While Twitter is likely to be around for a while, it takes some getting used to, mostly as its most visible features, Following, and Followers start to go from a few at the start, to a few hundred, and you find yourself unable to manually track what used to be fun and easy. The biggest and most profound change for me was as I approached my first 100 followers, and started to notice that my iPhone was getting inundated with SMS messages coming in, to the point where I had to shut off the phone's notification feature of vibration and tones, to let me know I was getting yet another SMS.
The first inconvenience was that I started missing family member text messages, because my phone was silently receiving them along with literally hundreds of messages a day. I started to think that the obvious solution was to turn off mobile notifications from all but the most important Followings, in terms of my interest in their comments.
I couldn't decide, and so I resorted to the plethora of tools available for my iPhone, and tested several before landing on one or two (*Twitterfon and Twittelator) that allowed me, without using Twitter's Mobile device feature, to not only log into my Twitter acct with my iPhone and read friends' comments, but then reply with a click.
I could, with one tool, track any "Tweets" that contained my username, infohwyman. This allowed me to be as responsive as I had always been to those who were either commenting directly to me, or replying to one of my earlier tweets, or even, as I discovered, saying something nice about me to another. It also allowed me to use my iPhone whenever I was ready to look at and catch up with the tweets that interested me and not be constantly bombarded with a steady stream of tweets, at times useless or pointless, and sometimes just not pertinent to me or my needs.
I have already heard of people getting exasperated and giving up on the whole deal, and I imagine to some extent it would be for some of the same frustrations I had felt, before I took action and found a way to allow this very useful and fun tool to continue to connect me to a world of thoughts and ideas, the likes of which have never come to me with such rapidity, nor usefulness as they do now.
There are so many positive uses that Twitter offers the adept and conscientious user, that I will save the ideas for a later post, but suffice to say now with utter conviction, Twitter has caught me in its net, and I am bound to it now, by the growing number of interesting people who have already made me feel very much at home, and many of which have already told me that I have made a measurable difference in their day with something I said. That is why I am here, and it is where I am heading.
* I am using a jailbroken iPhone, on TMobile's network, so apps available to me are actually not exactly the same as the Applestore apps, so I won't at this point make recommendations for iPhone apps to use, but Google and check around, there are already many reviews that led me to where I am happy now.
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