Connect with others using Twitter and Your Mobile Phone

If you haven't at least heard of Twitter, you've probably been living in a cave. But don’t feel too bad if you're not yet using Twitter - www.twitter.com. It's a rapidly growing service, but still not as mainstream as a service like Facebook.

So what is Twitter, exactly? It's a free social networking service, sometimes called a "micro-blogging" tool, because it's like a blog, only smaller. When you use Twitter you have a maximum of 140 characters to share your thoughts with the world. If you've ever updated your status on Facebook or added a personal message on Windows Live Messenger, you've micro-blogged. It's a way of sharing what you're doing or thinking with friends and with the world at large. You "follow" people on Twitter to read what they're saying. Everything that your followers write shows up on your Twitter page, also called a “Twitter feed.” I post to Twitter as "jasondunn", and if you follow me, you'll see the things I write on your Twitter feed.

When I describe Twitter to someone who hasn't used it before, their first response is often, "Why would I want to do that?" It's definitely not the type of thing that everyone wants to participate in. Social networking comes in all different depths, and not everyone wants to dive into the deep end. Sharing your life with others via Twitter is definitely in-depth social networking. You can use Twitter to follow the updates of others, post your own updates, or both—there's room for many different types of Twitter use.

So who's using Twitter? More and more people, as Twitter gains momentum. There are celebrities, such as Aston Kutcher, Lance Armstrong, and Tina Fey, among others. President Barack Obama used Twitter leading up to the elections, gaining followers (and probably voters) along the way. NASA uses Twitter to keep people updated about space missions, and the BBC Breaking News publishes small bits of news as soon as they happen, before the full stories are written. Even if you don't post your own thoughts to Twitter, you can see how useful it can be to stay connected with your favorite people and organizations.

Twitter and Windows Mobile

So how do you tap into Twitter using your Windows Mobile smartphone? There are a few ways. First, you'll need a Twitter - www.twitter.com account. Once you have registered one and have selected a few people or organizations to follow, you can open up Internet Explorer Mobile and browse to http://m.twitter.com - this is the mobile Twitter site. After logging in, you'll see a list of recent Twitter activity. You can read updates or post your own updates (called "tweets") from this simple and fast interface. And, if you really like using Twitter, you can set it as your home page so it loads whenever you start the browser. In Internet Explorer Mobile, just click Menu > Tools Options > Use Current.

Looking for something a bit fancier? Then check out PockeTwit - www.freewarepocketpc.net/ppc-download-pocketwit.html, a free Windows Mobile Twitter application that has a really nice user interface and several cool features. In addition to the large, high-quality avatars in PockeTwit, you can post to Twitter using a URL you want to share, a picture you have stored on your smartphone, or a picture you just snapped with the camera, and you can even insert a GPS link showing your location. PockeTwit is also very finger-friendly—you can sweep your finger up and down across the screen to move to older or newer tweets, search, reply to posted tweets, quote tweets, or stop following someone on Twitter. It does take 10+ seconds to start up though, so it's the kind of thing you'll start up and leave running on your smartphone.

The power of Twitter Search

One of the great things about Twitter is how you can use it to search for people talking about the same things. Go to http://search.twitter.com to try it right now.

Twitter Search is surprisingly useful for finding people in the same place or people going to the same event. People use keywords, preceded by the number sign (#), to make topics easier to find. For instance, if you were tweeting about going on a spring break vacation, you'd put the word #springbreak in your tweet. Then, when people search for other people talking about spring break, they'll find your tweets. This is even more useful when it's more specific, such as the name of an event you're going to. You can see what people are saying about the event, how to find it, and more. People even tweet things like the airport they're flying to (#SEA for Seattle's airport, for example), and when you combine an event name with an airport, it's easy to arrange a shared taxi from the airport to an event. You can search directly on your phone using Internet Explorer Mobile - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/en-us/downloads/microsoft/internet-explorer-mobile.mspx to access the Twitter search site.

However, because the site is not designed for mobile devices, it doesn't work very well on the small screen. Using an application that was built specifically for use on mobile devices and that has a built-in search function, such as PockeTwit, works much better.

Twitter is a rapidly growing social networking service, and one that you can easily tap into using your Windows Mobile smartphone. Enjoy it! ~ by Jason Dunn