twitter.com

It’s tough keeping up with all the latest trends in technology, especially on the web. So many sites and so little time… and now with the explosion of social networking sites it’s just about impossible to keep up. I try as many new sites as I can and stick with the ones I like, until I get tired of them or until they disappear.

Aside from my therapy (disability-related listservs and message boards), my first real web addiction was TextAmerica (TA), which unfortunately died in 2007. TA was a moblogging site, which focused on uploading camera phone photos. The IT guru from TA has started a new site called fragmob, which I use, but not nearly as much as I used TA. I basically just upload my camera photos to fragmob. After TA went under, I moved my online photos to Flickr, which I like. Most of my TA friends also moved to Flickr, but still it’s not the same as the old TA. I enjoy taking and sharing photos, which is the main draw to Flickr.

For social networking, I’m currently on FaceBook. It is definitely a class above MySpace (which I don’t like at all). I don’t spend a whole lot of time on FaceBook. But these days, having a FaceBook page is almost as necessary as having an email address. And it is a great way to network and reconnect with old friends.

For blogging, I like WordPress. The nice thing about WordPress – in addition to wordpress.com – is that the program that powers the blog is an open source program that can be downloaded and installed on any domain. When I first set up my personal blog back in 2006, the fun for me was figuring out how to install and set up a self-hosted blog. It was a bit of a learning curve, as it involved some PHP, CSS and MYSQL stuff. Once my blog was actually up and running, I really didn’t have much to say. Although when the presidential primaries started heating up, I seemed to find plenty to talk about.

I’m getting way off track. I wanted to talk a bit about Twitter. I’ve been hearing a lot of twitter about Twitter. This service is unlike other social networks, because it limits posts to just 140 characters. Short and tweet!

Why only 140 characters? Because that is the limit for cell phone SMS and the service started more as a way to post text messages to the web.

What can you say in 140 characters? Often times, not much.

The idea is to answer the basic question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less. The cool thing about twitter is that you can send your “tweets” right from your cell phone, from your desk top or from twitter.com. Your messages are then sent to people who subscribe to your tweets. Another cool thing is that you can have your tweets automatically forwarded to your FaceBook wall or your blog via widgets. My tweets (or brain farts, as I call them) are in the sidebar to the right of this blog.

Is anyone really interested in my daily activities or random thoughts? It doesn’t really matter to me, as long as it’s fun. Will I become a twitterholic? We shall see…