Hints and tips for Twitter noobs (and celebs)

After my recent post on celebs and Twitter a few of my real life friends signed up – and a couple of others asked what on earth I was talking about and why they should care so I thought I’d put together a short intro to Twitter.

1. What and why

Twitter is a relatively new form of communication with a simple premise. It’s used to tell people “What am I doing now?”

Explaining why it’s popular is harder – I can’t explain why I do it… I just do. It’s one of those things you have to tyr (and I mean properly try) in order to understand it.

2. How

I think many people use the online Twitter interface for their tweeting purely because they don’t realise the possibilities.

There are a plethora of applications around for updating Twitter. Most available on your desktop are developed in Adobe Air, which is a software plugin. This will require an additional download but I think it is worthwhile. Many apps in the future will be using Air – the BBC have recently released one for their iPlayer tv service for example.

As for which app you use, there are many and it really depends upon your needs.

I have recently been jumping between different applications but my current favorite is DestroyTwitter.

I’ve added my comments on the ones I have used so far below:

1. DestroyTwitter. I am quite new to this application but first impressions are very positive. The application is fast and responsive. The design is clean and minimal, and it’s very easy to use.
2. Twhirl. This is a very popular app, it works well and is updated regularly but it doesn’t do anything particularly special. The interface is a bit gimmicky and toy like but as a first app you could do worse.
3. Tweetdeck. This is Twitter for power users. You can set up multiple views to filter the content you see. In terms of functionality it’s one of the best, but there are down sides. Tweetdeck takes up a lot of screen space, and the fonts are huge so you can’t see much at once. Worse than this though is that it seems to use 40 percent of my processor usage, and about 200megabytes of RAM – and when you are a web designer running Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash at the same time this is unacceptable.

As I mentioned above my current favorite is DestroyTwitter, but I have used Twhirl for some time and that’s more than usable as well.

Hints and Tips

Below are a few posts with hints and tips for getting started with Twitter:

• Newbie’s guide to Twitter on CNet
• Getting Started with Twitter
• Newbies Guide to Twitter

Anything else…

So is there anything I have missed or any expert tips I should mention?