I found a great little tool that lets me organize and use twitter in a better way — it's called tweetdeck — and I can post directly from the app (that I downloaded onto my hard drive) so I can just twitter from my desktop, and it shows me in colums my posts, the posts of people I follow, and direct messages from people that I follow. So it lets me use twitter as a kind of "chat" tool as well, either privatly, by direct messaging (DMing) or publicly by replying. I can also "re-tweet (RT) useful information that comes in via twitter from people I follow, such as trip insurance or self-publishing tools or a cool new motorcycle coming out soon. Tweetdeck also lets you search on a topic. If you search "motorcycle travel" you'll see my tweets come up a lot. Also, if you tweet on self-publishing, I will come up occasionally, since I am an author who believes in taking matters into her own hands. Using search is a good way to find people who know a lot about the topic you're interested in. A lot of journalists use twitter search when they're researching articles, to find interview subjects and experts.
Twitter can also be used to chat. A browser-based tool called tweetchat lets you set up chat rooms for twitter users. You just sign in with your twitter username and password and start chatting. I set up a chat room for motorcycle travel, where I can set up a day and time for everyone to gather and chat about whatever's on their mind — related to motorcycle travel, that is.
I follow just under 100 people on twitter. They tweet mostly on motorcycle travel and self-publishing. If people start tweeting about, well, everything–like they're going to lunch now or getting coffee or they're hating having to use spreadsheets, I immediately unfollow them. I only follow twits who consistently give me useful information and links to more details on the web. Obviously I use twitter for my work and not my personal life. I really don't want to wade through the emotional state of everyone I follow. I have enough random emotional states of my own during the day. Trust me, you don't want me to share!
So there, that's my mega-blog on the micro-blog tool twitter. I do try to keep it to motorcycle travel related topics though remember that I do tweet on self-publishing sometimes. I also plan to tweet from my upcoming trip to Europe and Morocco. So if you want to follow my micro-blogs between my mega-blogs and the stories I publish on my dispatches page, then follow me on twitter!
Tweetchat is the Internet equivalent of the C.B. radio. When I first started in trucking, I had some great conversations on the C.B. and learned a lot. We truckers would meet on channel 19, then pair off and go to another channel to keep 19 clear. Now it is mostly just trash talk with no rules or etiquette, so most long-haul truckers listen to XM or Sirius instead. Lets hope that doesn’t happen to Twitter.
You’re into self-publishing, so what ever happened to “Under the Radar”? If the book is too costly to produce, then maybe you could just publish it on CD, and make copies as you need them. No charge for this tip:)
Hi Steve, nice to hear from you!
Thank goodness you can filter your twitter feeds – I immediately unfollow anybody who complains about spreadsheets or tells me they’ll be back in a minute or just says TGIF. For me it’s about trading valuable information – and that’s not that I’m going out for a cup of coffee, now!
I love the tweetchat capability and I hope to be using it to its maximum capacity during my trip. I’ll have the data package for the iPhone so will hopefully be on the G3 constantly enough to do some live stuff – of course, time zones permitting.
I may also set up a skype call. If I do, I’ll tweet it. Would love to hear from you.
Under the Radar/China Road is ALMOST done! It’s in final editing. I had hoped to get it out before I left, but . . .
10 4 over and out
Carla