I am sure you already heard of twitter.com by now. Well, I started using Twitter in Feb. 2009 and found it quite amazing in terms of discovering new people, new information, and sharing what you know with the ‘public’. Here are a few links and tips on how you can get the most out of Twitter.
Using Twitter
You first need a twitter account. That is an easy one, a trip to twitter.com and 2 minutes of time will take care of it. At the minimum, you should say a few words in your profile, and upload a picture of yourself. When other people stumble upon you on twitter, they want to have a basic idea on who you are. So you show that you are a real human with a genuine interest in whatever, they are more likely to follow you.
Twitter Clients: usually the web client (i.e. your favorite browser) is what most people use to tweet. But there are other twitter clients that offers enhanced features than the web client. My favorite one is TweetDeck (which is available on both Windows and Mac). If you have an iphone, TweetFon is what you will want to use.
Lastly, you may feel lost in the first few days of tweetering, here is a good blog post on how to be a successful twitter: http://blog.mrtweet.net/7-habits-of-highly-effective-twitterers-kris-colvin
Search Twitter
You can find interesting people to follow by going to http://twitter.com/invitations/find_on_twitter
You can searching for topics of interests to you by going to http://search.twitter.com/. For example, if you are interested in knowing what people are talking about iphone, you can just do: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=iphone
tweetbeep.com: Tweetbeep searches twitter for you on topics you care to monitor and sends email alerts to your inbox. A good research and reputation monitoring tool for you advanced users.
Twitter Tools
TwitterSheep: TwitterSheep is a website that builds a “tag cloud†from the biographical information of your Twitter followers.
HootSuite: The self-styled “ultimate Twitter toolbox†is a fantastic resource. It allows you to manage multiple Twitter profiles, pre-schedule and automate your tweets to other services, such as RSS feeds, and even gives some useful stats to help you hone your Twitter performance.