Friday, July 31, 2009

Twitter

I've begun exploring Twitter more over the last month or so. I can see advantages over Facebook using Twitter for certain reasons. I was not able to go to the American Libraries Annual Conference this year. But through Twitter, I felt like I was almost there. You could hashtag using #ALA2009 and see what everyone was doing. One breakout session actually placed a link from Twitter and the whole program was video taped with Tweets at the same time.

Today I participated in my first Twibes. This is an application that pulls all the tweets together of people who have joined a certain group. In my case, I joined Chief Tyler Florence's experimental cooking class called Twitterlicous. You have to first join Twibes and of course have a Twitter account. He posts the recipes the day before after the group votes on what he will be cooking earlier in the week.

Today he cooked Baja Fish tacos. There were some glitches with Twibes but we forded on using either Tweetchat or just a Twitter search engine with the hashtag #twitlish.
It was an interesting experience and I hope I can join another class sometime soon. (I am making the tacos tonight for dinner.)

I began thinking about how I as a Librarian can use this concept to teach the public about some of our resources. I can see converting my Business Research class to a Twibes format. If I can ink out sometime at work, I might have to experiment. The question is would there be an audience for this type of format. Tyler Florence seems to have found his audience with over a thousand members.

2 comments:

Chris Queen said...

I'm learning more and more about Twitter every day, and liking it more and more every day. Not only is it nice to promote stuff like my blog and interact with celebrities (and I've done plenty of both), but we've been using it to promote church events. As all of us build more followers the community will be even greater, and so will the opportunities.

Jess said...

Yeah... I think it's all just over my head. Or Twitter and I are just incompatible. :)
Does nobody else find themselves speaking with a speech impediment after talking about Twibes? That's probably just me, too...