Twitter! Thing 21

I have a personal Twitter account: http://twitter.com/geeaybee but honestly I don't tweet a lot on it. I use Twitter personally to follow a few "famous" people (Logan from Project Runway, and Gavin Rossdale). I've not found much use for it personally. However, over the past week I have been using Twitter to send updates on my Project Term experience to Galveston and Habitat for Horses. You can find the Twitter here: http://twitter.com/ASHGalveston

I had a relatively positive experience tweeting during the week,especially since I figured out how to post pictures using twitpic: http://twitpic.com/ By using the Twitpic feature I was able to update all friends and family at home by sending pictures as well as text about our experience in Texas. It was easy to do, and not very time invasive. I did find some shortcomings though. I'll list them in bullet form:

1. I couldn't post pictures with text. There could be a way to do this, but I couldn't figure it out.

2. I was limited to 140 characters, which didn't allow for much expansion on things. I think some people at home were a little disappointed because there wasn't elaboration, but I couldn't elaborate unless I sent a series of messages, which would have become time consuming if I did that. So,it may have come off that we weren't very busy because the tweets were brief, but we were awfully busy, including me, which meant that I didn't have a lot of time to update tweets!

3. For tweeting to work successfully, you should really have a phone with Internet access so that you can see the comments tweeted back to you. I was able to tweet, but couldn't check the responses to my tweets because I don't have Internet service on my cell phone. It's not that I don't want it, it's just that I can't afford it. Hence, several people posted responses that I was not able to answer until I returned home -- kind of defeated the purpose.

Other than that, I think Twitter was a good idea for PT. It may have been even more effective if the kids could all have access and post their individual thoughts as well. I also feel that for Twitter to be effective, individuals must update frequently. It seems to be the nature of the beast with Twitter.