I just started my Twitter and realized I really have nothing to say on a daily basis -- my thought is I should make up an interesting character and just lie a lot. Is there some rules about that?

Hi Chris,

Twitter Fiction is a big thing - http://tinyurl.com/5sodss - or you could try Twitter Haiku. And there are lots of cases where people have created fake Twitter accounts for celebrities, and Twitter will deactivate those accounts once somebody brings it to their attention.

But since the focus of this class is to learn how most people are using these tools, you may want to think of other things you can post for the week. It does not need to be posts about what you are doing at this second. It could be a way to share new and interesting Web sites with your patrons, share information about a new book you've read, or just highlight a program at your library. Since you are in this class with others working in libraries, you could also use it as a forum to post questions to your colleagues. In fact, you could have posted this question there.

But feel free to do the interesting character if that works best for you!

Kathy

So far my experience with Twitter is negative. Unless your experiencing some really interesting event in your life like climbing Mount Everest, there is very little reason I'd want to stay up to date every minute on small events.


One use I could see is by creating a small community that are interested in daily contact but that makes me think of family or friends. Perhaps it could be an extension of a group that gathers at the library with a main focus. I still see limitations though with the amount of text you can input for a real conversation so I go back to feeling like a blog is better.


Last night I did have a vision of authors creating a new genre of fiction that allows readers to interact with characters. Creating fictional characters that can contact their readers with thoughts could really motivate some children to read more. Hey maybe even real historical figures that could relate interesting quotes or factual details. Just a thought.

Setting up a twitter account for the school library would not be difficult, and it would be interesting to see what the patrons have to say, or who my followers would be. Maybe I could reach that kid who would not otherwise visit the library. It could be a way to advertise the library collection and online resources. It could be used to post important meetings with colleagues or to connect with other librarians in the area.

Twitter is interesting. I liked the use of twitter by the Presque Isle library...kind of homey, personal, "good morning from Lake Woebegon" style of keeping in touch. The libraries that use it to connect to their blogs and websites are really maximizing this social networking. Bravo to them.

It was easy to set-up an account, and I can see that Twitter could be useful in some situations. I'm afraid that it will be overtaken by banality and evenually advertising.

It was easy to set up an account. I would not add my cell phone! That would be expensive and annoying. I might use it in the library to post quick news events, but it seems repetitive with other tools, especially since there is a limit on the text. Who would want to know about my events via their cell phone? I'd want to know which are more likely to be accessed - facebook, myspace, the blog, the web site. It would be too much for a one-person or small operation to try and keep up with all of them. Maybe I'm wrong, but when I searched for 'library" in Twitter, I found mostly the large libraries, and the link just goes to a press release.

It was amazingly easy to set up my Twitter account! The video in step one was very helpful. I had to look around a bit to figure out how to post, reply, and search. When I searched for "libraries," I got tweets containing the word "libraries." I will try again using the # to find other actual libraries on twitter.


I haven't thought much about twitter because I thought it was mostly for kids and wouldn't have much useful info. The inclusion of URLs is a great feature! And having websites posted in the user profiles is great!


Our library has set up a twitter account to post announcements of cultural events. It's quite new; I'll have to look for info about/evidence of posting/replying.


I found the articles this week very interesting. I was intrigued by "The 8 ways twitter will change your life" item #2. I'm wondering how Stephanie Martin was able to find people in he field in her target market. I'll have to try some more searching. Maybe it's that # thing again?


And twitter replacing google for some searches?? How do you know you have the right followers?


The "All a Twitter" article had some great pointers for me as a "starter." I appreciated the tutorials--and will explore those more carefully in the next couple of days. The examples of the ways libraries are using twitter were creative and "inspiring." I will share those with others at my library. The 5 Fast Twitter tips and the Tools and mashups lists are great and I can't wait to explore them. (They may even answer some of the questions I have noted above. :)


The very recent TIME article gave me some good background and up-to-date status and possible future developments.


This week has been an eye-opener for me.


Thanks

I too am afraid that Twitter will be overtaken by advertising. Within one day of setting up an account I was bombarded by them. If the problem with spam does not get resolved with this site I may opt for something else.

I didn't add my cell phone, either, Judy. I don't text, so I'd have a hard time constructing a sentence. I just can't be concise. We English majors are bent towards verbosity.


I agree with Eden (at least I think it is Eden) about twitter replacing google or other search engines. Maybe searching on twitter will improve...we'll have to watch.

I have had trouble with the 140 character limit too. I have had to delete some things--though I fear they then don't make sense!!

History majors can be wordy too! With 140 characters, I'm just getting warmed up! :)

I've enjoyed reading everybody's Tweets over the past week. I am in total agreement that spam could be the downfall of Twitter if they don't get it in under control. Yes, I can block the Spammers, but it is a pain to do it every day. One of the reasons I use Facebook to communicate with people so much is because I know I'm less likely to get Spam there than through e-mail.

As far as advertising, though, that's one bizarre thing about Twitter. There is absolutely no advertising on the site, and there really is no business model for the company. Google has talked about buying Twitter, but those talks seemed to fall through a few weeks ago.

When it comes to banality, I think Twitter started with a lot of banality and has since matured. But it is all in the choices you make. If you choose to follow somebody who is outlining every step they make during the day, you will have a totally different experience from somebody who is using it to follow NPR News and the New York Times. Linda Braun mentioned in her class last week that she has stopped using her RSS Reader because she gets all of her news from Twitter now. She really is getting the same information she previously got from her Reader, but she is just getting it in a different place.

I also wanted to mention that although Twitter can be used with a cell phone using text messaging, I don't know anybody who receives Twitter updates via text messaging. They may send messages that way, but most people use one of the Twitter apps that were highlighted in an article I posted to Twitter earlier this week.

If your library already has a blog to share news, I would encourage you to try setting up a Twitter that your blog feeds into using a service like TwitterFeed. We do this with the SEMLS Twitter account - www.twitter.com/semls. Several of our SEMLS blogs, as well as the RSS feed from our EventKeeper calendar, feed into the Twitter account. After the initial set up, we don't have to lift a finger to keep that Twitter account up to date. Yes, the information is redundant, but it's a way to reach out to users who may already be checking Twitter every day, but may not be going to our blog every day.

But Judy makes an important point about knowing which service would be accessed more. Over the past few weeks, we've discussed four services that pushes information out to where the user is: RSS feeds, Facebook, MySpace (we didn't try it, but it was part of discussions), and Twitter. I will argue that these will reach a wider audience than any other tool that you put on your own Web site because you just aren't going to find a lot of people who go to your Web site on a daily basis. When designing this service, it is important to decide who your audience is and then find out which service they are most likely to use. If 80% of that audience is on MySpace, it doesn't make much sense to create a Facebook page.

Thanks to everyone for all of the great discussions over the past seven weeks. It's been a lot of fun!