I’m all aTwitter

At my new day job several people use Twitter, so I decided to investigate it on Friday. OH MY. I’m sucked in! I set up an ‘emmaclair‘ account and now I’m rolling in the wonderful land of tweets and followers. I did a search for users with ‘romance writer’ or ‘romance author’ in their bio and found many great women online and I added them to the list of people I’m following. This morning I ‘tweeted’ about my writing goals for the day and the very wonderful Keli Gwyn kindly wrote directly to me to encourage me. I saw her posting at a great time when I needed a bit of a pick-me-up - thank you, Keli!

So, what is Twitter, you ask? There’s a cute video on the Twitter home page that gives a great explanation, but the basic premise is this: you can post a 140 character ‘tweet’ about what you’re doing right now. Think of it as micro-blogging. You can post these from the Twitter website directly, from another online tool that you download (I like twhirl), or via SMS text from your cell phone. So if you’re stuck waiting in line somewhere, you can text that info and all of the people who are following you will be able to see it. If there are people that you’re very interested in following you can even have their tweets sent to your cell phone via text so you don’t even have to be in front of a computer to follow them.

My husband thinks this is information overload and I can see where he’s coming from. But I think of it more as connectedness. Today I sent a message to Grammar Girl, who I think is fabulous. And I also received the kind note from Keli Gwyn whom I’d never spoken to before. I like that sense of community.

Are you Twittering? If so, please add me (emmaclair) to the list of people you’re following and I’ll add you too.