Day 40 - Learning to use Twitter - Self Improvement

Today I am learning how to use Twitter. I am logging the process in this post from signing up to my first post and anything else I do with it today.

7:00 PM - Go to twitter.com to sign up for an account.

7:35 PM - Finally have a user name. Don't laugh, it was hard to choose. All normal variations of my name were taken. MattTandy, MTandy, MatthewTandy, MJTandy, Matt_Tandy, etc. Read a blog post about Twitter Handles Dos and Don'ts. Settled on: MatthewJTandy. It's a bit longer than I would like, but it maintains the branding of my name I am going for.

8:23 PM - Finished looking for things/people to follow. Tried to be selective. BradThor (one of my favorite thriller authors). Also SarahW, who is connected to Publisher's Marketpalce, WSJ, etc. The Blaze (a conservative and pop info news aggregator). FBN Stossel (ie, John Stossel, one of America's greatest investigative reporters alive today). The Science Channel. Chris Anderson (@TEDChris.. TED.com is a fantastic site of some of the greatest speeches).

I know there are individual people to follow that I know, but I haven't made it that far yet. If you have twitter and want me to follow you, just let me know your user name!

8:24 PM: Just a note: The Twitter.com site is sluggish when searching for people. They need to optimize their front or back end, whichever is slowing it up. I've had to reload several pages due to it being buggy. Maybe it doesn't like Google Chrome?

8:34 PM: After ten minutes on the set-up phase of "Friends" where it searches my email contacts, it's still "thinking". Time to move on from that. I'll have to give it a go later. So far I am not impressed with the stability of the Twitter website itself.

8:40 PM: Still trying to click "Finish". Reloaded the page several times. No luck. Twitter must be a bird that sleeps at night.

8:43 PM: It completely crashed my browser. Awesome. Switching to Internet Explorer for now. Found a confirmation email was sent to me to confirm my account. Did so.

8:47 PM: Ran Friend Connect for Twitter on IE. Worked instantly. Twitter sucks on web compatibility.

9:04 PM: Finished adding the few people I instantly recognized via my email that have twitter accounts: James Blevin, Tristi Pinkerston, and Cindy Hogan (via Watched1).

9:19 PM: Working on my Twitter profile. Tried adding a photo after putting in a brief bio and website, but it said Twitter is over capacity. Then it crashed when I tried to click back. Went back to the homepage, noticed the photo worked when I did a test tweet.

9:35 PM: Spent 15 minutes searching for a background I would like and had color consistency with my blog. Then I found out that no matter what site I used, in order to put the background up they all wanted access to my twitter account, including reading my contact, my messages, and... posting for me. Nice. Not. Guess that's a no improvement until I find a workaround (ie, create and load my own).

9:44 PM: Enabled Twitter by phone. Set the hours to not send notices between 10PM and 7AM. I have a feeling I'll need to make adjustments as I go.

10:17: PM: Installed TweetDeck and set it up. Cannot figure out how to get it to show my Facebook items on there, so functionality is limited. Going to take a break and come back alter tonight to it.

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10:37 PM: Figured out how to add Facebook. I see TweetDeck as being way awesome as a time-saver source for social networking via multiple accounts!

10:48 PM: Installed TweetDeck on my Android phone, Much niftiness.

I think that about concludes it for me tonight! I still need to learn more about trend topics and more, but I think for now I am all squared away and ready to get going!

Be sure to follow me on Twitter! User name is MatthewJTandy.

Categories: Matt Tandy , Matthew Tandy , MatthewJTandy , Self Improvement , TweetDeck , Twitter