"It seems like the conversation always turns to Twitter these days."
I was halfway through this post, when new Twitter friend Bryon Person twittered the above phrase and he's right on the money. Ever since the SXSW festival this past March, Twitter has been growing like wildfire among the early adopters and is now moving into the mainstream.
What is Twitter, you ask?
Quite simply, Twitter is a free micro-blogging and social networking service. With this service, users send "updates" (text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) via SMS, instant messaging, the Twitter website, or an application such as Twitterrific or Twitteroo. These updates are then displayed on the user's profile page and also instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.
Through Twitter, I can hang around the virtual water cooler where my group of friends and I, along various industry movers and shakers (and even Darth Vader) chime in, or "Tweet" throughout the day.
Before you dismiss it, I invite to you try it out. Like many new technologies, it's hard to grasp the utility without using it yourself.
I started by easing into it. At first I added a few close friends. Then I started checking their contacts to see if there were any other people that I wanted to follow. Over the past few months, I've let it grow organically to where I now have 61 friends and 51 followers and the conversation just flows.
It took a little while, but I've started to see the real estate digerati show up and start participating and I'd love to get a few more up and running.
Here's How to get started:
1. Go to Twitter & sign up for an account.
2. Go to my Twitter url (http://twitter.com/andykaufman)
3. Click add andykaufman
4. Congrats, you're now following your first person. Look at the icons in the right hand toolbar on my page. If you see anybody that you'd like to follow, click on their icon and add them as well.
5. Repeat steps 2-4 with: Jeff Turner, Paul Chaney, Joel Burslem, Pat Kitano, Steve Dalton, and Debbie Ferrari. That should get you started with a stream of incoming tweets.
6. Start sending out updates yourself. Now you're part of the conversation!
7. When you're up and running, leave a comment here with your thoughts along with you twitter URL.
I'm going to resist my urge to gush about the service and keep it simple for now. Expect a follow up post in the near future where I'll elaborate a bit more and offer some analysis, but I want to avoid the "drinking from the firehose" effect that tends to scare people away.
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