Activity 14: Tweeting

So I've been hearing about tweeting and seeing the twitter icon everywhere for ages, and now I've spent some time trying to understand the attraction. Here's what I've learnt: Tweets can be up to 140 characters only, tweets are short bite sized updates, tweets allow you to publish your thoughts quickly and follow others' thoughts/information streams, tweets can be viewed by everyone (public homepage) a group or indiviuals, tweets can be published to a blog or social networking site, tweets make connections, tweets serve a different purpose to blogs and email. Librarians tweet to keep clients updated and informed on any manner of things. I did a tweet search for public libraries and found some interesting topics to follow...the convoy of no confidence heading to Canberra, and another..'Take action: stop the privatization of California's public libraries' by Watchdogsniffer (how do they think of these names?). My first impression of tweets was that they are a different language! For example, this ALIA tweet: RT2helenmilner Some slides on slideshare for #disll&future enjoyment slidesha.re/nVBFQH+filmison YouTube bit......I guess Helen Milner must understand this tweet. Some tweets definitely require some deciphering, but I think you would get used to the
language and 140 character limit with practice. I haven't gone as far as getting a twitter account myself. I'm more interested as a result of my exploration though.