I Twitter. I admit it. But I follow more than I actually tweet. For those of you who have not been exposed to Twitter it is called a microblogging service. You can post up to 140 characters. You can follow other people who twitter so whenever they update their status you will see the post on your twitter homepage. You can also set up your account so that you can update your status from your cell phone and you can also get updates from others you follow on your cell phone. Useful and kind of fun but it just seems like one more thing to check and update online. I don’t know about you, but my email/facebook/twitter/rss reader gets out of hand rapidly.
I recently found something to follow that gave me a glimpse of a different way to use Twitter. Here is a link to the original site and if you twitter you can choose to follow.
Late last year, my family found a line-a-day diary maintained by my great-aunt from 1937 to 1941. She was in her early teens, living on a small farm in rural Illinois with her two brothers, one of which was my grandfather.
It’s a fascinating account of life in a bygone era, a time when my family’s only connections to the world were schoolhouse chatter and a neighbor’s radio.
Looking at the terse journal, my sister quipped, “This is the Twitter of the 1930s.” We glanced at each other and almost immediately began planning the Twitter account that would become Twitter.com/Genny_Spencer.
If you have run across any other diaries of this sort I would love to hear about it. I can see this being a great creative venue as well. Could a “diary” be created as a sort of stream of thoughts of a made of character?
If you are not into writing longer blog posts this might be a blogging outlet for you. Have you run across creative uses for Twitter? Can you come up with some new Twitter ideas?