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.