Explaing My Status Updates.
Da Twitter Code:
It has come to my attention, that many of my “status” updates are confusing people, so I will attempt to explain, and hopefully educate along the way. “yes this could be a long one.”
First off, let me give you a quick history lesson on Micro-Blogging AKA Mood Updates AKA Staus Updates.
Definition: Micro-blogging is a form of multimedia blogging that allows users to send brief text updates or micromedia such as photos or audio clips and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, digital audio or the web.
(source: wikipedia)
This is the basic essence of micro-blogging. Myspace and Facebook have taken this device to the mainstream, however it has been around much longer then that. I personally use a site along with millions of other people called http://twitter.com . This is by far the most popular, and is increasing in popularity at an INSANE rate, being used by the tech geeks like me, all the way to celebrities, and our president.
Twitter works like this:
You our aloud 140 characters to post whatever you would like, because of this character limit you may notice strange links, that’s because micro-bloggers use what’s coined as url shortening services. For example:
Let’s say I want to post an image of my dogs mohawk, and the kick ass photoshop edit I did of him, the link for that would be, http://denial-design.com/h
Now, for some of the twitter slang, and why things look the way they do. When you sign up for a twitter account you get a user name. Obviously, however, you can make sure someone see your tweet (this is what the call a post in twitter) you add @user_name, and if you wanted multiple people to see it, you would add there user names, so it would look like @user_name @user_name2 etc…
Now that we have the whole @thing taken care of, you may also notice in my updates # symbols, these are called has tags, they help for searching twitter, so lets say your at a concert for um, Bobby Brown, you would put #Bobby #Brown in you tweet, then if someone who is using twitter click’s that, they will find all post who are taged with #Bobby #Brown.
This is pretty cool, as technology gets more and more used on the cell phone, you can literally see all the post from other people at the #Bobby #Brown concert with you live.
A couple of other twittercentric slang, or shorthand is.
RT: RT Stands for retweet, so if you posted a link to s site I really liked, instead of typing it all out, and what not, you just retweet to your friends.
OH: This stands for overheard, this is used more when tweeting from your cell phone, like if your at the local pub, and you hear some guy say, “I would totally have sex with that panda bear.” you would tweet, ( OH: I would totally have sex with that panda bear. )
I know your sitting there thinking, why in the hell am I reading this, and if your not, your still confused as to why my facebook, and or myspace statuses have all this mambo jumbo in it.
Here’s the deal, I’m a huge geek, I do graphic and web design, I’m always on the bleeding edge of tech, and my thumb is definitely on the pulse of what’s hot and new on the internet, because of this, I’m always trying out all the latest beta site’s and I have an account everywhere. After awhile I realized I was updating all these different site’s putting the same updates, or neglecting one over the other.
So I discovered a way to post to twitter, and it would automatically update my facebook, flickr, myspace, and misc other Social Based site’s at the same time.
Makes my life easier, and a single text message about how Kick Ass the Taco Special @ uncle Bucks is tonight, will head out to the few hundred people I’m connected too through various sites. So everyone can enjoy the cajun taco’s if they so choose.
I hope this helps all the confused souls out there, and now you can make sense of my status updates, I’m fairly confident that you will be seeing more and more updates like mine on you social networking site of choice.
-Jason Kingery
denial-design.com
twitter.com/denial

