Twitter for Dummies - Laura Fitton [33]
Everyone pretty much swears by the apps they love the best, and no user group is more enthusiastic than the iPhone crowd, whose debates over Twitterfon (free), Tweetie ($2.99), and Twittelator Pro ($4.99), among others, can keep a conversation going through several pints of beer at a tweetup.
Figure 4-4: You can read your tweet stream with the Tweetie iPhone application.
These mobile Twitter apps barely scratch the surface of what you can find out there, and new ones are created fairly regularly. There’s no real consensus on which is the best. Try out a few to see which ones you prefer. Again, once www.oneforty.com launches, we hope to have much better answers to your perennial Which app is best for. . . ? questions.
Figure 4-5: You can post new tweets by using Tweetie.
Figure 4-6: Twitter-Berry, a Twitter BlackBerry application.
Part II
Joining Your Flock on Twitter
In This Part . . .
After you set up a Twitter account and know how to find everything Twitter-related that you might need, you probably want to know and find the people you want to communicate with.
In this part, we show you how to find the people you may know outside of Twitter on Twitter, locate people who share your interests, and identify other personalities and brands that you may want to connect with using Twitter.
Chapter 5
Tweeting It Up
In This Chapter
Following people
Scouring Twitter for interesting people to follow
Replying to messages, privately and publicly
Attracting new followers
One of the neatest things about the Twitter experience is that your conversations, your followers, and your ability to interact with them extends far past the Twitter.com interface into other platforms and even into the real world due to the Twitter community’s tendency to plan both formal and spontaneous events. But equally important to accessing your Twitter account from virtually anywhere is understanding how to interact within the community.
In this chapter, we go over the nuts and bolts involved in discovering, managing, and interacting with the people you follow on Twitter and the people who follow you. Additionally, we give you some hints about how to play well with others within the twitterverse so that you can start having conversations right away!
Finding People to Follow on Twitter
A key part of getting the most out of Twitter is knowing where and how to find people whose Twitter streams are of interest to you.
You can pretty easily find people to follow on Twitter: You naturally browse to people’s profiles when you think that something they say is interesting or relevant to you. But, when you start accumulating updates from the people you follow, you’ll quickly realize that you need to figure out who’s worth following. That process can become complicated because of the large size and diversity of the Twitter ecosystem.
Avid users have countless theories and strategies about the best ways and reasons to follow others. That’s the beauty of Twitter: You can make it up as you go along and create your own criteria for building up a Twitter stream.
Twitter is a very personalized experience. No two people use Twitter in exactly the same way, and no two people follow a given account on Twitter for exactly the same reasons. Quite literally, no two people experience the same Twitter because everyone is consuming different streams, and publishing to, and interacting with different sets of readers.
Twitter is not a single village, as the term Twitterville implies. When Laura wrote “Twitter is my Village,” (http://pistachioconsulting.com/it-takes-a-village-to-understand-twitter), she meant that each twitterer’s personal community on Twitter functions like a village. Even if Twitter goes heavily mainstream, you’ll still be able to shape your experience there by selecting who you listen to and interact with.
While you become better at your entire Twitter experience, you’re continually developing