CJ: http://www.twitter.com/CJCherryh and Jane: http://www.twitter.com/JaneSFancher. Here’s the deal: you can use a twitter ‘friend’ link to keep up with whether or when we’ve each last done a blog post, without having to hunt the page down, a big convenience for those of you wanting to follow a thread. So Friend us and twitter away! We are rather new to this, but we are seeing possibilities, like OSG (on the road) being able to reach us with a tweet like “OMG, I think I left the coffeepot on!”, and us being able to announce a new upload to Closed Circle—or a massive fix to some unforeseen problem. If you ‘friend’ us, that way we can reach out to our ‘friends’ย and say: “We just uploaded a file with a fix to the .lit glitch in the last megafile!” and you’ll be able to find it before the keys are cold.
You can also install a comment to a post without having to go further…pretty neat, eh? You can do that via phoneย from the washroom at work, if you just can’t wait that long. But please, not in traffic! ๐
I’m going to admit it. This one shocks me. I’ll be watching to see just how it goes. Brave souls! ๐
Heh! I have twitter, but I don’t twit… Kind of like facebook: I don’t really use it, unless it emails me something I find interesting. As my favorite math teacher answered any question during a test: “I’ll be interested to see what you do with that.”
Oh dear,twitter! ?Friend? How do you ‘Friend’ some
one? Google has a Blog place where you can set up
a blog(?),so I did……I have nothing to ‘blog’.
This Twitter has the same feeling.
Basically, you establish your account and then go looking (search on twitter) for somebody you know. You go into their profile and click a button to ‘follow’ this person’s tweets, which basically enters their twitter URL into your ‘notify me’ list. It doesn’t have to be reciprocal. In the case of Wave or, when we get it running, Closed Circle, this means you’ll get an e-mail whenever there’s a new Post (which it calls a ‘tweet’) on some site you’re following. It doesn’t ‘tweet’ each new comment, understand, just each new Post, or we’d inundate twitter. ๐
Twitter’s interesting – I tend to use it more for microblogging or linking to a real post. I’ve been in a lengthy rut where trying to crank out a blog post is less fruitful than squeezing blood out of a turnip. Twitter’s more spur of the moment, and great for a “hey, blah blah blah” tweet.
One thing to watch out for is the spammers – the people who are following an ungodly high amount of people, yet don’t have many followers. They’ll follow you for no reason and post insanely stupid stuff. I find that having a locked account eliminates most of the spammers, but the drawback with a locked account is that you need to approve /every single/ person who wants to follow you. I prefer a locked account to avoid the spammy, my better half prefers to keep his account unlocked, but goes through periodically and blocks anything that seems spammy. YMMV here.
Thanks for that warning. I have a spam filter, but the only people it has EVER caught have been mostly Spence, occasionally JCrow, and other honest people trying to post a useful link for all of us. We’ll see if we develop a problem. Of course I have my godlike Admin powers, in which I can blow a post and poster offline. And if it turns out to let people post without membership here or to bypass my vetting the first post, that could be a problem which I will have to solve.
For those of you wondering about this twitter thing—it’s not all people tweeting to each other every minuscule move they make: I’ve linked the rss feed of this blog to my twitter account, so if I post a new page, it’s a ‘tweet’ on that network, and people who ‘follow’ my ‘tweets’ will be notified there’s a new post. At that point they can visit it, read it, comment (I hope with the aforesaid restrictions) and become informed. I’m using it solely for information: Hey, I’ve posted, it’s RSS, want to read it? I don’t comment by phone, just by the title and first line of the blog.
The benefit to you for joining this (free) thing and friending Jane, Lynn, and me, is that you get an email notification on your computer or on your phone when there’s a new post up. If you can’t wait. Ha. The greater benefit is that if you have a direct link to that new post then and there. The even greater bennie is that, say hypothetically the .lit file gets screwed in the latest download offered on Closed Circle: we can post to that effect on the blog, recommend that everybody hold off downloading until we get it fixed, and everybody who has ‘friended’ us on twitter will know it. We can then post that we’ve fixed it and everybody will know it. We can also post, say, that we have just uploaded a new book to the catalog. Or that one of us is autographing next week, and where. It’s sort of like the old bulletinboards, in that sense. Of course you can use it in the silly fashion: “I am on the porch. I am reading the newspaper. I am wondering if I want to get a cup of coffee…” and do that sort of thing all day long, but I can’t imagine you’re going to pick up any followers but family and friends that way.
๐ But this way I can leave a ‘refrigerator note’ for the membership—you know, that kind of thing where you come in the door and it says: “Don’t open the basement door whatever you do. I’ll be back soon.”
You only get messages from people you’re ‘following’, and there’s no rule saying you have to reciprocate – if someone wants to follow me, fine. I, on the other hand, only follow people or organisations that I want to hear from. So, not so much of a problem, I think.
I get a lot of interesting info from people through Twitter, but mainly on a work-related basis – info about new reports, books, events, sites, articles, who’s doing what.
I am being dragged into the 21st century so hard my heels are leaving furrows in ground. ๐ I’ll get it….eventually ๐ Apropo of nothing it was 68 here on Thursday and snowed Friday night and did not get warm enough to melt until today ๐
I’m not on Twitter but here’s a Tweet just for you — it will save email:
*OSG just returned “home” dragging a plastic poncho & toilet paper.*
See? Useful!
(I attended the Blue Man Group tonight, explaining the odd accouterments. Very fun!! I couldn’t stop laughing!)
Good for you. You’ve got to explain that one. Party down, dude! We’re working like Trojans—and getting very close.
I never understood the use of Twitter, it’s too short to post anything useful and there tons of service like it with higher character limits and better functionality.
And well, I kinda never come to this page unless I want to whine … er … post, because this site has RSS Feeds that serve all entries (the complete entries, not little notes). The only annoying thing about the Comments RSS feed is that it uselessly appends the user’s name to the entry title, that shoots the threadability of my email programme and it’s redundant, because it (correctly) fills in the sender field anyway.
OK….did it….. .had to reverse my name…..did not realize there are so many smartcats out there! As the wise man said, ‘We’ll see”
Smartcat,
My high Monday was -1. It’s presently 5:45 am and
the thermometer has bottomed out at -22(it will
however go to +160). The Weather Channel promises
0 for today.
Our low is around 1. We’re looking at the pond heater out there and hoping it’s not going to cost us the sun and moon.
Every time I start feeling sorry for myself, there is invariably someplace colder, snowier etc. Winter is as hard for me as summer is for you, CJ. However, we had a fantastic fall which basically ended saturday. ๐ I think the contrast got me because *really* it is still not that cold compared to some years and there is no drought! ๐ A good day to hibernate in the studio! ๐
Oh,I wasn’t complaining,I LOVE winter!! Not crazy
about summer heat,I begin sweating at 60*.
Yea! You’re on Twitter!
And so glad to have found this website too. ๐
Welcome!
Both you and Jane have just been “Followed” (the correct term). ๐
Thanks so much. We’re only going to ‘follow’ each other, because if I ‘followed’ everybody back I think I’d be inundated in e-mail. (One of the purposes of the blog is to let me communicate with everybody at the same time.) But I’m impressed by the nice and interesting folk who have turned up.