On The Road to Mastering Twitter

On the Road to Mastering Twitter

  Twitter shows its users whether what items and topics are hot and controversial. In its "trending" feature, the users are informed about the recent trends, namely the local emergency, events, or newsworthy occurrences. For instance, because I have set my location to Boston, Twitter automatically feeds me the news articles, data and even official announcements that pertain to my life. The "trending" tweets and accounts allows people to make collaborative efforts and even achieve desired outcomes. For instance, this picture below shows Boston Police Department's announcement.

  Hashtag is the backbone of the Twitter. When an user embeds a hashtag to his/her tweets, Twitter gathers the full information about a post and categorizes such tweets with specific hashtags. The garnered data thus bears a great deal of information and personal tweets about an uniform topic. Users can search for hashtags in the search bar, and they will instantly get the search results for all the relevant tweets that contain the particular hashtag. An impressive portion of this feature is that when searching for hashtags, the results show up on the order of descending relevancy.

  When using Twitter, users can send an interesting "tweet," or post to desired recipients directly. This is a feature that connects Twitter users with users of other social media platform. For instance, I can spot an interesting tweet about Boston's weather forecast from Fox News' Twitter account; then, I can refer this tweet to my friend, who does not frequently use Twitter. This feature can improve people's efficiency in regards to dealing with urgent news. Also, this feature frees the users of creating a new tweet or a post.

  Users can easily find their friends through the "find friends" features of Twitter. This feature of Twitter allows people to import their contacts from other messengers or even e-mail accounts. For instance, I can import my contacts from AOL, Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo Mail. With connected friends on this platform, I can further converse with my long last friends and relate to them. In a very realistic example, a student at BC might not know the contacts for his group assignment. In such case, he/she can connect the BC Gmail with Twitter, and open a casual channel for expedited communications.

  Users can discover and search popular accounts on Twitter with a great ease. The popular accounts in Twitter are further categorized into groupings like music, sports, entertainment, technology, news and many more. I personally found this feature very useful, because I am planning to use Twitter as a quasi news platform.

This is an assignment from the Immersive Education course that I am taking at Boston College. The course is called Collaborative Computing. For details, visit the immersive BC portal at http://ImmersiveEducation.org/@/bc