I'm all a-twitter

Some of you might be wondering what that widget is on my blog that looks like a bunch of random posts by people you don't know. Well, that's exactly what it is. It's known as twitter. I was skeptical about twitter after hearing about it from co-workers, but I needed to try it out to see its potential for something I'm working on in my job. So I signed up, and within moments people from all over the world started to "follow" me. I guess you could call this the next generation in internet stalking tools. You can stalk - ahem - I mean follow anyone who has a twitter account.

The point is this: You update your twitter status as often as you want by simply answering the question "What are you doing?" These are known as "tweets" so for example, my status could say "I'm blogging about twitter (and I could put in a link to this blog)". People following me on twitter would receive this message either in their browser in a twitter application like twitterfox, via a twitter application they've installed on their system, on their phone as a text (if they chose that option), or the next time they go to twitter.com and log in, they'd see it. You might wonder why this is useful. I know I did, and I'm actually still on the fence about it. Although today I was posting an article to a product wiki, and within moments of me pushing the post button, I received a "tweet" from LotusInfo (it's a twitter user name, obviously) that mentioned my wiki article and provided a link to it. So I see it has potential. I just need to figure out the best way to use it :-)

Anyhoo, if you care to follow me on twitter, you can do so by signing up for an account yourself, and then searching for "amandabauman".

This concludes the geek portion of my day. Amanda out!