Here’s what that means: five other posts have also been chosen but the winner is picked by you, the readers! So head on over there and check out the other five posts and then you won’t have a dirty conscience about voting for my post!

Or vote right here:

I was nominated once before and ended up in last place. Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen again!

Thank you!

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Well, Twitter has its good side: it’s a great place to find like-minded people and it’s a fantastic place to ask questions and get immediate feedback.

But some people still don’t understand what it does or how it works—they need to see it. So I decided to put together some sketches that helped me kind of understand how Twitter works. And since I suck at drawing, I’ve also added nine other visualizations that other people have done.

Hopefully one of these will get the message across and you’ll “get” Twitter by the end of the post.

My Drawings

Fist thing you need to know is that a Tweet is a short, 140 character message that you send off into the ether. Your followers all see it on their feed.

Retweeting is when one of your followers takes what you said and they “pass it on” to their own followers, spreading your message.

Which can often lead to new people discovering you and deciding to follow you.

Still haven’t had enough? Here are nine other Twitter visualizations that will hopefully get the message across:

1. Twitter Explained Video:

2. A Basic Twitter Network:

3. A Twitter StreamGraph:

4. Exploding Stars Twitter:

5. Twitter Outer Space:

6. German Twitter

Don’t forget to add thewriterscoin to your Twitter feed!

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• Twitter First Impressions
• The Writer’s Coin and Social Networking

The good news: someone out there is giving me props by putting me on their top-ten anything list. Sweet.

Bad news: nobody’s heard of me. Which is OK if I had started this whole thing a few months ago, like Bargain Babe apparently did. At least that’s what her Sitemeter button says. Oh and you know what else it says? That even though she only started blogging in January of ’09, she already gets more traffic than I’ve ever gotten in over a year!

Wait—this was supposed to be a celebratory post. Damnit!

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I’ve been on Twitter for a little over a week now and I wanted to jot down some of my quick impressions of this social-networking site. For those of you that haven’t heard of it before, it’s kind of like Facebook and Blogging mixed together but stripped down of everything but the most basic stuff: you can only write messages that are no longer than 140 characters.

The Pros

• Brevity: I like the 140 character limit—it keeps others from blabbing and it makes everyone really think a little bit more about what they’re writing before sending it out into the world. Especially myself. I’m like Obama that way—I feel the need to explain every nuance of what I’m saying so I can go on and on when it’s really not necessary. The character limit is a fine way of forcing me to refine and reduce my thoughts.
• Immediacy: Someone can be sitting on the train and see an accident happen, they text in their tweet, and boom, everyone knows about it. The ability to text in a message from your phone is a very cool part of Twitter and one that I’ve used many times. The potential is huge for what you can do/report on with this service. Granted, once most phones have web access this might not be as big a deal, but for now it is.
• Commingling: It’s nice to see the people you follow all on one page “talking.” Instead of going to this person’s site and that person’s blog, you see what they’re up all on one page, which is pretty nifty.

The Cons

• More to oversee: Add Twitter to the long list of things you need to check up on. Facebook, email, the other email account, the blog, etc. It’s enough already.
• Repetitive: A lot of people link to their sites/blogs to highlight articles (I’m actually going to do that now with the Is a New Yorker Subscription Worth It? post), so it just becomes another way to say “Hey look at what I’m doing over on my site!” Which can get old.
• Banal: A lot of the stuff is, like Facebook, pretty useless. So you’re going for a walk now, great, nice to know. I’m using Twitter for this blog, not for personal use, so maybe that’s why this annoys me, but I still don’t care about the minutiae of someone else’s like—even if they are my friend/relative/spouse. Have a little privacy for crying out loud.

Overall

Obviously, it’s a little early for me to be finalizing any judgment on Twitter, but so far I like what it brings to the table. It’s pretty much what you make of it and right now I’m using it to express random thoughts in a really succinct way (which is kind of fun) and sharing my Urbanathlon time (which was 1:39 and I shall be posting more on this soon).

I don’t know how Twitter intends to make money, but that’s their problem, not mine. Until then, you can follow me here and enjoy such groundbreaking Tweets as:

Got my tix to see Aronofsky’s The Wrestler @ Chicago International Fikm Festival next friday 1:14 PM Oct 13th from txt

Make more= pay more taxes. Simple. 11:42 AM Oct 16th from txt

10 mile run+Soldier Field+my bum ankle=a very interesting Urbanathlon 2:27 PM Oct 17th from txt

And my favorite, which I intend to make a regular habit of because abbreviating these story ideas down to the bare essentials is a great exercise:

Story Idea: Men on the ship sailing back to Europe bringing first word of the discovery of America. Drama ensues. 3:25 PM Oct 14th from web

Do you Tweet?

Other Posts You May Like:

• The Writer’s Coin and Social Networking
• Nine Cool Twitter Visualizations