Potluck #56: To Tweet or Not To Tweet...Twitter

I created a Twitter account back in iHCPL, the first generation, but I've never really found a use for it for others keeping up with me or me keeping up with others.

In browsing a couple of different Twitter profiles (news, fashion, celebrities) and read through a few updates. Do you think this is something you would adopt for personal use? Is there a particular topic you'd like to tweet about?

I have zero interest in keeping tabs on celebrities so Celebrity Tweet is something I would never follow. Entertainment Weekly's The Truth about Twitter says it best, "many celeb posts are either purely promotional ... or simply boring."

The 10 Traits of Highly Effective Twitter Users imho, are 10 traits of highly effective _____ (and you can fill in the blank with just about any word) but people comes to my mind.

2) I used the search feature to find tweets about one of my favorite things - Sonic Route 44 diet cranberry limeades! I found:

• "I hate you Sonic for not Dieting my Route 44. Blergh." and I can totally relate I hate it when I ask for diet and it ends up not being diet that could throw someone into a diabetic coma!

3) Not really sure what the buzz is all about but for me I'm too busy living life to stop and get on a computer to twitter to let the anyone know what I am doing and my cell phone despite the $178.00 monthly bill associated with it is useless!

"After years of bemoaning the decline of a literary culture in the United States, the National Endowment for the Arts says in a report that it now believes a quarter-century of precipitous decline in fiction reading has reversed." For the complete article

Playing for Change

Mark Johnson is the co-director of a remarkable documentary about the simple but transformative power of music: Playing for Change: Peace Through Music

Something Bill Moyers says really resonated with me in regard to how foreign the past political campaign seems to the reality of my everyday life. He states, "How foreign and fraudulent the politics of sleaze, the polarizing almost savage pursuit of power that strokes the paranoia in us in order to divide and conquer."

So if you are like me and need to meet someone "who hasn't given up on either our humanity or our future together." Let me introduce you to Mark Johnson.

Pot Luck #55: Getting the Most Out of Facebook

1. I already have a Facebook account

2. I currently have 43 friends and have searched for new friends in all the ways described.

3. The applications use on Facebook include Living Social: Visual Bookshelf, Shelfari, Bumper Sticker, WorldCat, and My Music among others.

4. Looking at my applications was a good chance to "clean house." I removed several applications that I don't really use. What happens is when someone sends you a Valentine's Day present for example and you accept it that adds the Valentine's Day gift application to your applications when really all you may have wanted to do was accept the gift. I never really got into giving because they are not all free. So I took this opportunity to clean up my applications. I also have a better understanding of how they work, for example, if you ignore something your friend will NOT be notified so I don't feel as obligated to accept invitations to join groups, mailing lists, petitions, etc. I like Facebook because I have out-of-state friends and family and it makes keeping in touch with them very easy. No more getting double prints and mailing them in snail mail, yes this is what I did when my kids were growing up with out-of-state grandparents. Today I have a niece with a 7 month old little girl who lives in Indiana and I get to see photos of her almost daily and even videos of her. Though my friend list is nowhere near the hundreds like my daughters are I am guessing this is because Facebook is much more popular with the younger set. I do occassionally find a new friend who I graduated from high school or college with has recently joined Facebook so I guess it's catching on with those my age.