MiddBlog

A lot of people ask me: “Ryan, what’s Twitter?”

I have yet to come up with a succinct and accurate way to respond except for: “it’s facebook statuses on social crack” (even Jon Stewart makes fun of Twitter or better yet, someone twittered as a man broke into his house). The best way to know is to try it yourself. Sign up for an account, answer Twitter’s question of: “What are you doing?”, and start “following” people who are interesting.

And it’s the idea of “following” people that is sometimes hard to grasp. Facebook has trained us to “friend” someone (basically, ask their permission to interact with a person online). Twitter is different in that most everyone’s information is public – no permission needed, just “follow” someone, anyone.

And as you follow people, their “updates” populate a list of all the people you follow. Some may have breaking news like the NYT saying that the “Dow Soars 379 Points as Investors Find Faint Signs of Hope” and still others will be mundane dorm items like: “trying my best not to hear the girl next door having a tuesday morning sex, but she’s really loving it and it’s really loud and o god. awkward.”

The next step is to publish your own updates which are limited to 140 characters each. The key here is that you don’t necessarily need to publish every last detail in your life, but you can if you want. What you publish determines how many people find your updates interesting enough to “follow” you. I usually publish an assortment of fringe thoughts on the weather, life, professors, music, emails I get, classes, cool websites I find, etc.

The last major element of Twitter is the social element: the “@” tag and the “#” tag. You can reply to other people’s updates by starting your update with “@username.” Again, the idea here is that it is not a private message between two people, it’s a public message so that people can join in on the conversation. You can @reply to anyone from friends to celebrities to your professor to various companies (I follow the Sharpie brand on twitter). Adding a “#topic” tag allows people to search for specific keywords in updates. For instance, searching for “#powershift09″ gives you a list of all updates with that self-identified tag. This allows people to follow the “news” in an almost instantaneous manner. Civil unrest in Tibet? You’ll hear about it first from people twittering on the ground, not from news teams rushing back to offices to writes stories for the morning paper.

Warning: this may be addictive and make you procrastination-prone.

Here are some other articles that might help explain further: College Student HAVE to Twitter, 18 people to follow on twitter for a real time education, Beginner’s Guide and Tutorial for Twitter.

The Middlebury Twitterverse: @b_fung, @liberalWill, @rkellett, @jisham, @readDanwrite, @yuletide, @worthBak, @BenWessel, @smclaypool, @mvjennings, @IntraVenus, @angeow, @MistressMaeve, @caseymahoney, @middvites, @konstantin_s, @rosmeissl, @AustenLC, @billmckibben, @queenna. Wanna join this list? Hit the comments or “follow”@MiddBlog

As an alternative to Twitter, many staff, some faculty, and a few students have signed on to a similar service called Yammer. It’s exactly the same as Twitter except it exclusively features users within the Middlebury network, if you sign up with your middlebury.edu address. The advantage is that it is a much more closed and close-knit community and you get to hear more about what’s going on at middlebury as opposed to randomly what’s happening in the world. Go ahead, give it a go.