TimesToCome

Twitter has been a lot of fun.  I realized I was behind the curve last April when I attended a garden blogger’s conference.  I was the geekiest of them all, and about the only one not yet on Twitter.

So I signed up when I came back from the conference.  Over the last few months I’ve stayed in touch with people I would not otherwise have remained in touch with and I ‘ve met a whole lot of really cool people in the surrounding communities.

The best way to use Twitter is to sign up and first look for people you already know.  Then using Twitter’s search tool you can search for people with common interests near you,  or any where you’d like to meet people.

It is a bit like having a text messaging party line.  I leave Twhirl running on my desktop.  You’ll have several witty comments run by, several funny comments run by, and you’ll be the first to hear if anything interesting happens near you. You can jump in and help when someone has a question, people will jump in and help you when you are stuck on a technical issue.

You can send messages to the public and to a specific person, you can also carry on private conversations under the radar of everyone else.

You can access Twitter from your cell phone there are clients for most every phone or you can just go to the website.

You can upload photos various ways to share with the Twitter crowd.

Twitter is changing the way lots of companies interact with people. About a week ago Comcast went out and I twitted ‘Comcast is out what a surprise’ seconds later I received ‘@timestocome How can we help? comcastcares’. It was spooky.

I imagine a day not too many months away when I will Twitter ‘George Bush is a moron’ and I’ll receive back ‘Step away from the keyboard, swat team is moving in department_homeland_security’.

On Twitter you’ll be limited to 160 characters per tweet. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you’ll learn to convey things in 160 characters or less.

Many of the iPhone clients have an emergency button on the Twitter clients. You hit it and it takes a photo, your GPS coordinates and sends a tweet for help to your friend list. In Egypt an American Twittered to his friends that the police were coming. His friends then knew he had been arrested and were able to get him out of jail. One day soon not having a Twitter account will be like not having an email address.

I mentioned in passing that it is odd that people search for my name once or twice a month, visit my blogs, then never leave a note or drop an email. I never know if it is an old friend, new friend or someone just curious about me? No matter, any information I have splashed all over the web is public. But someone asked how I knew people were Googling me?

So how do you know if people are watching you? I find out from my website logs. Every log entry that comes from a search engine, shows the terms some one used to find your website.

timestocome.com-Jul-2008:00.00.00.000 - - [06/Jul/2008:14:43:13 -0600] “GET / HTTP/1.1″ 200 2206 “http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Linda+MacPhee-Cobb” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; SU 3.011; (R1 1.6); .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; MAXTHON 2.0)”

I zero’d out the ip number of the searcher. You will have an ip number, date, search terms, browser, and search engine.

You can then search for the ip number in the logs and see what other pages that person visited.

So are you curious about who is curious about you?

You can go to Arin enter the ip number of your visitor and you might get some information back. More likely he/she will just be part of a pool of ip numbers from some isp, but it never hurts to try and occasionally you get lucky.

You can put that ip number in your web browser and see if there is a website hosted there.

You can also check your emails and see if that ip number turns up in an email that was sent to you.

If you are worried about people stalking you on the web, keep your real name off the web. Seriously I don’t see any harm in it. Tell me that you, the reader, has never Googled someone you’ve run across. I thought not. You were just curious, and I expect your visitor was as well and perhaps just embarrassed to tell you.

Suppose you want to Google someone, visit the websites that turn up, but not be identified as having Googled that person? That is easy.

Google the person in one browser, cut and paste the link into another. The search term shows up when you click the links Google servers up. It helps webmasters know what kind of information people are looking for on their site. If people are looking for information on apples and I’m not covering apples much on my site, I know I need to fix that.

Now if you want to know who is talking about you online you’ll want to set up a Google Alert. I have them set up for my name and for the website domains.

Remember, always, every step you take online is logged.

Resist the temptation to get too clever setting up a website with your name on it to see who is Googling you. It might be your future spouse or your future employer who is doing the search.