Gays are incredibly well connected, quick witted and love sharing their point of view with anyone who will listen. Twitter really should be the social network of choice. Even the vocabulary for twitter is gay. 'Twittering', 'Tweet', 'tweet up' - is there a queen out there that doesn't like the idea of 'followers'. I've looked at the numbers and the gays still have not adopted the gayest social tool out there.
So, here's a quick gay guide to twitter.
What is twitter?1) It's free. All you have to do is register at www.twitter.com and you are given a twitter page.
2) You fill out a profile - make it a good picture. The competition out there is weak.
3) Start typing short, sharp, pithy comments (140 characters or less) that are broadcast to all your 'followers'
4) Depending how witty, interesting and cute you are in your picture, people will 'follow' you (it's just like the gay world)
5) Decide who you want to 'follow' by going to 'find people'. Import names from your email to see if any of your friends are there or invite the ones who are not. When you choose to 'follow' someone you get to know everything they are up to and everything they are thinking, so choose carefully. 'Over- Following' could feel a bit like attending a gay Turrets sufferers event.
Some interesting features:RepliesIf you put the '@' symbol in front of someone's name e.g.@fagadget this message goes to their 'replies', folder but everyone sees it. So, it's like replying to someone so loudly that everyone in the room hears you.
DirectIf your want to reply to an individual personally, without everyone hearing, simply put a 'd' in front of the name, replacing the '@' (e.g. d fagadget).
Search
If you go to the search bar and type in any subject you can see who is talking about it and what they are saying. Some common themes are already identified by the community as good topics to search. These have a '#' in front of them and are known as
hashtags. e.g. #gay #gay_teen_hackers .
(maybe we need #hashfags).
Twitpics
You can share picture with your followers using a service called
twitpicYou simply sign in with your twitter name to register and can then send pictures of whatever you want to all your followers.
Posting links
You can post links in your twitter account but the longer links take up a lot of characters. There are many tools that let you post links really easily to your twitter account. My favorite is
bit.ly This lets you post directly to your twitter account. If you want to see pages that are getting shared most on twitter go to
Twitturly.
Twinfluence
By counting how many followers you and your followers have you can work out who has the most influence on Twitter. A site called
Twinfluence ranks people based on their overall influence and the sister site
Twitseeker can measure this by subject matter
Check out other tools (there's new ones every day) at:
Mashable Twitter list or
Smashing 99 twitter toolsPlease use #fagadget and @fagadget
The 2009 Red Dot design awards were released recently but without pix. These are just a few of the best - thanks to www. ifitshipitshere.com for these.
Love this boat.
A door you can't slam.
The perfect cook top.
Step aside straight guys...this is a dream grill
Best of all we loved the welders mask!
My good friend Toby Barlow just wrote a piece for the NYTimes about the $100 home and the artist communities that are growing in Detroit due to the massively reduced home prices.
TED is one of the Geekiest conferences of the year and always a bit of a marathon of cerebral stimulation. Previous years had not had a LGBT(Q) gathering. This year in Longbeach Tom Rielly organized a dinner for all the gay geeks and world changers. It was a great group but something tells me there were a lot of other Gay/geeks who were not present. Next year we will be organizing something really special so if you are attending (either Palm Springs or Long Beach) please be sure to check the "Gay" attribute in your profile...or just tweet @fagadget.
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