Here We Are. What Now?

1. Go to Twitter (http://www.twitter.com) and see what you think, then check out this blog post for more info on Twitter:  Twitter 3 years on and why it is the killer app.

• Read some of these other articles, if you would like:
• Twitter Explained For Librarians (http://www.davidleeking.com/2007/03/10/twtter-explained-for-librarians-or-10-ways-to-use-twitter/)
• The 12 Minute Definitive Guide To Twitter (http://dev.aol.com/article/2007/04/definitive-guide-to-twitter)
• Is Twitter Too Good? (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2007/03/is_twitter_too_.html)
• More Thoughts On Twitter (http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2007/04/09/more_thoughts_on_twitter.html)
• Twittering About Second Life (http://librarygarden.blogspot.com/2007/05/twittering-about-second-life.html#links)
• A Twitter with ‘tweets’ (http://www.nj.com/starledger/stories/index.ssf?/base/news-11/1179030652309280.xml&coll=1)
• 10 Rules of Twitter (and How I Break Every One) (http://scobleizer.com/2007/09/23/the-10-rules-of-twitter-and-how-i-break-every-one/) – via Scobleizer

Check out some of these other twitter related apps:

1. Twittermap (http://twittermap.com/maps)
2. Twitterholic (http://www.twitterholic.com/)
3. Twitter Public Timeline (http://twitter.com/public_timeline)
4. 8 Awesome Firefox Plugins For Twitter (http://mashable.com/2007/05/06/8-awesome-firefox-plugins-for-twitter/)
5. TwitterVision (http://twittervision.com/)
7. As you go, add these URLs to your del.icio.us account, and when you’re done write a blog post about what you think.
8. Check out these other, similar sites:
   • Jaiku (http://www.jaiku.com/)
     • To start on the path of comparing Jaiku to Twitter, check out this O’Reilly Radar post.
   • Pownce (http://www.pownce.com/) – currently in beta, so you’ll have to ask to be invited to try it out.
   • Dodgeball (http://www.dodgeball.com/) – very much for mobile devices.
   • Blip – for music lovers.  Search for a song using blip’s music search engine, and post it, twitter style, for all you friends to follow.  No uploading needed.
9. If you find the process of microblogging so addicting that you can’t stop, and you’ve set up accounts at these and other microblogging sites, then you might be in need of HelloTxt – a site that lets you simultaneously post to all your microblogs at once.

Try It Out

1. Sign up for a Twitter account. Go to Twitter (http://twitter.com) and sign up for an account. It’s pretty straightforward, and they don’t require a lot of information to sign up. A great post about things that you can do with Twitter is The Several Habits Of Wildly Successful Twitter Users (http://slackermanager.com/2007/03/the-several-habits-of-wildly-successful-twitter-users.html), which gives a lot of ideas about what you can do with Twitter and how you can use it effectively. Some quick things you can do right off the bat are:
   • Put a link to your twitter account in your WordPress blog. If you have a Blogger blog, put a badge in your sidebar.
   • Check the Twitter public Timeline, and see what people are Twittering. On the right is a box that has some of the main Twitterers. See what they’re twittering, and add one or two of them as friends if you think they’re interesting.
   • Explore some of the ways you can integrate Twitter into other websites – widgets and sidebars and the like. By now you have a lot of different profiles – see if you can add something Twitter related into one of your other profiles, like MySpace.
   • Check out the article (if you haven’t already) 8 Awesome Firefox Plugins For Twitter (http://mashable.com/2007/05/06/8-awesome-firefox-plugins-for-twitter/) and try adding one of those plugins to your Firefox browser. One great add-on is Twitterbar (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4664), which lets you post whatever is in your address bar to Twitter. So, you can post a URL, or you can type a short message there and post it. Nice.
   • To find other users, use a search tool like Twit-Dir (http://www.twitdir.com/) which allows you to search for ID’s as well as keywords. I searched for “Library” and got over 100 results.
   • Check out this Libraryclips Roundup (http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2007/07/19/roundup-flotzam-twitticious-twitterfaces-tw3t-twittermail/) post for more ideas.
   • In Facebook? Join the Librarians Who Twitter (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5825485883).