For those of you that have never heard of Twitter. Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the USA, Canada, and India, as well as a UK number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.

I am a gigantic fan of Twitter. I have written a few things about Twitter in the past. Besides being accessible from just about any medium you want, it’s a great way to meet new people that share your interests online. for me, that happens to be anyone in the local Concord area.

Heres a quick video to explain.

Twitter Tracking

A great way to find people on Twitter that have the same interests as you is to use the Twitter Tracking feature. Start tracking some keywords that interest you like “Starbucks” or “Earthquake” and when ever someone puts that in their update across the entire Twitter network, you will get a message. Then you can choose to follow them or not. I find people all the time that I want to follow from using Twitter Tracking. Valleywag wrote about how Twitter Tracking takes all the fun out of stalking. I say track away and hear what other people are saying about your favorite celebrity, product or city.

Follow people and be followed.

Initially I was only following about 10-20 people that I had already known from other sites but by tracking comments and digging through my friend’s followers, I built up a decent list of people to follow on Twitter. Thats when Twitter becomes interesting. As I followed more people, I started seeing that they would follow me and then some of their friends would start following me too. This started a spiral of following and followers that has incrementally increased over time. People like Robert Scoble has upwards of 15,000 people he is following.

Now you don’t need to get notifications on your phone for everyone, you can select who you want to interrupt you while you are out and about by turning off the device updates in your settings. This way you can make sure you never miss an update by the people you actively want to follow.

What next?

So I have set up a Twitter account for the website. To be fair, I have used the name Concord_Blogger. This will be for any Mayor of Concord stuff like new posts and general chatter with my friends. I will be asking questions from here as well so if you want to, you can help. You can also add my personal Twitter account as a friend since I will be checking this ALL the time.

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