The more I use twitter the more I find myself changing the way I communicate within it’s 140 character limit.
First of all I dropped capitalization, just for the sake of speed. Spelling is one of those things that gets forgiven by everyone due to the nature of the medium I think, pretty much like text messages on a mobile device. Same goes 4 using nmbrs and abbr 2 shrtn msgs.
As twitter is part life-streaming, activities such as what you are listening to, eating, watching, or doing all come into play. For listening I'm now using the prefix “ipod=” which seems to fit and putting the track or album name in quotations seems to be an accepted way to separate it from the artist.
e.g. ipod=“blue moon station” by solar fields
So why should you be interested in this? Well, I'm not the only person who is re-thinking the way they communicate. Others are too and there are sites and services springing around twitter up to accommodate this.
Some I’ve noticed others using and coming to the fore are:
- OH: = overheard. You can see this going on over at http://overheard.it/
- FAIL = Tantek was the first person I saw use this to highlight something not working in some sense or another
- Hashtags - by placing a hash or # in front of a word, this can act like a tag within your twitter stream I used this method of tagging tweets at #sxsw this year
There are also a number of blogs devoted to twitter. One of the new kids on the block is Twitter Thoughts by Roger Harris.
Any of these can used to get a look at and track what's going on around you, but unless you participate you'll never fully appreciate the new conversations. And that could be an EPIC FAIL.
