Found this really simple, 7 step process on how to get started with Twitter. Forget following just the people you know, expand your reach, and find people who are interested in the same things you are:
1. Pick a topic the person is passionate about.
2. Go to http://search.twitter.com and run a search on the term.
3. Find an interesting tweet or post about the topic, and click through to the profile of the person who posted it. If the profile looks interesting, follow that person. Follow a few folks like this.
4. Start a conversation, reply to one of the posts as if you had started a conversation in line at the supermarket.
5. Look for someone sharing a useful website or blog post related to the topic, click through to the blog and consider subscribing to it. Maybe reply to the author via comment or back on Twitter to let them know what you thought.
6. Spend a few minutes in the conversation and see what happens. Try again the next day.
7. Repeat.
via How to Show The Value of Twitter In 2 Minutes or Less | :: a thousand cuts :: adam cohen’s blog.
The real value comes in networking at geek oriented events. A whole other conversation is going on at most conferences among those on Twitter. Find out if there is a hashtag, signified with a # instead of an @ address- and watch the conversation there. Guaranteed you’ll meet more people through twitter than by trying to make small talk at the breaks over soda.
plasq.com – Skitch – Snap, Draw, ShareYour friends are global… you can send them links… but what if the action is on your screen? … Point out a quick suggestion to a colleague or pass on that funny moment from an IM chat, post images to MySpace, eBay, forums or via email..Skitch is the Internet age’s Camera and it Rocks!There are many ways to take screen shots of your desktop, from a quick series of keystrokes, to 3rd party tools of varying levels of ability and complexity. But even with advanced tools, any editing beyond cropping and resizing will require another program, and then another will be needed to share it.The developers at Plasq saw the need for a better tool, and the result is Skitch, a veritable Swiss Army knife of functionality – from capturing, to editing, and finally, uploading or embedding. Take a screen shot, crop the picture, resize it by dragging the corners of the window, draw on the picture, add some text, drag and drop it to your desktop, upload it to Flickr, insert it in your LiveJournal/MySpace/WordPress post, share it through the Skitch website, drag and drop it into an email, share it through almost any social networking site, save it as a PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF, TIF, or the native Skitch format, then view all your other screen captures in the History window – all from Skitch. Skitch can also upload to an FTP server, or share via WebDav. It’s freakin’ sweet!Like many sweet things, it’s only available for the Mac. Try out Skitch, and let us know what you think.