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.

What Twitter is can be difficult to explain, if only because it manages to be many things at once.  Simply put: Twitter is a social network in which it’s users post updates limited to 140 characters, often referred to as tweets.  Twitter’s own explanation says that you are supposed to use these tweets to answer the question: “What are you doing?”  Anyone who knows the link to your twitter profile can view these tweets (unless you decide to make them private), and any Twitter user who decides to follow you will be able to see all of your updates on their main feed with the rest of their friends’ updates.  Similarly, you can build up a similar list of users whose posts you are interested in, so that you can keep track of all these tweets.  The original idea was to provide a way for friends who don’t always get to be around you to still get a better idea of what your life is like, what your interests are, and otherwise learn new things about you.  The whole twitter phenomena has also been referred to as “micro-blogging”, due to it being a less involving, lower commitment version of having a blog (web log, an online journal, column, or diary).  Tweets can also be compared easily to facebook’s status updates, as they are very similar.  In terms of content though, you can pretty much post anything you want: what you are doing, random thoughts, messages to your followers, etc.  It’s essentially a massive publishing platform with which you can quickly reach a lot of people.  Because of this, users have come up with a way of responding to each other, through the use of the @ sign.  Any time someone says something that you’d like to comment on, you can simply make a new tweet of your own, and start it with @ followed by their username.  So if you wanted to respond to me, you might tweet “@jamesgoux I really dug last night’s episode.”

So how do you use it?  It’s easy to set up an account at Twitter.  Once you’ve done so and set up your profile, you can start tweeting.  Post whatever you like.  If you know other people who use twitter you can easily search for them and begin following them.  My user name is jamesgoux.  As you continue to use Twitter, you’ll learn that there’s many ways to access your feed of friends, and also to update your own.  You can go to twitter.com every time if you like, or you can access it using  one of various programs.  Personally, when I’m on my computer, I use Digsby, which not only gives me full access to Twitter, but also several other social networks, and numerous instant messaging clients as well.  There are other Twitter specific programs such as Twhirl, I’m sure they are better designed for the specificities of Twitter.  But there’s one way to access Twitter that makes truly changes the face of the network itself, and really revolutionizes social networking as a whole, and that’s through your phone.  Through the Twitter website, you can set up your phone to receive standard SMS texts from Twitter.  You can choose which users you’d like to receive text updates from and which you don’t, and you can also send a text to a specific number and have it automatically update your Twitter account.  When this number is stored in your phone contact list, it makes it pretty easy to drop your thoughts on the go, or respond to someone else while away from the computer.  Additionally, if you have any sort of smart phone, such as the iPhone or a Blackberry, there is probably an application specifically designed to make it easy to go through the entirety of your Twitter feed, and make updates all from your phone.  Most of these applications and desktop programs offer additional features such as the ability to attach a link to an image, or even use GPS to tag the location where your post was made.  My most common strategy for staying up to date on Twitter is to receive SMS text updates from my close friends’ accounts, and keep track of the rest of the people I follow through an iPhone application called Twinkle.  I like Twinkle because when I post it allows me to attach a location, post a picture from my phone, helps me keep track of how many characters I have left in a tweet, and allows me to see tweets that were made in a surrounding radius from where I am at the moment.  Twinkle itself has sort of become a network in itself for any given location, and I often see people chatting in the nearby area.  Finally, you can often tie your twitter account to various other social networks.  I have mine set up so that every time I tweet, it changes my facebook status accordingly (unless it’s an @ response).  Those of you who’ve noticed that I update my facebook status constantly will now understand why that is.

Twitter can also serve as a sort of mass communication tool.  Once you and a number of your friends have set up mobile updates, you can send out messages such as “Anyone want to see a movie tonight?” and all of your friends will see this and have an opportunity to respond.  It’s a good way to get a message out to a lot of people you know, without having to send something multiple times or hunt through a large address book.  And even if it’s not important, you could still have something to say that you want everyone to hear as soon as possible.

So who’s using Twitter?  A little bit of everyone.  Like all internet phenomons, the tech savvy tend to get to it first, but Twitter is rapidly spreading in popularity.  Users from around the world and all kinds of people are using it.  In addition, a lot of websites use twitter as a feed to keep you updated on changes and posts to their site.  Even famous news networks such as CNN have begun to take this approach.  While these user accounts aren’t as personal as some of the others, they can provide you with useful information and become a good source of news as well.  There’s also a lot of celebrities on Twitter these days.  Everyone from J.J. Abrams to Barack Obama to Britney Spears to M.C. Hammer has jumped on the band wagon, and if someone is famous in the tech world, they almost certainly have an account.  I also see various sub-communities start to pop-up within Twitter.  People who have common interests will often friend each other and the cross conversations that arise from this can be quite fascinating.  I myself am very interested in comics, and have found that almost every comic writer/creator who I read has a Twitter account.  Not only that, but this particular brand of user is extremely active.  Not only do you get to know more about the lives of these writers, but you sometimes get a rare glimpse into their writing process.  As someone who’s goal has always been to be a writer, and who has a passion for the process of making art in its various forms, this can be a useful and fascinating way to learn a bit more.  Other prominent communities that I’ve noticed and follow would be the podcasters (people who host radio shows for free on the internet), and the webcomic artists.  If you have a different interest, chances are there is someone of note on Twitter, or at least someone who shares your interest.  And if not, then Twitter needs you to add that interest to its community.

Another fascinating development recently is that Twitter has become a sort of news network in itself.  Because of the ease of posting, some news breaks on Twitter before it does anywhere else.  When Southern California had an earthquake recently, many twitter users beat the news stations to the punch declaring the event, what happened to them, and if they are safe.  News travels fast along the twitter route, as people often retweet things that they find of note.

And that’s about it.  The main thing is to just sign up, find a few friends, and start tweeting.  While it’s uses are complex, it’s probably the simplest and easy to use social network out there because it strips everything but these little updates away.  So go to Twitter and sign up, and make sure to follow me, @jamesgoux.

1. This is my webpage, so it’s a central location for all things… me.  It may seem pretty basic, but I really wanted a central place to have links to everywhere on the internet that has any connection to me (that I can think of).  Mostly this means linking to my social networking profiles, which you will see in the right hand column of the page.  At some point I plan to add a more extensive list of links that will include explanations of what all these websites are, for the uninitiated.  This will eventually appear on the about page, but for now, if you see something and are confused, check out the “ClaimID” link on the right for a similar list.
2. I want to make myself accountable for putting out some creative writing every week.  I often find that pressure to write something really good keeps me from starting at all, so I’ve created a place where I can just throw work out into the world and forget about it, and this is it.  Additionally, because other people are looking, hopefully I will feel some sort of obligation to get work out on a regular basis.  Inspired by Paul Dini’s “200 Words” column on iFanboy.com, I’ve tentatively decided that writing 200 words once a week is a good starting point, so expect to see pieces around that size soon.
3. I’m a film student, so in turn, I have made films.  A lot of people ask me to post them on YouTube, but I’m just not a fan of it’s cluttered format and low quality.  I would like to share my films with those who can’t go to a screening, so soon I will have my reel posted on this site.  Similarly, I’d like to get some of my art photography up here as well.
4. This site should serve as a marketing tool both for myself as someone who works in the film inustry, but also as a freelance photographer/videographer.  This is why my resume appears in the links above, and if a business for photography/videography ever begins to build up, you’ll probably start to see more information on that somewhere on this website as well.
5. It’s been a while since I had a blog, and it would be nice to have someplace to go when I feel a rant coming on, or if I have something to say that doesn’t fit in a twitter post. (By the way, if you don’t follow me on Twitter, you should note that I’m extremely active on it, and it’s one of the better ways to get to know things about me.  The link to my account is on the right).

There’s more details to be worked out of course, I’d like to come up with some sort of schedule for posts.  Perhaps 200 words on Mondays and blog posts on Thursdays?  Don’t hold me to that quite yet.  And obviously nothing real has really been posted quite yet.  Hopefully that will change soon.  Until then, “Good night, and good luck”.