Gettin’ Techy Widdit

by Sister-Diane on June 17, 2008

A couple fun things have happened in Internet-land recently:

I took the plunge and joined Twitter. I’ve been seeing so many of you mention it on your blogs, and everyone describes it as addictive. I admit that at first, I thought the whole thing was kind of silly.

But, after a full day of Twittering, I see that it’s not. In fact, it’s pretty amazing.

If you’re still skeptical, let me offer my two cents. It’s true that many of the updates people post on Twitter are kind of . . . well . . . mundane, but there’s a particular sort of comfort to knowing some of the daily details of people you like.

For instance, yesterday I loved knowing that Rachel was working at Stitch Lab, and Tsoniki was looking for a new haircut, and Candie was hammering metal. It’s a funny little current of keeping in touch, and it happens in tiny, 140-character bites.

Plus, Twittering your daily activities is really addictive. Takes waaaaaaay less effort than a blog post, and you can share stuff that’s outside the realm of your blog. I’m hooked like a trout, baby.

So – I’ve found a lot of you on Twitter already, but if you’re a member (or want to join), come find me, and we’ll tell each other what we’re up to. Or, you can just look to the green widget in my left sidebar there.

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The other cool internet thing is Alltop, which is a new sort of feed reader/online magazine hybrid. It collects feeds from prominent websites and groups them into category pages.

The Crafts category page is pretty awesome, and I’m thrilled that CraftyPod was included there, among some extremely august company. Gosh!

The Design, Small Business, and Blogging pages are all very rich, too.

You can see a full list of Alltop categories over here. Check it out!

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Dot

i just joined twitter, too (and we're already friended) but how did you find the cool people to follow on there? I had it search my gmail for matches, and that's all i've done..

dot

Chris

I'm SOOO tempted to join! I'll have to wait until I can feel more current with my commited projects, which is why I'm not blogging right now. But I love getting these resources from you. I'll be checking these out.

tsoniki

I'm glad you are on twitter! :)

Oh yeah twitter feed will pull your blog post into twitter after it's published. Pretty cool!

gl.

i adore twitter. i think of it as a social "sixth sense". :) but i'm not at all good about separating my personal/professional identities there, and sometimes i use it as a log of personal progress for persnickety projects or through periods of low motivation. so yeah, it depends on how well you really want to know someone. ;)

Sister-Diane

Thanks, Sara -

I'm using BeTwittered: http://www.32hours.com/betwitteredinfo/, which sounds a lot like Flock. It was easy to add to my personalized Google homepage, and makes it really easy to keep up on my Twitter-buddies.

(Customized Google homepage info, for those interested, is here: http://tinyurl.com/4u4t45

Sewer-Sewist

If you like Twitter, you may want to check out these two complimentary applications (if you haven't already):

Twitter Feeds: http://twitterfeeds.com/ You can integrate website that has an RSS feed into Twitter. So, I have our Sewer-Sewist blog, our personal blog, our Flickr feed and my facebook status all linked up to my Twitter account. (I was messing around with the possibilities of Twitter for work and did an experiment to link everything I used and sort of left it.) It compresses the links into tinyurls automatically.

Flock: http://flock.com/ It's a firefox based web browser that integrates Twitter (and lots of other applications, too) right into your browser in a sidebar. I don't know what I did before I found Flock. (In fairness, it's not for everyone. Josh thinks that Flock's "weird and distracting.")

~Sarah