Thing 27: Starting Twitter

Well, I have one. God help me, I have a twitter.

Reading through the descriptions, it seems pretty similar to setting your status on facebook. And almost everyone I know is on facebook. So I'm wondering if this works pretty much the same way for people who don't have a facebook, or if it will all seem different after I work this out for a while.

For one thing, I don't know anyone else who's on twitter. I know one blog I read has a little twitter feed embedded on the side, so I'm following that, and I also added Barack Obama's twitter feed (Although it seems not to have updated in a while). I tried to find something that would let me add a widget to my own blog here, but I'm not seeing anything. I'm also wary about adding this to my phone, because I don't know how many texts I could end up receiving.

However, I've heard so much about twitter that I want to make a real effort to utilize it fully. I read a little piece online about the ways people use twitter, and you can do crazy stuff if you code it right. It seems that in the recent snowstorms across the country, someone set something up where people would update their twitter status (with an @reply to this guy's feed) with a report of how bad the weather was where they were, and he used all this data to create an up-to-the-minute weather patterns map, all of which was supplied by users. This sounds like some crazy powerful futuristic stuff, which is exciting.

I'm thinking that as long as I split the posts up into two sections, I might as well start setting goals for the next post I make. This will give me something to work on in between scheduled times. On that note, my goals for Thing 27 are:
1) Expand the twitter feeds I'm following to 5
2) Update my status daily for a week. (I may get another Things session before then, but I want to do it anyway).
3) Find out about embedding twitter feeds on here
4) Unrelated, but I need a new avatar or picture for this blog, too.