Two services a new Twitterer must know
I’m going to avoid writing about the the pros and cons of Twitter, which have been much discussed since it’s inception in October 2006. Discussed enough, and by people who’ve used it far longer and are in a far better position than me to comment: I’ve only recently started using Twitter a lot (More than a few times daily). Just Google the subject for millions of posts an articles on the subject. So I just thought I’d share two things I find particularly useful when using Twitter: one general web resource that most hardened Twitterers take advantage of, and one I discovered earlier today that seems slightly less well known.
The first is, of course, TinyUrl. Those who frequent Web 2.0 all know about it, and use it. We use it a lot: whenever we find ourselves with a lengthy URL that needs shortening. And that’s what TinyUrl does: provides short aliases to redirect long URLs. A one hundred character URL (Like http://www.llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll- llantysiliogogogoch. com/) is shortened to 23 (http://tinyurl.com/16gu). Tweets (A single Twitter post) can be a maximum of 140 characters, so you can see why TinyUrl is so useful. Those who don’t frequent the web, take note.
The second can be found at Terraminds.com/twitter. Twitter offers a search that lets users search for other users, but it doesn’t let you search within Tweets, which makes it hard finding Twitterers posting about certain subjects. The search function linked to above lets you do this, making it easy to find users posting about certain subjects. Very useful for those who want to make use of Twitters numerous benefits but don’t really know where to start having signed up.
I hope you find one of these things useful (The second especially) - I do.