitter.zappos.com: "I know that I've been spending about half an hour every time I try to convince my friends to sign up for Twitter. At first, they think it sounds interesting but aren't really motivated to sign up. Sometimes it's been a multi-week long process. But finally they relent and sign up, probably just so they can shut me up. I walk them through the signup process, step by step, and then slowly but surely, they become addicted and their lives are never the same again.

So to save me from having to give the same spiel over and over again, I decided to create this page for anyone new to Twitter."