Twitter And Bzpower
Entry posted by Black Six
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So yesterday I announced a new feature on BZPower, the ability to integrate Twitter anywhere you can use BBCode. This feature really has a lot of potential in my opinion, and I look forward to see how people use it. It seems though, that many people haven't heard about Twitter or don't know how to use it. So I'm going to try to explain some stuff about it.
First off, you can think of Twitter as a miniature blog. Your entry is limited to a maximum of 140 characters, meaning you have to be concise with what you say. The idea is that you make a bunch of short entries about what you're doing over the course of the day. You don't need to do it all the time or talk about every little thing, just what others might be interested in. Other people that are also members of Twitter can then 'Follow' you and whenever they check their account they'll see all of your updates. There are other things you can do like send replies directly to an individual or just browse through everyone's entries as well.
To start off you need to go to Twitter and make an account. Pick your username and password and all that fun stuff. Now you can follow your friends to see what they're up to. Twitter has a couple tools that can scan your web mail address book for contacts and see if they have Twitter accounts. Otherwise you can find BZPower members that are using the feature and follow them.
No, you can add and view Twitter entries from their website and that's all well and good. But that means you have to keep checking the website all the time, which can be annoying. I installed an application called TwitterPod that collects all of my Twitter friends' feeds and displays them for me in a window on my desktop. From that window I can send Tweets, access people's profiles, and a bunch of other things. TwitterPod is a Mac-only program, but you can check out a whole list of different apps.
Another thing Twitter does is allow you to add your cell phone to your account. Then you can send and receive Tweets in the form of text messages wherever you are. Just watch out for going over your limits!
So that's Twitter in a nutshell, hopefully you understand how it works better. But now the real question: what does this have to do with BZPower?
Well, there's a whole bunch of possibilities here. Than, our resident Q&A Guru, made a Twitter account to show the latest updates in the Q&A forum. You can see the most recent events at the top of the page when you visit it.
I've added Twitter feeds to a custom content block in my blog and also to my signature. This way people can keep up to date on what I'm doing in regards to BZP and other things. I've also been thinking about making an account to use in the RPG forum to use for keeping people up to date with the RPG Contests and anything else that might be going on there. People could use it while they're building a MOC and ask for feedback or talk about what is is they're building at that moment. The possibilities are endless, and I'm hopeful to see what people come up with.
If you have any questions about Twitter and how to use it in general or on BZP, let me know and I'll be glad to do my best to help!
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