Everybody’s Tweeting – How To Get The Most Out Of Twitter

Over the last week Twitter has dominated the national conversation to a degree hitherto only rivaled by snow. Last week Stephen Fry – the suitably erudite poster-boy of micro-blogging – turned in his definitive Twitter performance and transformed 30 minutes stuck in a lift from banal setback to gripping adventure. It was a bona fide News Event and took the service ever-further into the mainstream.

Stephen Fry

Thousands of new users are signing up each day (and more and more are following NME’s updates at Twitter.com/nmemagazine). Increasingly it’s a way for fans to keep track of their favourite bands’ activities – Mike Skinner, Sonic Youth, Lily Allen and Little Boots are all frequent Tweeters, as are hundreds more artists.

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To the newbie or the cynic it can seem like a pointless endeavour, a dripping tap of nerds documenting their ready-meal choices. Yet scratch the surface and there are a range of neat ways in which to engage with the Twitterati. To enrich your experience of what can seem a rather limited application, simply follow my hitchhiker’s guide to the Twitterverse…

1. Watch live tweets via an application

Using Twitter is like playing God and knowing everything that’s going on inside everyone’s heads all at once. Predictably it’s noisy and needy so you need to find a way of filtering the interesting activity. There are hundreds of web applications that allow you to see through the matrix, using whizzy graphics and keywords to highlight different themes.

Twittervision is a mashup with Google Maps that displays incoming updates on a world map. To navigate flourishes of the English language specifically though, they don’t get more incisive than Cursebird – a real-time feed of tweets featuring swearing. You can even track weekly swear trends. As you’d expect, it’s NSFW.

2. Stay on trend

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For an unsettling measure of just how easily our chit-chat is manipulated by a global news agenda just spend some time following trends. There are various ways to keep abreast of (and contribute to) dominant Twitter themes, whether it’s unfolding acts of terrorism or pop star transgressions. Twist is the prettiest, most powerful route to discovering what everyone’s talking about right now. Not only does it identify popular topics on Twitter, but you can have multiple statgasms with its lists and graphs.

Sounding like some ‘Skins’-approved wonder drug, Hashtags are the standard convention for adding a context to tweets. They’re most useful in events of community significance, when anyone can tag relevant tweets inline with an agreed keyword – e.g #frylift or #uksnow. Querying a hashtag via the likes of Twitter Search displays all the assorted musings on that topic.

3. Get a desktop/mobile Twitter client

Obtain instant Twitterati cachet by using a Twitter client rather than the standard Twitter web interface, which turns out to be pretty clunky and inadequate once you start following more than 3 people. Installing one on your desktop allows you to tweet, search and filter posts, group users, and shorten links all in one place.

Fans of procrastination will enjoy the notifications that pop-up at the slightest sneeze from your friends in Twitsville. Twhirl is excellent, though it’s being rapidly overtaken by TweetDeck as client of choice for the geek class. Meanwhile, mobile versions – like Tweetie for the iPhone – do similar things and ensure the minutiae of daily life never go unchecked.

4. Set Twitter to update your Facebook/Myspace/whatever

Let’s face it, once you’re off swapping 140 character bon mots with your new Twitter pals, tending to your other social media platforms will seem a quaint proposition. Luckily, you can give your less-fashionable friends a window into your new life by adding a Twitter widget to your profile page.

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