I’ve been somewhat intrigued by Twitter for a while now but never got around to doing anything about it. So many people rave about it though and it seems to just keep getting increasingly popular. Tonight, while testing the most recent version of ccDismiss, I had plenty of time to kill since it required waiting for my batteries to get to different states (e.g., fully charged, critically low, etc.). I ended up playing with Twitter a bit and checked out some applications to make it all easier. I think I’m going to give it a shot at this point and see if I stick with it or not. The chances for me staying with it will be a lot greater if I get some of my friends and family (fellow geeks and non-geeks) on it as well so this post will serve as a good reference for me to point them to to get going.

Here’s a pretty interesting video description of how it works for those who are not yet familiar with it all.

If you’re interested in giving it a shot, here are some bullets to help you along:

  1. Go to twitter.com and get an account.
  2. Go to twitter.com/gusper and click on the “Follow” link to subscribe to my “tweets” (as silly as that may sound).
  3. Install a twitter client on your computer. You can find a few here. I’m actually trying one that wasn’t on the list called Twhirl and it seems pretty good so far.
  4. You can enable getting notifications on your phone via SMS. But if you prefer having a richer experience, you can install an app like Tiny Twitter. It’s much nicer than just plain old SMS and doesn’t cost you anything (assuming you’ve got to pay for SMS messages) if you have an unlimited data plan already. To install it, just download it straight from your phone’s browser here: http://tinytwitter.com/m/.
  5. If you use Facebook, add the TwitterSync app to your profile. This will automatically update your Facebook status with your latest “tweet.” 
  6. Finally, there’s really just a couple of things to learn how to do and you can read about them here in a brief help page.

I’d say it’s at most 50/50 that I’ll stick with it at this point but we’ll see how it goes.