I’m going to start out by defining a few terms you may see on Twitter.

RT: retweet.

Quite simply is the act of reposting a twitter post.  Basically you would do this if you thought someone else’s post was particularly entertaining or otherwise relevant and want to share it with your twitter followers.  I’ll show you several ways to do this.

RT @jamesgoux: Work is simply hell today.
retweet @jamesgoux: Work is simply hell today.
retweeting @jamesgoux: Work is simply hell today.

OH: overheard

This is when you tweet something that you heard in real life, usually (but not always) spoken by a complete stranger.  Usually I see people posting comments that just sound really strange and funny out of context.  Here’s a couple  examples

OH: I swear to god, if you don’t change your answer I’m kidnapping your monkey!

OH on the bus: You know who’s really cute, and just got out of jail?

#keywords

You may from time to time see tweets with phrases in them that have a pound sign in front of them.  These can be anywhere in the tweet.  Basically they’re purpose is to signify or sort of category or tag for the tweet.  This way a topic can be tracked across all of twitter, no matter who’s following who.  There are several ways to track this.  The simplest way is to just use http://search.twitter.com but there are other sites out there that organize #categorizes into visual mediums.

tinyurl links

Often you will see links that direct to some variation of tinyurl, bit.ly, or tr.im.  It ends up looking something like this: http://tinyurl.com/cnwuz8.  Rather than be confused by these mysterious links, just know that these sites can take long links and shorten them into more managable ones that take up less characters in the feed.  You can create these short links by going to any of these websites or using a twitter client that includes url shortening as a feature (digsby, tweetdeck, etc).

TwitPic

Another link that you’ll often find in tweets is to twitpic.com.  This is a really simple place where people can share photos with Twitter.  Once again, the easiest way to do this yourself is through various clients.

Clients

Since my last post I’ve found a few clients that I prefer to the ones I previously recommended, so I’m going to point them out to you.

The first is TwitterFon, which is now my primary twitter client on the iPhone.  I find it to be much better than Twinkle, which I was using before.  Mostly the interface is much cleaner and easier to read, and it also keeps track of which tweets you’ve read already, and skips straight to the next item on the list.  It also highlights new items to make them easier to keep track of.  I also like that it uses TwitPic instead of its own system for posting photos.  This is simply a more universal way of posting photos, and it allows comments too.  As for geotagging, you can do it from post to post, instead of generally.  Finally, it avoids the whole “twinkle community”, the one that doesn’t even use twitter, and at least in my area, incredibly inane, crude, and often perverted.  I highly reccomend using this if you use an iPhone.

The second client I want to point out is TweetDeck.  I’ve stopped using Digsby for Twitter, primarily because it’s interface is hard to use (it often closes accidentally since you have to hold the mouse over it directly for it to remain in view) and it also doesn’t provide many featres.  TweetDeck is great primarily becasue you can organize the people you follow into groups.  I seperate the people I actually know from the wealth of “celebrities” who I follow.  I don’t mind missing a celebrity tweet now and then, but I want to prioritze the tweets that my friends post.  Additionallly, it’s interface is fast and easy to use, and it provides all the standard features plus a few I haven’t seen elsewhere, such as the ability to auto-shorten your post (finds unneeded characters if your strapped for letters).  It also can do a lot with the #hashtags I mentioned earlier.  It’s even integrated facebook in a few ways recently.  Once you get really into Twitter, TweetDeck will become a must if you want to keep track of everything.

Facebook sync

Not everyone is on Twitter, but pretty much everyone is on facebook.  I like sharing my posts with as many people as possible, so I sync my tweets with my facebook “status”.  For those who wonder why I change my status so often, this is the reason.  Doing this is easy, just search Twitter on facebook and you’ll find an application called Twitter. Fill out your information and you’re done.  I get a lot more opinions on my posts this way, and on facebook people can add comments to my posts instead of @replying.

Comparing Twitter to Facebook

With the most recent updates to facebook, the home page feed has become very similar to twitter.  There’s something to be said for the fact that facebook has a system identical, and perhaps in some ways better than twitter.  But it’s not the system that makes twitter what it is.  For one, the simplicity of twitter makes you engage with it in a certain way, one far more active than any facebook feed.  Secondly, the facebook feed isn’t really consistant, sometimes certain posts show up and then upon refresh they don’t.  It’s easy to miss things your friends say.  Twitter’s feed is completely consistant, if you are thorough, you can see every post from the people you follow.  Thirdly, twitter’s mobile function, both in terms of applications and SMS compatability, is much more accessable than most.  And finally, there’s the community.  The way the people on twitter participate is much more active than the way people on facebook participate.  Obviously, twitter is what you and your friends make out of it, but I find it’s simplicity really allows for fun thoughts and discussion.

And that’s about it for now.  Let me know if you find these types of things at all helpful.  I plan to do an explanation of RSS sometime in the near future.