Using Twitter

I have been playing around now with the increasingly popular social networking site Twitter for a year having set up a Profile and linked it through to my Facebook page. Twitter asks "What are you doing?" and limits postings to 140 characters. Among other things, it can be used with TinyURL to give short pointers to other web sites. Mashable has a posting dated 24 May 2008 with information about additional Twitter tools.

I recently came across a good posting on Shane Richmond's blog at the Telegraph dated 6 January 2009 about how to use Twitter better.

As well as being useful for quick pointers from some aviation writers (for example, Jon Ostrower) I am following for the latest happenings, postings that have grabbed my attention have included:

• From English comedy actor Stephen Fry currently visiting New Zealand while making a wildlife documentary: "A kakapo tried to shag the back of my leg. Mark was roughly shagged on the back of his neck. It's mating time for kakapo: anyone'll do x" and "Leaving Codfish Island this morning and heading for Queenstown. Kakapo made 1 last alarming attempt to ravish me on way to loo last night x"
• From the software programmer Mike Wilson a.k.a. 2drinksbehind who attracted media attention after sending out a message on Twitter having just survived his second air crash, this one on the Continental B737 that burnt at Denver in late 2008: "Holy [Two expletives deleted] I wasbjust in a plane crash!" He has subsequently advised that although his laptop was destroyed he was able to extract data off its hard drive.

Just don't expect anything too profound to appear as part of my twitterings.