What Is Twitter?

Over there on my sidebar I have a section called “The Very Latest.” It is a collection of my Twitter posts. What is Twitter? It is a webpage/phenomenon where you can go to post and read 140 character updates on anything you like. I follow (or added as friends) other travelers, expats and China people mostly, so I get “little postcards“, as @nerdseyeview calls them, all day long. You can post about what you are doing, link to interesting things on the Internet and even carry on mini-conversations with other twitterers. You can also get live news updates through Twitter – someone actually twitted the Continental crash in Denver a few months ago!

I originally signed up for Twitter thinking that I could just post a little update on what I was doing when I didn’t feel like writing a blog post and it would show up for blog visitors to read, and that is how it stayed for a long time. But recently I have come to learn that Twitter is a great way to find out about all kinds of things. It is a great way to interact with total strangers who might end up being netfriends. It is a great way to network with fellow travelers, expats and China peeps. And you never know where Twitter will take you, like to a spelling bee.

It is also a major time-grabber. I could spend all day visiting the links I’ve discovered, reading through tweet posts, visiting profiles, writing tweets, etc. All of that has escalated since I downloaded and installed TweetDeck. Warning, if you want to get work done, don’t use TweetDeck!

At times I feel isolated in my little corner of China. The Internet helps to alleviate some of that isolation, but nothing really compares to Twitter. I feel constantly connected to diverse people all going about their daily lives and tweeting about it.

And for the record, I have no idea how the heck you make verbs, nouns & adjectives out of Twitter. Are we tweets twittering or are we twitterers twitting? Do we produce tweets or twits? I don’t want to sound like a nitwit!

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