The word ‘Tweeps’ brings to one’s mind four-legged, furry beings with horns that used to live long, long ago in the Ice Age. In reality, Tweeps are a species (totally unknown to Charles Darwin) that evolved in the twenty-first century from Homo Sapiens and are mostly found hanging from their favourite electronic gadgets viz., computer, mobile handsets, etc., permanently connected to a service called Twitter.com and working their nets (as in ‘networking’) with others of the species from all over the planet.
Ever since Twitter, with its 140 character limit per message, burst into the Internet scene, one of the most important contributions it has given to humanity (next to having an entire generation raised on thumb-prodding Twitter applications) is the swelling of English vocabulary in leaps and bounds.
A Twitter-savvy individual can be identified by the terms Tweeps, Tweets, Tweet-ups and so on (often going ’Twee-Twee-’) that he uses in his daily parlance, at least once every three sentences. A drawback is the global abbreviation of words to fit into the 140-char space (the trend that originated with mobile text messaging), that may soon deprive English language of its valuable vowels and redundant consonants.
Twitter does not often make a very good first impression on people. In fact, very rare are those who have fallen in love with it at first sight. As for me, I took one long look, and turned my back on it. I did not ‘follow’ anyone, and no one followed me. There is a time and place for everything, even Twitter, as I discovered later.
When the time was ripe, I returned to it and started following people with a vengeance - Writers, Bangaloreans, Mothers and so forth. To my surprise and pleasure, many of them followed me back. Following is a simple courtesy - if someone follows you, you follow them back, unless you happen to totally disapprove of them or their posts, commonly referred to as Tweets.
However, there are a large number of spammers doing the rounds following people; there are even automatic spammers who locate and auto-follow Twitterers. There doesn’t seem to be much that we can do to filter them out, except report them to Twitter Support as Spam, through a single click.
Once we start following others, all the Tweets that they send appear in chronological order, latest at the top, in our ’Home’ page. We can read them or ignore them. The information overload may make us dizzy at the start, but we can easily learn to steady ourselves and pick the good ones and cast away the others. Our own tweets would appear at the Home page of our followers (as well as our own). Many a time, we find interesting comments by others, which we can reply to or broadcast to our own group of followers (known as Re-Tweeting or RT).
Users at Twitter, alias Tweeps (or Tweeple), are identified by a handle beginning with ’@’. For sending messages to a specific person, this handle is used anywhere in the message (within the 140 characters) and he can see it in his ’replies’ section (these messages are also available in the public timeline).
Direct Messages(DM) are a private messaging wherein they appear only in the DM Inbox of the recipient and the DM Sent folder of the sender. A mail will be sent to the recipient informing of a new DM. If either of them chooses to delete the DM, it will be removed from both the DM boxes. Topics of discussion are distinguished with ’œ’ in the prefix, so that all the tweets on the topic can be searched with ease.
Months after hooking myself to the Twitter Chatter, I have realised that Twitter never sleeps; any time of the day or night if I login to it, I can find people chattering away from all zones of the Planet. The mixed-up tweets are the evidence that when sun sets on one Tweep, it rises on another.
It was through Twitter that I first heard of the NaNoWriMo (http://nanowrimo.org) - the National Novel Writing Month, which is now International - where Writers from all over the world go totally bonkers, feed on grass, paper and coffee, ignore their family and work, and try to complete 50,000 words or more in one month, a phenomenon that happens every November.
The crazy activity for this year has started, and if you hang around the Writing Communities on Twitter, you can hear either sobs from those who aren’t achieving their target word count per day or enthusiastic throwing around of word counts by those who accomplish them. An entire civilisation has sprung up around Twitter.
There are tools and softwares to use Twitter to the best advantage, links to other applications from where tweets can be sent, viewed and replied to, and every new model of mobile handsets has a Twitter app on it. If you are not part of this civilisation, you might as well be an outcast!
Once we have built our community around us (and it keeps growing day by day), we will get used to asking, answering and listening, on any topic under the sunny sky. If you have questions for which you need suggestions or answers, Twitter is the place to be.
When in doubt, Tweet. You will be answered.
trivandrum@expressbuzz.com
Jeena is a Bangalore-based writer, blogger, and author of a collection of short stories titled ‘Tales from the Garden City.’