<p>I think myspace is the best for privacy. In facebook what ever you write it shows it on your friends homepage and to there friends. You have to send a PM or IM if you don’t want people to see it.</p>
<p>
You can also block people (or other entities) who sign up to follow you. But abasket’s advice on minding what you tweet is wise.</p>
<p>Tututaxi, I signed up for a twitter account simply because I wanted to follow the tweets of a particular public figure but I didn’t want to be twittering (tweeting? who knows) myself. Within an hour or so after launching the account, I already had two followers … they were clearly people soliciting something or other, as my screen name bears no relationship to my real name (or even this screen name) and no one knew I was on twitter. So I blocked those two people, which you can do. Though there’s really no point in following me, since I don’t tweet :-)</p>
<p>It’s kind of pointless, though, because even without an account, I can go to [url=<a href=“http://www.twitter.com/name”>http://www.twitter.com/name</a> of this particular public figure] and see his tweets. I didn’t really need an account to do that. Oh well. This particular public figure does not accept tweets back at home, though many do.</p>
<p>In the link Sooz provided the young woman in the bank was obviously having a “tweeting” or “twittering” conversation with someone. Is this something that occurs frequently between people that follow each other? It would seem impossible to have an account unless you had a BlackBerry. Are tweets sent to a regular email address?</p>
<p>Tweets can be sent as text messages to your cell phone. I have some sent to me that I want to see immediately- others I check from the website. There are also programs for Blackberry and iphone to manage your Tweets.</p>
<p>You could set it up to work like text messages on the spot, or only when you check your site. (like choosing between receiving info through text messaging or through email – instant delivery versus someplace you have to check).</p>
<p>I use it as a personal news feed. lance. local news. other sports. CNN. Fortune. I check it twice per day. I find I have the early scoop on things…pretty cool. Don’t tweet at all. </p>
<p>When I tell folks I have a twitter account, they look at me funny. I think most think it’s silly. But I’m not tweeting about sitting around watching my dog and sipping coffee. It’s just an easy way to get news on things of interest to me. </p>
<p>BTW, I do have some strange followers…I pay them no mind since I don’t tweet!</p>
<p>I’m on facebook now too… thanks to a few old college buddies. But I’m still uncomfortable there. I like looking at other’s pics but hesitate to post any. And I’m not sure I like all my “friends” seeing my posts. some are good friends…others on the periphery. So I guess I’m a bit of a reluctant facebooker…</p>
<p>EDIT: I just tried to check twitter and got a picture of a whale saying Twitter was overcapacity…too many tweets. LOL. Never happened before…I guess it’s really catching on.</p>
<p>The overcapacity thing happens to me about once a week or so. I think the work day hours especially are heavy twittering time!</p>
<p>Thanks All, I’m a slow learner……… If you are following say, 3 people and 3 organizations/businesses, every time they tweet you won’t get an email or text unless you select that method of receiving their tweets? You can elect to have all your receiving tweets be posted on your Twitter page? How much info about you is required inorder to have a Twitter account?</p>
<p>Yes. It will only go to your twitter page if you set it that way. You only have to give your email address and a password. I had some mortgage guy spamming me but I just blocked him. It’s easy: click on the list of people following you or that you are following and then you can right click on someone to block them.</p>
<p>Sometimes people follow you (especially businesses) because of some of your wording in a tweet. For instance, once I tweeted shortly after MJ’s death about how my girls had spent the weekend “learning Thriller across our wood floors”. The next day I had two wood floor refinishing businesses following me - I just blocked them. Easy.</p>
<p>Tututaxi - they required nothing other than a screen name and password.
When you sign in, you can see both what you’ve twittered and then the tweets directed at you by the people you follow. It is super easy to figure out, though I don’t do anything with it! It’s really a no harm no foul - less “investment” than setting up facebook.</p>
<p>Hi Toneranger, my daughter just convinced me to get a twitter account for the exact reason you described: using it as a news source. I’m still figuring it out but from what I’m seeing you can stream from a number of different news sources (they are all on twitter!) and easily scan the headlines… really useful.</p>
<p>I have a twitter account. I follow a number of people, but only have two followers: both kids. It’s a fast and easy way to let them know what’s going on. Both of them tweet from time to time.</p>
<p>Our business tweets our daily special every morning at 8 AM. I’m astonished at the number of people who are willing to get that morning advertising tweet.</p>
<p>I just returned from an international conference. It’s the first time I’ve attended a scientific conference where there were signs posted to “Follow us on Twitter”. They used Twitter to disseminate info re: schedule changes, late breaking news, etc.</p>
<p>I was quite proud of myself as the only middle-aged person in my group who actually knew the nuts and bolts of doing that, having signed up a couple of months ago to follow news of my D’s college.</p>
<p>How do you access the tweets? Do you sign on online or get them on your phone?</p>
<p>For my account, I access them online. I just look at the webpage each morning. Some of the tweets have a URL embedded in them, so that makes it easy to just click on the URL and go to the website of interest. For instance, D’s college might send a tweet that has a link in it to a website showing photos of graduation.</p>
<p>You can elect to get them on your phone - I think that would drive me crazy, though. But that mode was helpful during the conference.</p>
<p>That’s what I thought. So basically one just logs into the Twitter site to get the updates?</p>
<p>right. very easy.</p>
<p>In fact, if you use Firefox as a browser, they have different apps that you can use with it. One of the apps is to show your twitter messages at the bottom of your browser screen. So with that, you don’t even need to log in to read your tweets.</p>
<p>There are also third party apps, like TweetDeck, that will show you all your Tweets, facebook updates etc. You can sort them. I have some Tweets coming to my iphone as text messages and access the rest from an iphone app called TwitterFon. I like my city’s news and weather alerts to come in as text messages, but I don’t need to hear from Lance Armstrong quite that frequently.</p>