Last Updated on Saturday, September 03, 2011 at 10:01 PM
In tech tip 18, we discussed blogging and briefly mentioned Twitter.com as a micro-blogging site. A micro-blogging site is a blog that limits the length of posts to a certain number of characters –140 in Twitter’s case. Twitter is free and it’s by far the most popular micro-blogging site in the world with more than 100 million users.
Here are a few key points to keep in mind as you use Twitter:
- A message that’s posted via Twitter is called a tweet. Tweets are publically visible by default, but an author can restrict message delivery to their own followers by marking their account as private. Marking an account as private also gives the author the ability to approve or deny access to their tweets on a per-user basis.
- Users may subscribe to other authors’ tweets – this is known as following and subscribers are known as followers.
- If you want to have a public conversation with someone via Twitter, you’d type their username as @username. Usernames typed with that syntax are tracked accordingly so users can see who is conversing with them.
- Tweets that feature words with the hash sign (“#”) in front of them signify a term that the author would like to be searchable within Twitter, such as #education.
- In addition to the public format of tweeting, messages can be sent between authors and followers by direct messaging (DM). DM is a good way to converse privately, but these messages also are restricted to the 140-character limit.
As with any social media tool, “social” is the operative word and interaction is key to realizing the full potential of this tool. With more than 100 million Twitter accounts worldwide, you might be surprised at who you can find and collaborate with online. Here are a few prominent accounts in our state that you might want to follow:
Official Commonwealth of Kentucky account: http://twitter.com/kygov
Gov. Steve Beshear: http://twitter.com/govstevebeshear
Secretary of State: http://twitter.com/KySecofState
Commissioner Terry Holliday: http://twitter.com/kycommissioner
KETS Service Advisor: http://twitter.com/ketsservice
Kentucky Center for School Safety: http://twitter.com/KCSSnews
To provide feedback or submit a technical topic you’d like to see addressed, please send e-mails to Matt.Jury@education.ky.gov.
Published 11/5/2010