kylelibra.com   a blog about what’s on my mind

Recently I signed up for Twitter at the urging of a colleague. After figuring out what it was all about, I found that I really liked it. Unfortunately it took a little nudging to get me fully understand what was going on.

This is a very short explanation of Twitter:
Think of facebook status updates, but 160 max characters and more frequent. You subscribe to friend’s tweets (the name for the updates) and in turn they subscribe to yours. You can get all of the updates through your phone, but it is turned off by default. You can send tweets (updates) from your phone or from a computer. You don’t type out every literal thing you do all day long. Instead you only put something interesting, funny or important.

Interesting - “I just missed Jared at subway today.” (true, but a story for another day)
Funny - “pandemic has shut down the office.” (everyone got obsessed with the flash game)
Important - “drinking at McCarthys.” (that way friends can meet up with you)

It helps you kill time and keep up with what your friends are doing. Wired has a great article on making tweets interesting that everyone should read, you can check it out here. At the very least I recommend trying it for a week and seeing if you like it.

Below is some sample tweets from my feed today:

hamby86 - this is creepy about 3 hours ago
vebah - rediscovering twitter… thanks for another distraction libra about 8 hours ago
stevebanfield - good to see my LA twitter contacts posting. just seeing the tweets lets me know they are ok. up here in san mateo didn’t feel a thing about 8 hours ago
stevebanfield - CNN’s update on quake http://snurl.com/378bo about 8 hours ago
cld77 - I miss my own bed about 9 hours ago

CNET is running a preview on the new Facebook design that is being tested on certain networks. Lately I have been sitting in an office for eight hours a day so I spend what some people may call an obscene amount of time on Facebook.

I’m not sure what I think about the new design. Some good things, some bad things. Mainly less clutter, which I like. The applications were getting a bit out of control and now they have been scaled back a lot. Regardless of what I think, try it out for yourself by going here.

Update: There is also an AP Article if you want to know more.