Twittering away

I have started to use Twitter, mainly to see what it's all about and how it can be useful, fun or interesting in normal life.

From what I have found out so far, Twitter is a free messaging facility online, which your 'followers' can be updated on what you're doing at that time. Sort of like a mini-blog, as each 'tweet' (a message) can be a maximum of 140 characters.

When you first create an account, you have no 'followers' and you follow no-one, so it's all a bit boring. So, the key to getting started is to find someone you find interesting and follow them - i.e. you find their account and click the follow button to add them to your Twitter account. This means that whenever that person 'tweets', you'll get that message either on your PC, mobile phone/iphone/etc. Just because you decide to follow another person on Twitter doesn't necessarily mean that they'll follow you back; they might not even know who you are!

According to Twitterholic.com, Barack Obama is the most followed Twitter user with over 304,000 followers. CNN Breaking News is second with over 237,000 followers and Stephen Fry is third with over 216,000 followers. Britney Spears comes in fifth, would you believe?

I have an HTC TyTN II mobile phone and have installed TinyTwitter on it, which is a Twitter client application. There are plenty of Twitter client applications to chose from, but I got on ok with this one, so will continue to use it until I find something better. On my desktop PC, I have downloaded and installed Blu, another Twitter client, but one that is visually stunning, as well as being an easy and intuitive application to use.

A few people at work had already been using Twitter and so we have all 'followed' each other, meaning I see their tweets and they see mine, etc. But knowing what to tweet about can be a bit strange at first, and why I have mentioned about this on my Baby Blog, is because my life at the moment is consumed with Jack and keeping him (and his mum) happy, and so the last few tweets appear to be based on that. That's not to say that I'm flogging everything out of this blog and using Twitter to keep harping on about it, but throughout the day, as different things happen, I have been trying to get into the swing of things with Twitter and you only do that by joining in and sending tweets out about something. So, I have been.

If you're already on Twitter and you want to add me, my username is (cunningly) brettrigby. If not, and you want to get yourself and account, just go to the Twitter site and sign up for free.