International Mac Podcast

Here I am going to deviate from the norm. Yes, I know what we really haven’t set a norm yet, having only had two posts, but they were both on a theme and I am going to explore a different aspect of that theme. Instead of Will Gets Things Done, this is What Will Got Done.

You may know that I’m in High school. You probably don’t know that I’m taking Journalism as an elective. One of our recent assignments was to write a review, so I decided it was a perfect way to earn some Geek Cred. I chose to review Twitter. So, without further ado, here is my masterpiece…

The main barrier to entry for Twitter is how to explain it: micro-blogging or macro-communication? Twitter advertises itself as a way for family and friends “stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

Using Twitter is very simple: users create an account at twitter.com, and can customize their profile. They then are presented with the question “What are you doing?” and a box underneath it to blast out answers of 140 characters or less to all their “followers”–people who have chosen to receive their updates. They may also follow others.

Twitter, which was originally designed as a way to simply update a universal status and therefore worthy of the title “Micro-blog,” has now evolved into more of a communication medium. Twitter has its own codes for conversation, which makes it even more situated to this role. Users can reply to a tweet, or individual status update, to let others know their views on the subject being discussed.

Since Twitter was designed to be accessible from anywhere (one of the more notable is text messaging your tweet to 40404 after linking your cell phone number to your account), third-party software developers have been able to create software that lets you view your friends tweets and post your own from your desktop. There are great variety of applications for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, and several smartphones, including the iPhone and Google Android. Some are more full featured than others, and all have a different user interface, so there is bound to be something for almost everyone.

Twitter has also had some reliability problems as the service grows more popular, but the developers have been working on that problem–and it survived the up to 200% increase in activity during the election. Early Twitter users were used to seeing the “Fail whale,” an oft- graphic of a whale bearing down the Twitter birds that appeared whenever the site was having difficulties. Happily, those days are now over, and the last outage was only partial, on September 17. Twitter does frequently disable and re-enable some advanced features to compensate for problems. This is a good practice, but Twitter seem to have used that excuse to not re-enable some features, namely the ability to post via Instant Message.

Twitter is great when you are feeling depressed and need the support of your friends, or you come across something you want to share with everyone. It is useful for answering your questions and connecting with the community. Twitter is a tool that will be of minimal use to when it first comes into your tool belt, but one you will continue finding more and more uses for until it is nearly indispensable.

Now, wasn’t that wonderful? Since that story another of our topics was an editorial, and I chose to earn some more Geek Cred. I won’t spoil the surprise, because there’s so little extra writing involved that I will probably put it up quite soon if there is a good reaction to this one. Suffice it to say that it is a topic you will all know quite well.

If you were wondering, my writing tool of choice has become, as I suspected, Write Or Die, because I know how to get around Writer.app’s limitations. There’s this little button labeled “Show Apps” that I would really do better without.

You may be hearing from me soon, and yes, I do mean hearing…

(P.S. You’ve been cliffhangered!)