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It can be difficult to start using Twitter, since you must decide who to follow and it will take some time before people follow you back, let alone interact with you. Imagine yourself walking into a room full of interesting people, all having conversations with each other. Do you expect everyone to notice that you have arrived, stop what they’re doing, and greet you warmly? Or do you expect that you will need to find someone interesting and join their conversation?
When you create a Twitter account, you will be asked to enter some profile information, including your name, URL, description, and photo. All of these are critically important: Many people will look at them to decide whether they want to follow you. If you have not set these up, other Twitter users likely will ignore you!
The most important concept to grasp is the fundamental nature of Twitter: It is an ongoing, global, democratic conversation. It is not a blog, USENET, Facebook or MySpace, or an instant message platform, though it does have certain elements of all of those. Let’s take a look at these elements in a little more depth.
Stephen Foskett, founder and principal at Foskett Services, has been recognized by Microsoft and VMware for outstanding contributions to the technical community. The companies today notified him that he has received the MVP and vExpert awards for 2011. This is Foskett’s fourth consecutive Microsoft MVP award, as well as his second VMware vExpert award in a row.
Foskett Services Principal, Stephen Foskett, has been announced as a featured speaker at TechTarget’s Storage Decisions conference to be held in Chicago on June 21. Foskett will speak about data reduction for primary storage and storage virtualization at the general conference, and will present a special dinner session on managing data growth.
Druva Software has developed a simple and effective backup application for remote devices called InSync. When it came time to show off just how easy it is to install and configure InSync, Druva needed an independent and credible voice. That’s why they turned to Foskett Services to develop a series of video segments walking through the process of installation and configuration.
In this age when video conferencing has come to the palms of our hands, not to mention our laptops, desktops, and tablets, it is tempting to be dismissive of live events. Who wants the hassle and cost of flying across the country and staying in a hotel when we can see each other wherever we happen to be? But attending events live and in the flesh is a totally different animal from online interactions. Nothing beats meeting in person, and techies more than most should get on the plane and go to events, if only to build stronger connections with their peers!
With traditional media and analyst organizations declining in numbers and influence, conference organizers are turning to social media for coverage and attention. If identifying and attracting bloggers is difficult, keeping them happy at an event is doubly so. After three years running the Tech Field Day and a decade attending conferences, trade shows, and other events, I’ve learned a thing or two about that. Here are my suggestions.
Twitter Zen: The Four Conversational Paradigms
Twitter can be confusing for the uninitiated, and the fact that there are effectively four different ways of viewing it certainly contributes. Although the main Twitter stream seems like a unified set of short messages, clients view it in very different ways.