on that note, she is training for the tri through team in training. one of the ’social networking’ tool they suggest participants to use is twitter…

it just goes to show how many different way twitter is being utilized, from the far left of social tweets to the far right of business tweets.

one of my pet peeves is when i follow someone (velonews) on twitter and they are tweeting for every article that shows up in their rss feed. i hate redundancy.

The importance of hash tags ( http://hashtags.org )

Geeky, but powerful, especially when you are in attendance at an event or conference. Adding #___event id___ to the end of your tweets lets other track the millisecond by millisecond happenings around you, even if you are not following the person who uses the predetermined hash tag. Hash tags can be for anything, not just events. Hash tags are “bottom up” creation of semantic data, and there are some very cool programmatic things you can do with the data.

Twitter app for Android ( http://twidroid.com)

Currently free and well reviewed, Twidroid is a native Twitter app for all Android devices and has all the same utilities as the iPhone ones mentioned in this post…But since it Android, you can have it and several other apps all running at the same time *AND* receive a call – Unlike the iPhone

Finally,

Keeping you Twitter account closed is just a really bad idea and I do not recommend you do that. “Closed” will never bring you the joy, satisfaction and entertainment that comes with the serendipitous discovery of an open account.

I acknowledge that “noise” is an issue with Twitter and I am working hard to fix that. You are encourage to participate and help solve the activity noise problem here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ronin691/3132754199/

While I’m continuing this brain dump, I may as well add I did give FriendFeed a try. Instead of saving time by aggregating content, I found myself less productive visiting/commenting at just another site. I know many folks swear by it, but I’m happy with my current solutions for online social participation.

Also, have you tried Tweetree (http://tweetree.com/)? I like their concept but wish it’d auto-refresh and keep more items on a page.

I haven’t installed SocialScope, but from what I’ve seen and those I know using it, it looks quite promising. If you add yourself to the beta signup page, you can usually get in pretty quickly. (The Blackberry in our household belongs to Melissa, so I only use it now and then.)

And, dang, how could I forget TwitPic! Twitter doesn’t offer integrated media sharing/hosting powers yet (like the recently acquired and then shut down Pownce), and TwitPic is an invaluable tool – pretty much the de facto standard for uploading and linking photographs. When mobile, I use it in conjunction with my crappy iPhone camera and Twitterrific (it’s builtin).

I’d also like to mention that I’m not following David Pogue (NY Times) until he starts following more people (aka conversing) and knocks off the fake queries and column research. Some mainstream tech media who “get it”: Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle, Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post, Jason Snell of Macworld, Sascha Segan of PC Mag, Lance Ulanoff of PC Mag, and Harry McCracken of Technologizer.

Your suggestions on the etiquette stuff are excellent. It’s easy to stray off topic on twitter at times though.