Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Are any other genea-bloggers Twittering?

I signed up for Twitter the other day, but it's lonesome talking to myself. I need others to play with - who else is following and tweeting?

How often do you tweet? I can't see doing it every 10 minutes, but it may be a good way to stay in touch when away from the Genea-Cave (if I can figure out how to do it on a cell phone).

Is it a time-waster? It probably is if you let it be. I look at it as an occasional diversion - like Facebook is for me - I visit there 3-4 times a day and drop some nuggets of wisdom to my Friends. Are you on Facebook? It's free, and can be useful to network with people with similar interests, like genealogy.

I know that Denise Olson on Family Matters has written some Twitter posts - see All a Twitter. She has some good examples of how it can be used effectively.

Is this something that could be used for genealogy research? If so - tell me how! I can see using a laptop at the library to ask a research question of someone at home or at another library, but a cell phone would do just as well (but might cost for messages).

My Twitter ID is rjseaver - tell me yours, or send me a follower request and I will follow your tweets too, and vice versa.

My latest tweet said:

"rjseaver getting dressed to party for NYEve ... it's a progressive dinner - 4 houses, 4 courses, lots of friends, champagne and hugs/kisses at end"

It only allows 140 characters, and I had 138 in that message.

UPDATED: 1/2/09 - Dean Richardson posted an excellent response to this message on his Genlighten! blog this morning, titled GeneaTwits — A Twitter app for genealogists read it! Thanks, Dean.

I've managed to find over 50 genealogists on Twitter, and am following them. I've also been able to tweet on Twitter and have it show up on Facebook, but not vice versa. As long as being a Genea-Twit is time-efficient, I will keep at it.

9 comments:

Unknown said...

Randy--

Thanks for following me on Twitter! I've been using it for a few months and really enjoy it. I find the bite-size posts to fit my style a bit better than conventional blogging.

I'll be giving a presentation at the South Davis Family History Fair in Bountiful, Utah in March on microblogging/lifestreaming (e.g., Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed) so I'm quite interested in any responses you may get about Twitter's usefulness to genealogists.

Happy New Year to you and your family!

--Dean Richardson

Anonymous said...

Happy Newyear.

I do keep an eye on twitterings from paulballen ever since it appears that he is no longer blong, but twittering, a.k.a. micro-blogging, instead.

Anonymous said...

Hm. That's blogging, not blong.

Cherie said...

I'm following you now!

I also follow a few other genealogists, and have even made a connection thru Twitter with a fellow researcher who has relatives in the same area as some of my ancestors. She sent me some really useful info recently and we figure we'll find we're related someday!

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

I'm pretty sure I've become a minority of one, but I see both Facebook and Twitter as time wasters. Denise has pointed out that Twitter is a way to stay in touch if disaster should strike and if used that way it could be a very important tool. I don't know how to send text messages, much to the frustration of my kids.

ChicagoGenealogy said...

I finally signed up for an account a few days ago--Dean's been twittering to me about the joys of Twittering for quite a while now--and I'm toying with the idea of using it as a way for people who have requested lookups from me to follow my progress. I've often thought it would be helpful to have an easy way to let researchers know "I won't be going to the FHC until evening today." or "My list is short. Watch for email early this afternoon." And, I'm also thinking it might be a good place to quickly record and share some of the insights that I come across while using Chicago records. "Before 1910, Chicago death records didn't ask for parent names, but father and/or mother may be recorded if an infant died before being named." Is that less than 140 characters?!

--Cynthia Richardson

John said...

I tweet under the twitterid Gavroche. Most of my tweets aren't genealogy-related. Though if I am following/being followed by other geneabloggers that could change.

I sometimes tweet humorous thoughts that others might not find humorous, and I sometimes tweet political and other news related commentary that might not interest some.

At the bottom of the twitter page, there is a link to search all of Twitter for keywords, so you could search for genealogy and see what others are saying about it. Or you could search for surnames to find relatives who are twittering. Beyond that, I'm not sure how useful it is for genealogy.

Anyone is welcome to follow me, but no one should feel compelled to follow me if I am following them.

John Newmark/Transylvanian Dutch/Gavroche

Thomas MacEntee said...

Randy

It took me some time to get into Twitter - I am @tmacentee on Twitter and I am using Twitter Deck to read tweets, send tweets and am also using FriendFeed to aggregate blog posts etc. into tweets.

Now, just like Facebook, I am addicted. I see great potential for this both for my genealogy as well for my business.

Anonymous said...

I have seen a large increase of people following me on Twitter since I posted a small meter of Twitter followers on my blogs. I am amazed, but happy too because some of them are my geneablogger friends. I am webduck on Twitter.

Please add name/url to your ways to leave a comment Randy.