Twitter Tips, Trick, and Tweets by Paul McFedries

You know, I've always been a little bit of a tech geek, but not to the point of always having to be the first to adopt a new gadget. In fact, I'm just so cheap that I seem to alway run behind the curve, buying a new piece of technology only after it gets down to commodity prices. So, sometimes it takes me a while to get around to figuring out how to use new tools, which makes the local library a great resource for me, as the "for Dummies" books tend to come out before I need to know about something. Such is the case with Twitter. In fact, I'm not certain I "get" the whole tweeting thing, but it's turned out to be a handy tool for me to use to post things to multiple social networks simultaneously.

I decided I ought to know a bit more about it, just in case there was something in its functionality that I should be using, so I went to the library looking for the "for Dummies" book, but it wasn't on the shelf, and I found Mr. McFedries' book instead. A rather significant portion of the book was actually taken up with account setup, which I'm not certain belongs in a Tips and Tricks type of book. I mean, if you can't figure out that much, you better start with the "total Idiots" book instead, right? However, the section about profiles got me motivated to at least change my background image to something custom, instead of the default color I picked back when I set up the account in the first place, so that was something.

I also found, in the section on mobile tweeting, just enough information to motivate me to get my cell phone number set up to tweet. Did that, tried it, confirmed that it worked, and probably won't use it again unless it's some sort of emergency when I really need to get a post out there and I have no access to the Net.

There's a lot of information in here about all sorts of web sites and applications that work with Twitter to perform various functions. Most of them I'll never need, but if you're interested in getting more out of Twitter, it would be a good idea to check them out. I'll probably end up setting up an account on Hootsuite, to help me schedule tweets ahead of time. I'm definitely in search of the automated life.

One small problem with the book is that I can tell it's already outdated. So, if you're thinking about using it, you might look for a more recent version, with updates to capture Twitters latest upgrades.