I can take a quick look at their profiles, and see exactly why they aren’t catching on like everyone else. If you have friends, who are not “getting it” either, or you don’t quite understand it, this is for you.

First things first, if you don’t already have an account, get one.

Fill out this form in detail. And please, put your full name in the box. Why? So people who know you can find you. Pick any username you like, because you can change it anytime you like. Just remember, people might judge you for what you put.

Once you have signed up foran account, head over to your settings page, and add your avatar, and fill out the bio. These are the two most important things on your twitter account. You can change your picture as much as you like, but try to keep it as long as possible. People will get used to seeing your face. Likewise, you can change your bio whenever you want, and as you give and take more from the service, you will (and probably should).

Complete the rest of your bio, including location (city and stat are a minimum must. Don’t worry to much about the design part of your profile at this stage, you can worry about that later.

[Read more on building your profile]

So you’ve set up your profile. Now what? What exactly is twitter?

Wikipedia defines Twitter as “…a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.” The network basically operates as a giant chatroom. But that may be a bit simplistic. Depending on your goals, Twitter can be any number of things. But to the newcomer, the best way to describe it, is a party.

In the offline world, when most people go to a party – certainly a big one, with lots of people they don’t know – what do they tend to do? Right: hang out with their friends. A few people have that admirable quality where they can readily mingle in just about any social situation or group but the majority feel more comfortable staying where they are.

If you do this on Twitter, it will never make sense to you. You will never ‘get it’, because at its root Twitter is all about socialising. Twitter is not Facebook. By simply following your friends or people that you know, it will always seem a cold and somewhat vapid place.

The secret to “getting” Twitter, is in two parts:

1. Follow more people, so
2. More people will follow you

It really is that simple. As you follow and are followed by more people – new people, not just the friends you came in with – the ‘Twitterstream’ will open up and you’ll be privy to a lot more information. In turn, when you share information yourself, you’re giving back to the stream.

If you do this consistently, and well, you’ll attract more followers, many of whom will engage you directly. In turn, you will correspond with other Tweeters yourself, and relationships will develop.

You should follow anyone and everyone! Twitter makes it very easy to follow new people – simply go to their profile page, and click on the ‘follow’ button. Equally, it’s just as easy to ‘unfollow’ anybody, which means that at no time are you risking anything. Again, Twitter isn’t like Facebook – by following somebody, or letting somebody follow you, you’re not exposing all your secrets to some random stranger. The personal information on your profile page is basic and all your Twitter friends will see is your name, location, website and bio. That’s it. There’s nothing to worry about.

There are three main ways to find new people to follow:

1.    Use Twitter’s ‘Find People’ feature
2.    Use Twitter’s search function
3.    External services

Each of these are beneficial in very different ways.

As a new user on Twitter, if you follow less than ten people, certainly if these are ten people you actually know, the service won’t make any sense to you at all. Yet, if you follow too many random users, it can easily get confusing any overwhelming. Furthermore, if your following count is too in excess of your number of followers, you could actually end up looking like a potential spammer (both to other users and Twitter itself).

So what’s an ideal number of followers for the new user? I would say a good starting point is the number of people you know plus about another twenty people you don’t. So, if you know ten people on Twitter, seek out and follow another twenty or so. If you use the various search and tracking facilities outlined earlier this should be very easy, and hopefully you’ll find lots of people with whom you have a common ground.

When you reach this number, sit tight for a while. Let people start to follow you back. This will include some of the people who you are following and new people that appear out of the ether.

The rule of thumb on Twitter was generally that to be polite one should always follow back everybody who chooses to follow you. This is social media, after all. But this has always been more of a guideline than an actual requirement, and as the platform has grown it is wise to be somewhat careful before automatically clicking on the ‘follow’ button.

When you get a new follower on Twitter, the site will send you an email announcing this. This email will come with a link to this new person’s homepage. It’s good advice to get into the habit of regularly checking out these links. Some of these users will be spammers and some of them might just not be your thing.

Tip: Try and let your ratio of the people you are following to the people that are following you get a little better than 1:1 before following more people. This isn’t essential, but it will ensure that you keep things under control a bit. Remember, Twitter is a two-way medium. If you’re following a thousand people but only being followed by ten, you’re going to be a pretty small voice in a big crowd.

By following the advice above and, most importantly, really getting stuck in, Twitter can be enormously entertaining and offer a significant amount of personal value as an educational tool. Make the effort, share information and engage with others, and it won’t be long before you’ll be telling your friends how they can ‘get it’, too.

Related posts:

1. Dear Twitter Noob: 5 Tips to Help You Hit the Ground Running
2. Twitter is for Old People?
3. 5 More Twitter Tips

Because you persisted, eventually the penny dropped, and Twitter suddenly seemed a place of enormous opportunity. You started to recommend the service to your friends, and then watched the process repeat itself through their eyes.

• “I don’t get it.”
• “I have nothing to say.”
• “Who are these people following me?”

Here are five tips that all newcomers to Twitter should read and implement to help them get off to a good start.

1. Use Your Photo for Your Avatar

Twitter has a default avatar in place when you sign up for a new account. If you leave your avatar as the default, it tells veterans of the service one of two things: you’re either a newbie, or (worse) a spammer.

Your choice of avatar will be one of the most important decisions you will make. It’s the first thing most people see when deciding whether to follow you – it should represent what your Twitter account represents. Your avatar should tell us a little bit about who you are.

Ideally, your avatar should be a recent photo of YOU. Alternatively, it can be your brand’s logo, but if you’re the only person who will be using the account a photo is still better. It’s more personable and people will warm to you and become familiar with it.

You should never EVER EVER use an avatar like you would on MSN or AOL such as a cartoon, a picture of a celebrity, or a TV show. People expect to see your face, It makes you seem real.

Also, if you decide to go with a photo of you and your spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, you and your child(ren), or your entire family, expect people to be confused as to who exactly is writing the tweets. This is also a “trick” some spammers and marketers use to make there account seem more “safe”

Spend some time working on your photo. Upload a large image in as high a resolution as you can manage taken with a decent digital camera – go for a JPG or PNG over a GIF. Twitter allows up to 700kb and will shrink the photo down to size for you (avatar sizes are 73×73). When someone visits your profile page and clicks on your image, it will get bigger.

Avoid raunchy photos. If you’re a man with his shirt off, much as it may appeal to many on a base level, nobody is going to take the things you have to say seriously. This isn’t MySpace.

It’s okay to change your photo, but try not to do it too often – users tend to see your image before your name, and can get lost if you change your image too frequently. Only 5% of your followers don’t care about your avatar.

2. Complete Your Profile

Blank, half-filled profiles on Twitter are a big no-no. Take the time to complete it.

• If you’re an individual and want to be taken seriously, include your real name – not your nickname or an alias.
• Make sure your timezone and location are accurate – you don’t have to be too specific on the latter, but the more you are, the more relevant people you will attract as followers. If you’re a business, it should be very specific.
• Fill out your bio with things that are interesting and relevant to you. This will ensure that when people search for users to follow your account will show up – if you just include quirky or cryptic stuff then expect quirky and cryptic followers (or, more likely, none at all)
• If you have a blog or a website, do include it. Alternatively, link to your LinkedIn profile or even your Facebook. Again, it tells us more about you. Avoid using shortened URLs, as this can seem like a bit of a scam.
• If you don’t have a website, don’t include one. Linking back to your Twitter profile makes absolutely no sense at all. And linking to something stupid or offensive will make people hate you.

Think twice before protecting your updates – if you are a convict, running from the police, you might want to consider a more secure network. Twitter is predominately about socialisation – you’re encouraged to meet and converse with people you don’t know. Twitter is not a place to hide.

The theme for your profile isn’t something you should worry too much about right now. Twitter has a few default themes to choose from, and for now, you should just choose any one you like, or upload a background image of your choice. Just remember, people have different monitor-sizes.

3. Find People to Follow

MOST IMPORTANT PART! Twitter will make absolutely no sense to you at all until you start following people. And they need to be relevant people. If you don’t find the people you follow interesting, Twitter will not be interesting. That simple.

• Use Twitter’s Find People feature
• Invite your friends from other social networks and via email
• Pick ten people from the suggested users list
• Check out external trackers and directories like Twittercounter and Twellow
• See who your friends are following
• Use Twitter search to see what people are talking about in your industry
• Re-visit your favourite websites and blogs, and see if they list their Twitter profile (most do)

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

4. Be Interesting

Don’t take Twitter’s “What are you doing?” question too literally. There’s a place for the inane on Twitter, but if that’s all you tweet about, people are going to get really bored, really quickly.

Find and share content. If you’re a business, think engagement first, and marketing second. It’s okay to tweet out links to your own website, but do so on an ocasional basis.

People are on twitter to engage in conversation. About things that are interesting to them or the community. Take a look at the trending topics. The secret to Twitter success? Be famous, useful or interesting.

5. Engage

Twitter is all about socialisation. That’s the ‘social’ part of ‘social media’! It pays to adopt a policy of listening to yoru network first, thinking about what is being asked of you, and then formulating your response.

• Take risks. Start conversations with strangers. Don’t be shy – everybody’s doing it.
• Ask questions, both one-to-one and open to your entire network. Twitter is a great way to get solutions to things that require experience or an opinion. And if somebody answers your query or solves your problem, publically thank them.
• Answer questions. If you know the answer to a posted question, answer it. If you know some of the answer, or can recommend somebody who does, reply back. Don’t wait for or assume somebody else will do this. Take the initiative.
• Use Twitter’s search facility to find common problems and solve them with your expertise.

Think about changing your username.

You can change your Twitter username at any time, and it’s not a good idea once you’re established, but it something you should think about when you first sign up.

Here’s why:

• If you want to be taken seriously – certainly if you’re promoting your business – try and use your real name, or your business name
• For individuals, first name last name works best. If that’s taken, try combinations using your initials and first/surname.
• Tip: the shorter your username is, the better. Why? Retweets.
• Avoid underscores unless you have no other choice
• Don’t use combinations of letters and numbers, as this can make you look like a spambot
• This isn’t MySpace or Bebo – studmeister won’t do you any favors at all.

Twitter usernames are becoming as precious as domain names, and are running out fast. But with a little ingenuity and care I’m sure you can come up with something memorable and smart.

Related posts:

1. 5 More Twitter Tips
2. So You Don’t Get Twitter
3. Twitter is for Old People?

1. Twitter Isn’t Third Person

Remember the old days when Facebook status updates were always third person? The status boxed used to come with a fixed “is” before each message, which ment you always had to be doing something.

Because of its limitations, Facebook eventually dropped it as part of the status box, but the majority still updated in the same way.

Twitter has never been third person. Each tweet is a standalone piece of the news delivered in 140 characters or less. It is not your name doing or saying something. It’s not an action. It’s a message. Hence you should NEVER write tweets in such a way.

This happens all the time with new Twitter accounts (and many established ones). Yes you can partly blame this one on twitter, by specifically asking us “What are you doing?”. So, how should one write a tweet?

Any way you want to. There are no set rules and guidelines on how a tweet should be written, Tweets are essentially first person in nature, but ca also be quite toneless, like when delivering a news item or sharing something interesting that you have found.

If you share a lot of links, most of your tweets will be built around a headline and a link, with a little creativeness if and when necessary. If you use Twitter just to chat with friends, your messages will likely be quite talky and loose. Or, like a lot of people you’ll find yourself somewhere in the middle – and engaging blend of content sharing and personality. If your unsure of what to say in your tweets, striving for this balance can work really well.

2. Monitor Your Replies and Mentions

Because nobody has instructed you on the nature of replies and mentions, you remain oblivious to any messages that are sent your way, unless you happen to notice your name appear in the timeline.

On Twitter.com there is a sidebar on the right side of the window that contains a number of selections, the most important of which is the replies/mentions link, which is directly below the home button and reads @username (where username = your actual username, i.e., @sonnicdrummer). Click on this and Twitter will re-populate your timeline so only the messages sent to you, or any of those in which your username has been mentioned, appear.

Again, because Twitter is all about engagement, this is REALLY important. If people are sending you messages and you’re not seeing them, then you can’t respond. And if you don’t respond, people will stop sending you messages. That simple.

Most Twitter clients will notify you of mentions and messages, but Twitter.com does not. You will need to actually click the button yourself.

3. Be Personable, Not Personal

Twitter often attracts some very strange behavior, and this is mostly due to the fact that it is an entirely open, public network. The best approach here is to fall somewhere in between. If you withdraw too much, and become distant, others are going to struggle to warm to you because you can come across as cold and robotic. Alternatively, if you’re too personal, and share too much, you’re likely to make other people uncomfortable and nervous; for fear of what you might say or do.

You want to be engaging and friendly, but also remember that Twitter is an open network. It’s easy to forget that you are still on the internet, and that tweets are for all intents and purposes forever. Even if you delete them the don’t go away. Google tracks and links to everything that you say. Your boss could be reading your tweets. Your future boss could be reading your tweets. Not to mention your spouse, friends and family. Be smart.

4. Master the URL Shortener

Twitter only allows you to send up to 140 Character messages. This means you have to be creative with your messages, and this is especially true when you are sharing a link. Most links, are often far too long to be manageable and this has led to the creation of various link-shortening websites. It’s important that you familiarise yourself with URL shortening and make a habit of it.

Twitter has partnered with bit.ly, and as a result the already-popular URL shortener is now the industry leader. Bit.ly has always been a personal favorite because it also provides a link-tracking and statistical service which is really useful. These features are only available to those who have a Bit.ly account, so it’s worth your time to register for this free service.

5. Try looking at Twitter in a Different Way (With Software)

Everyone starts out, on Twitter.com and very quickly begin to realize that its features are a bit limited.

• For your home computer, I suggest you download Seesmic Desktop or TweetDeck. Different people have different opinions about which is better.
• At work, we’re often not allowed to install software, so a web-based Twitter application is necessary. Seesmic Web is the best.
• If you’re a business looking to manage your Twitter account with multiple users, I recommend HootSuite or CoTweet.
• The iPhone has a plethora of Twitter clients, including TweetDeck, Tweetie,Twitterrific and many more.
• For your Blackberry, I recommend ÜberTwitter.
• Your Android phone could do a lot worse than Twidroid.
• For your Windows-based mobile, I don’t think anything is better than Dabr.

Experiment with as many as you can and find what works best for you.

Take Your Time with Tweets

Twitter is a real-time social network, and updates can come through thick and fast, especially when you start to follow a lot of people. As such it can sometimes seem like you need to operate in a super-fast way yourself, rushing out loads of tweets just to keep up.

Mistake. Twitter is high-speed, but that’s only because you’re seeing the collective. Individually, people update on a much slower basis and it’s important that you maintain a manageable pace to ensure the best quality in your tweets.

The learning curve on Twitter is quite steep and it’s easy to pick up bad habits at the expense of good practices and etiquette. By following these simple tips above (and those in the previous article), you can move from newbie to pro in no time at all.

Related posts:

1. Dear Twitter Noob: 5 Tips to Help You Hit the Ground Running
2. So You Don’t Get Twitter
3. Twitter is for Old People?

Related posts:

1. Facebook’s Project Titan: Webmail
2. Facebook Chat Available Everywhere
3. Facebook Bores Me

You won’t be surprised if I tell you that people under 25 years are the main Internet users, only this group of people takes the 25% of all population; but they also just represent 16% of all Twitter.

And which age group takes the majority on Twitter? 25-54 years old, they take up to 64% of the Twitter population (me included of course). 20% for people over 55 years and 16% forthose under 25. Yeap, you read it right, 20% of Twitter users are over 55 years.

If you start thinking about it (and when I say “thinking” I mean checking your list of followers and following) you would probably notice that you have a bunch of friends, a selected group of celebrities, and would probably see a large number of marketers, companies, brands, channels, journalists or even PR guys. And that’s not exactly the main focus of teens these days.

It doesn’t feel like the teen wave didn’t appear just yet in Twitter? Can we expect a new teen market for Twitter as it was for Facebook? Sadly, I don’t think so. Everyone is too mesmerized by Facebook.

I myself, am certainly not “old”, yet I still use twitter. I use it for multiple reasons. Twitter is a great source of news (provided you get it from the right people). For instance.  I learn a lot about the world of Visual Worship from @worshipVJ.  I get updates on the software that powers my blog comments from @disqus, and occasional news worthy updates from @JohnBoozman.

As well as being a great news source, Twitter is a great place to keep up with my friends. My friends on Twitter are too many to list here, but rest assured, we have some fun conversations. Even you could join in on my conversations at Twitter.  I’m know as @sonnicdrummer.

I prefer Twitter over Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, you name it; because of its simplicity.  There are know apps to be had. There is just me, and my content.  What I want to say, when I want to say it, viewable by everyone at a moments notice.  It really is exciting right?

So why is it that youth today don’t use Twitter? I can’t really answer that question.  But I can tell you its catching on in a bad way. Media has caught on to Twitter, and turned it into the “Next Big Thing”. This in turn has increased the number of spam accounts (although Twitter denies this).

Bagged Milk Picture courtesy of @david_bullard

I would love to see a growing number of people my age using Twitter. As I previously stated, I have so many fun conversations. About bagged milk. Videos. Music. You name it.  And did I forget to mention that this conversations come with pictures?  Remember the bagged milk?

So now maybe I have you interested? Here are some ways for you to make Twitter useful:

1. Follow the news
2. Get better customer service
3. Ask for help
4. Promote your work
5. Discuss with friends
6. Meet celebrities

If you don’t have a Twitter account, I would encourage you to go sign up for one and give it a try. If its not for you, deactivate your account. No harm done. If you find you enjoy Twitter however, check out these tips to help make your experience better.

Related posts:

1. So You Don’t Get Twitter
2. Facebook Bores Me
3. Dear Twitter Noob: 5 Tips to Help You Hit the Ground Running

All uploads on Facebook.com will support the new photo size, but uploads made from some external applications may continue to use the previous size. The larger photo size is launching gradually over the next few days, so you may not notice a difference right away.

Nathaniel, a Facebook engineer, is living 116 pixels larger.”

(Via Facebook Blog.)

We all know that Facebook has become a major photo sharing hub, even bigger than Flickr and PhotoBucket.  Here are some interesting stats about photos being uploaded to Facebook today.

2-3 Terabytes of photos are being uploaded to the site every day

We have just over one petabyte of photo storage

We serve over 15 billion photo images per day

Photo traffic now peaks at over 300,000 images served per second

So what makes Facebook such a popular photo sharing platform?

Facebook is a social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Since September 2006, anyone over the age of 13 with a valid e-mail address (and not residing in one of the countries where it is banned) can become a Facebook user. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, and school or college. The website’s name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better.

Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook with his college roommates and fellow computer science students Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes while he was a student at Harvard University. The website’s membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students, but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. It later expanded further to include (potentially) any university student, then high school students, and, finally, to anyone aged 13 and over. The website currently has more than 400 million active users worldwide.

One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos. Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other image hosting services such as Photobucket and Flickr, which apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to upload. During the first years, Facebook users were limited to 60 photos per album. As of May 2009, this limit has been increased to 200 photos per album. Privacy settings can be set for individual albums, limiting the groups of users that can see an album. For example, the privacy of an album can be set so that only the user’s friends can see the album, while the privacy of another album can be set so that all Facebook users can see it. Another feature of the Photos application is the ability to “tag”, or label users in a photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user’s friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a notification to the friend that they have been tagged, and provides them a link to see the photo.

I’m not currently sure the total number of Photos uploaded to Facebook, however I do know, that in October of 2008, Facebook hit a milestone with 10 Billion photos uploaded to the site. So where can Facebook go from here? Well in order to completely beat out more of the popular image hosting services, they would need to integrate some sort of comercial printing services and continue to up the maximum resolution on there photos.  This would eventually knock out all competition.

Related posts:

1. Dear Twitter Noob: 5 Tips to Help You Hit the Ground Running
2. Attacks Silence Social Media
3. Why I DON’T Miss FarmVIlle

What I am not a fan of however, are all of the mindless applications that some people seem to love. It is easier for me to just ignore all of those stupid “gift” and “buy me a drink” requests.

My friends have all got into Farmville and all have begged me to join and become her “neighbor” to help them out. The problem is that I now get even more requests from other people who are also playing Farmville.

I have heard it is addictive, but there doesn’t seem to be much skill at all to the game. The stream of my friends’ updates in Facebook used to be interesting, comments, links and photos, but that has just been replaced with irrelevant Farmville messages, like “someone just lost a cow on their farm”.

How much do you like FarmVille/Farmtown? Love it? Ok? Hate it? Well I for one don’t like it very much. I trashed it, and I’m proud to say that I will never again go back to it. And for the record, if you are like me and get tired of all the stupid requests from your friends applications coming in, join me in the quest to block every single application that post on your profile.

Related posts:

1. Facebook Bores Me
2. Twitter is for Old People?
3. Bigger Photos for Better Viewing

As well as adding an AIM partnership, you can even access your chat via Jabber. Whats this Jabber you ask? Jabber is a chat protocol. A version of Jabber chat is gTalk; Googles Chat inside gMail. So basicly, if you have a Jabber Chat client, i.e. iChat, Adium or Pidgen; you can use the following details to log in to Facebook chat without logging into facebook:

1. Start your instant message program and locate the menu where you can add a new account (usually in preferences or settings).

2.Create a new account by entering the following info:

* Protocol: XMPP or Jabber

* Username: Your Facebook Username or Vanity URL. (the one you set at http://facebook.com/username/.

* Domain: chat.facebook.com

* Jabber ID: yourusername@chat.facebook.com

* Password: Your Facebook password

3. Enter the following server info, as requested:

* Port: 5222

* Server: chat.facebook.com

* Use SSL/TLS: no

* Allow Plaintext Authentication: no

Get detailed information on how to set it up at the Tutorial Page

So there you have it Facebook addicts. Never leave Facebook Chat again. [via The Facebook Blog]

Related posts:

1. Facebook’s Project Titan: Webmail
2. Facebook Bores Me
3. 5 More Twitter Tips

Facebook is completely rewriting their messaging product and is preparing to launch a fully featured webmail product in its place, according to a source with knowledge of the product. Internally it’s known as Project Titan. Or, unofficially and perhaps over-enthusiastically, the Gmail killer.

Facebook messaging has been the bane of users’ existence for years. My first public gripe was in 2008, when I said that urgent changes were needed. The biggest problem is simply deleting old emails. It takes so long that I have thousands of unread and read but not deleted messages in my inbox. [via Techcrunch]
But Facebook messaging is also only indirectly linked to the email, which is still the standard way that people exchange digital messages when not on Facebook.

Facebook has occasionally dabbled with improvements to messaging, like adding the ability to search messages. But for the most part it has remained static. And not very useful.

Even MySpace moved away from their aging messaging platform to a true webmail service in 2008 (albeit one that lacked POP or IMAP support).

But now Facebook is getting itself back in the game. And if the details we’ve heard are accurate, Project Titan, or whatever it’s called when it launches, may be the kind of product people flock to.

First, our understanding is that there will be full POP/IMAP support, meaning users can access the account other than through Facebook itself. Your email account name will be your vanity url – vanityurl@facebook.com.

Email is all about identity. And Facebook is ahead of everyone else in the identity game via Facebook Connect. Facebook says more than 60 million people log in to 80,000 third party websites each month via Facebook Connect.

Tacking a real webmail product on top of those vanity URLs and Facebook connect is something even Google may shudder at. Gmail killer? I don’t think so. But a strong product move nonetheless.

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1. Facebook Chat Available Everywhere
2. Facebook Bores Me
3. [Facebook Account Saftey] Quiz Hacks Profiles!