The Skittles.com front page has been replaced with a twitter search page for the word skittles and has now become a playground for twits everywhere. My contribution is below, 2nd from the top.
screenshot of skittles.com page
If you’ve never heard of Twitter then you’re no doubt confused right now. Here’s a short introduction to Twitter for the uninitiated. Simply, it’s similar to a world wide chat room of short 120 character messages that can be sent to their front page over a cell phone or web application. You can follow a user to see all of their tweets on your private page, and users can follow each other to send private messages.
You can see the individual tweets of every single user on the public_timeline by clicking ‘everyone’ on the right sidebar. A look at this page for a few minutes can give you a good idea of how some people use the site. Most of it probably looks like gibberish; most people are new and everyone is trying to figure out how to use this latest technology, so keep that in mind if it seems confusing or full of vapid crosschatter and inane personal details.
A good way to make Twitter a little less daunting in scope and more useful in everyday life is to use the search.twitter.com page and narrow it down with the advanced search page. Try using the location search to show only people within a certain mile radius. A 15 or 30 mile radius usually works for me. Using the location search for a while will give you a good idea of what individuals and organizations are twittering in your area. By this point you should have found a few people worth following , or at least a few that are worth replying to.
The other handy search tool is the use of #hashtags. Hashtags function as a type of instant chat room that can be appended to you messages to make them searchable by those that use the same tag. For example; during President Obama’s a few weeks ago, a bunch of us were including the #SOTU tag to our tweets and were thus able to chat with each other while we watched the speech. It was pretty crazy watching a live event play out like that in real time. Other popular tags during that time was the NOT The State of the Union Address, #nsotu, as well as #Obama. It also resulted in attention for some Congressmen and women who were twittering during the speech itself!
There’s only one rule people should keep in mind when using Twitter: Don’t believe anyone who says you are using it wrong.
Twitter is so simple that a whole wellspring of uses have spawned around it. News organizations and marketers have already hit the site hard along with the other early adopters, and now that Twitter has been getting mentions all over newspapers and on television shows like the View its popularity is sure to increase even more.
To close out, I’ll leave you with Evan Williams, Twitter Co-Founder, talking about how they got the idea for Twitter and how most of the sites current conventions were formed spontaneously by the users themselves. Enjoy, and see you on Twitter!
