I was feeling a bit ancient.
But no longer!
I’m a-twittering now. Sort of. Maybe more accurately, I’m a-tweaking.
But I’m a quick learner.
It’s not that I just heard about Twitter. You would have to be in a coma or archiving your 33 1/3 rpms for the past few years not to know about Twitter. I got all a-Twitter with the elections in 2008 and began following George Stephanopoulos. For me, he was the George Clooney of political journalists.
And then the election was over and I broke up with Twitter and George. Occasionally, I would get a notice that someone had started following me. Why? I had no idea.
And then one of my RSS feeds had a review of TweetDeck. Always lurking around for some new app for my Android, it sounded interesting, so I downloaded it and took it for a drive.
Va va va voom! Was I surprised. During my test drive, I discovered that TweetDeck lets you arrange your Twitter streams in a row of columns for specific people, searches, hashtags, or lists.
You say what? Hashtags? Me too. I had no idea what “hashtags” were but soon discovered they were sort of like web tags, allowing me to follow specific topics of interest.
Those hashtags grabbed my attention just like George did during the election! I quickly discovered other Tweeters who were writing or blogging or struggling with their own fiction like me.
The real power of Twitter, as I’m learning, is that it serves as a new form of search to build myself a community of writers and bloggers that I can share, learn, and continue to grow with.
And the good news!
You can listen, or NOT, to anyone you want on Twitter.
And you can talk. And others will decide to listen to YOU, or NOT.
Sort of like marriage.
Did I just say that?
Let’s not tell The Professor. I sort of want to keep him around.
Anyway, check out TweetDeck. Take it for a drive. Cruise around, kick the tires, honk your horn.
Honk loud! Cause I'll come running and hop in to cruise along with you!
Happy Monday,
missing the mom gene
