What's Twitter?
Twitter.com is a free social networking site that allows you to send 140 character messages to anyone prepared to listen. These posts are called "tweets". You can "follow" organisations or people to receive their messages. Think of it as a public SMS.
Why are OxMUG using it?
Twitter came into being to help people stay in touch. The OxMUG Committee use Twitter to advise of forthcoming meetings and to underscore official announcements like the AGM. It's use was inspired by the snow of January 2010 which left some members literally out in the cold!
How does it improve my life?
The service is now well and truly mainstream thanks to the likes of Simon Mayo (twitter.com/wittertainment) and Stephen Fry (twitter.com/stephenfry).
Like any social networking site, the quality of information imparted depends who you follow. Users writing on a particular topic can insert a "hashtag" beginning with # (Alt + 3 on a UK keyboard) - so searching for #iPad will return all tweets with that tag in the content, for example. Twitter's by-line is now "What's happening?" and it is a way of seeing what is top of mind for a broad cross-section of the tech community at any given time
As well as accessing it through its own website, there are many great iPhone clients such as Twitterific - you can even tweet by SMS from your phone, although there is no good reason if you have an iPhone to go to the expense of SMS.
"The qualities that make Twitter seem inane and half-baked are what makes it so powerful," says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of Internet law at Harvard Law School and certainly it is lower-maintenance than keeping a full-blown blog - some people find the limited number of characters helpful in refining thoughts they want to share.
While often mocked as self-regarding drivel, the impulse to keep a diary is as old as Samuel Pepys. Many people find the mild narcissism therapeutic, but as with all social networking, be mindful that your thoughts may persist on the interweb forever …
Mac Help Tips
Thanks to Peachpit press for these excerpts, click the headings below
Organise Your Mac Files with Colour
Use the Label feature in contextual menus (for example, when burning a disc or copying a file) to colour-code file icons. Later, you can use Spotlight to search for files with particular label colours; perhaps red for tax files, blue for business documents, and so on.
Excerpted from The Little Mac Book, Snow Leopard Edition by Robin Williams
Improve Snow Leopard Installation Performance on Your MacBook Air
For better performance when installing Mac OS X Snow Leopard on your MacBook Air, try this technique. While you install Snow Leopard, connect both the MacBook Air and the computer hosting the remote disc via Ethernet, instead of via AirPort wireless networking.
Excerpted from Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Pocket Guide by Jeff Carlson
Use Real Accent Marks
You can type accent marks on the Mac, as in résumé and piñata. It's easy to remember that you use the Option key, and the accents are hiding beneath the keyboard characters that would usually be under them. For example, the acute accent over the e (é) is Option e; the tilde over the n (ñ) is Option n.
Excerpted from The Little Mac Book, Snow Leopard Edition by Robin Williams
