On Twitter

I'm giving Twitter a try. So far (about a week), so good.

In case you don't yet speak Twitter, it's an exercise in forced brevity in which users (Twitterers) are limited to posts of 140 characters--about 25 words. Some users hew to the suggested format and answer the question "What are you doing?" The rest of us march to different drummers. I'm using Twitter to capture little wisps of thought or scraps of overheard dialogue. It's also fun to tweet (sorry, that's the term of art) back and forth with fellow Twitterers.

One Twitter oddity is its use of the @ sign. I've always pronounced that symbol "at," as in "12 light bulbs @ $1.15" or "wordworking @ gmail dot com." On Twitter, however, @ precedes a user's name, almost like an honorific. For example, if you want to respond directly to one of my tweets, you select the @ icon, and the response appears as "@fritinancy." If you want to mention another Twitterer, you write "Nice tweet by @wisekaren on legal terms." I'm not sure whether the @ is silent or how the convention arose, but I'm starting to see it in non-Twitter contexts, as when a blogger responds in Comments to a previous commenter. (Read more about the @ symbol here.)

Yes, I've mocked Twitter in the past, and shared others' mockery. That's par for the course with me and new technologies. The cycle usually goes like this: mockery, refusal, adamant refusal, argument, skeptical acceptance, grudging approval, enthusiasm, obnoxious proselytizing.

If you're a little bit curious, go to the Twitter site and register. (It's free.) If you get into it, I recommend downloading a little app called Twhirl, which gives you automatic updates. (Karen at Verbatim posted a good explanation.) You can follow my tweets by searching for "Fritinancy."

Thanks to Karen and to Kelly at Copylicious for helping me get over myself.

Read my original post on how Twitter got its name.

Comments

[Meg from All About Appearances]

I just started Twittering recently myself -- and that's how I found you. Well, I guess you found me first ; )

So far, I've found it pretty fun. I have so many random thoughts everyday, it's nice to be able to share some of them.

[Kelly Parkinson]

I went from stage 1 Mockery to stage 8 Obnoxious Proselytizing in about 2 days because of this book called _Connect! A Guide to a New Way of Working,_ by Anne Truitt Zelenka. That book got me to get it. Highly recommend!

[Emily]

I've seen the "@username" construction used on a few other message boards, ones that don't have a quoting feature. I mentally parse it as a symbolic way of saying "This comment's directed at such-and-such".

[Karen]

Welcome to my cult!
The @username thing indeed started elsewhere and was used by Twitter's early adopters, so they made it an actual feature.
P.S. LOVE the 8-stage model!

[mike]

Hear, hear on the model. What with being a late adopter and all, I find it so ... familiar. :-)

[Nancy Friedman]

Mike: I'll be getting around to *your* stages in due time!

[Erin]

The '@' is meant to have technical uses. If it's at the beginning of an entry, the '@' signifies that the tweet is directed at the person following the '@'. I think there's a page where a person can look at all tweets with @their_name in them, too.

There's also the '#', which is a "hashtag" designator. It makes it possible for you to look up all posts by any twitterers using that hashtag. E.g., knitting: http://hashtags.org/tag/knitting

[Nancy]

Thanks for the explanation, Erin. "Hashtag" is a new addition to my vocabulary!