afordrunning

aford on twitter's bird

Thanks to Twitter and good co-workers my new blog is 12 days old and just hit 1200 hits.

I am passionate for people to get on Twitter and create their own set of followers and followed tweeters. (FOLLOW aford ON TWITTER HERE) Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows only 140 characters for messages given and messages received. Twitter asks the question, “What are you doing?” when you finally create a profile. That question is a bit misleading once you really figure out what you want out of Twitter. Because you might want to know what someone else is doing? You might want to know where the best place to find a deal online might be? Or, where the  next meeting is at? You pick it, Twitter is the info-philes source of choice for cutting edge, early adopters. All I can say is act now, before your grandma gets in and kills the flow. 

I have also found that one of the best ways for those of you who spend a good portion of your day away from your desk  to keep connected via Twitter is through your mobile device. Now I know that Blackberry has an application called Twitterberry – but since I use the iPhone I will talk about the apps that I have found “ridonkulous” and the one I have finally settled upon. 

1. Tweetie – My personal favorite because it gives you a clean looking interface, great functionality, and has yet to fail me on a single post…well, maybe one post. Still – this is the new go to guy for me through the phone.

2. Twitterriffic – This one has all the bells, buttons, and whistles with a desktop client to boot. I didn’t like the lack of ability to reply in direct message to users without using the dreaded and oft failed ‘D’ functionality.

3. Twitterlator – Didn’t like the way this one segmented out my twitter feed. Ugly and lacks some functions. 

4. Twitterfon – Failed often and seemed to crash on some critical message moments. Also doesn’t sync with your actual Twitter account. Shows messages as active after you have already read them.

5. Twittervision – The best thing about this application is the world view it gives as tweets come in from around the globe. The worst thing is you can’t just see you feeds easily. So you get two Japanese tweets, then a dude from France and finally some “Nancy” from Delaware. It’s randomness is cool when you start up, but after you have an established following list you really want to hear what those people have to say. I will say the desktop page is neat.