Twitter for the Beginner

April 17, 2008

Twitter Logo Twitter’s picking up popularity, and lot of us, who didn’t have very many friends on Twitter before, are shouting, “Finally!” It’s a fantastic service with about as many different uses as there are people using it.

I won’t try to describe to you what it is, because you really should decide for yourself by signing up for an account at Twitter.

All right, All right, I’ll try a really succinct explanation, that I think a lot of people agree with: Twitter is a water cooler around which to stand and communicate with only the people you want to communicate with.

What I will do is try to tell you how all the technical stuff, that can seem like so much complicated bologna, works together.

The reason I’m writing this, is because a friend of mine @thoughtstorms, posted that he was trying to work through all the applications that work with twitter and figure it all out. And, I thought the explanation would make a good blog post.

So, I don’t really have time to go through all the apps that work with Twitter, so I’ll go through the ones I use, the main food groups if you will.

But, first, a little about their relationships:

So, Twitter started as a web service and mobile phone application. As far as I know, that’s all you could do: post on the web and on your cell phone, and get updates in those places.

Then, Twitter released its API which means that people could create applications of all sorts for it - and they did. People wrote applications that live on your computer and talk to twitter, they created applications that live on the internet and talk to twitter from other places. And they wrote the API into existing applications, so that you could control twitter from those too.

But, the thing you have to remember is that twitter is the hub - and all the other applications work around it. Here’s a diagram:
Twitter and it's applications working together
So, basically, you have any IM client (Google Talk), The desktop clients (Twhirl/Snitter), Twitter itself and all of the online applications like facebook and Jott that can integrate it as well.

Something to keep in mind here is that when I say “an IM client,” I’m not saying that only Google Talk works - any IM client will work with Twitter. And, there are tons of applications, for your desktop and on the web, besides the ones I mentioned. If you’re curious you can always check out the Twitter Fan Wiki.

On a side note: The fact that facebook has an API for their website that allows third party developers to integrate it with API’s from other online applications, like Twitter, is enough to make my head start to spin a little.

So, give twitter a try. And, don’t become overwhelmed by all of the third-party-whatnots. They’re there to help, and if they’re making your life more miserable you should just ignore them.

If you’d like to follow me on Twitter, you can find me at http://twitter.com/flowersjustin - Oh, and add Thoughtstorms while you’re at it, he’s a pretty great guy with some interesting ideas.

Posted by flowersjustin | Filed Under blog