Are you a Tweet Person?

Our audience at asiancemagazine.com is somewhat computer-savvy, but I wonder how many are participating in Twitter, the on-line interactive communication site where the individual messages are limited to 140 characters, including spaces.

I am fairly new to Twitter, nearly addicted right now, though that should wear off. It’s like eating potato chips, not terribly nutritious but hard to stop.

You sign up by choosing a username and your password, standard stuff for the Internet. Put up a picture of yourself, or something else, along with a 160-character-or-less description, and this becomes the profile that others will see if they become interested in knowing about you.

The twitter.com site has informative help items, but much is pretty intuitive. Starting off, you will want to “follow” some news sites and perhaps some celebrities. You can search for people you know. [I am douglaswcooper.] Whomever you follow, you will then receive their short messages, “Tweets,” whenever they produce them. Soon you will also see others commenting on these or extending them or…. When you reply, they may choose to follow you and thereafter will see your tweets. You can Retweet these to others. You can also send private “direct messages” to individuals who follow you and you are able to “unfollow” and even “block” those you decide no longer to interact with. In a few sessions, you will have made some interesting acquaintances.

What can you say within the 140-character limit? For example, I used two messages back-to-back to send:

Poem by Lee Wilson Dodd:

Much that I sought I could not find.
Much that I found I could not bind.
Much that I bound I could not free.
Much that I freed returned to me.

Another time, I told a joke:
He: “Happy birthday, dear, what would you like?”
She: “I want a divorce.”
He: “Oh, I wasn’t thinking of spending THAT much!”

In response to the news from a Tweep [one who Tweets] that Viagara sometimes causes deafness, I responded, “Did you say ‘Niagara’?”

Another use for Tweets is to give the link for a news item or a site to call it to the attention of others. For example, “See my article, ‘Provide, Provide’ in http://asiancemagazine.com.” Asiancemagazine.com is on Twitter and sometimes the staff Tweets to call attention to articles, too.

Under its “Discover” section, you will receive short summaries of items thought likely to be of interest to you. You can also search for keywords and see the tweets that relate, and you can learn to follow threads like #asian or #marriage or other words with a leading #, making the words “hashtags,” more easily found and replied to.

There are lots of women on Twitter, though men probably predominate. It differs from Facebook in having much less emphasis on what is going on in one’s personal life, though some use it that way, but most post news and articles and comments.

When I finish this piece, I am going to go to Twitter and write:
“Enjoyed GOLD MOUNTAIN, #romantic #novel about San Francisco 1906, #interracial #AsianAmerican.” I have not counted the characters, but when I get to Twitter, it will do so for me, and I can edit it there to add or subtract to get below my 140-character limit. By the way, I recommend that novel highly, having gotten it through Amazon and read it on my Kindle.

It is not a dating site, being nation-wide, but you can make friends, pen-pals of a sort, learn a lot and have some fun.

Give it a try, or as they might say, “give it a twy.”

Douglas Winslow Cooper, Ph.D., is a retired scientist, now an author [douglas@tingandi.com] who now helps others the write their own books. He wrote Ting and I: A Memoir… and co-authored Ava Gardner’s Daughter? and The Shield of Gold, all three published by Outskirts Press [outskirtspress.com] and available through Outskirts and amazon.com.