The Skinny on Twitter part 1

The most wonderful thing about Twitter is the absolute lack of guilt. There is absolutely NO obligation to follow anyone who is following you. I can start and stop following people at will...and I do...often.

The most unnerving thing about Twitter is the format. Since you only get 140 characters to spit out whatever is on your mind, people get pretty creative. Luckily some standards have developed that make sense, but look crazy at first.

1.) if the post begins with RT simply means they are retweeting something interesting they saw for their followers.
2.) if the post begins with @name that means that they are direct tweeting with one other person. Since you don't get the whole conversation, these usually make no sense at all.
3.) if you see a #word that means they have tagged a word in the post. I don't know exactly what you can do later with these tags (yet).

Right now, I am considered a "Lurker" because I just look around at other people's posts and don't say much. I look for posts with links to other sites. I have wandered my way into many cool video clips, articles, and blogs this way. Lots of things out there to get the brain churning about education!

My goal is to become become an active Twitterer by the end of the summer. This is out of my comfort zone, but to summarize something I recently found by Twitter: the whole point of social networking is to interact with new people in a new way. So go big or go home!

Here is a good Twitter Resource. If you scroll all the way down past the glossary, it shows some common protocols for all social networking.

twictionary.pbworks.com/