Twitter Translator

Since my first 3 posts were pretty long, and at least one of my forthcoming posts might also get hefty, I thought I'd break it up with at least one shortie.

I joined the Twitter phenomenon just over a month ago. The highly interesting thing is that just a short time before that I could be found venting and ranting about how I thought Twitter, and microblogging, was super cheesy (i.e. I don't care how delicious your lunch was today). But after looking deeper I realized that tons of lawyers use it to exchange a lot of interesting legal related content. So I joined before the ship passed me by.

In general, I mostly utilize it as another tool to stick in my "lawyer toolkit." I also post and pass along a lot of disability related information. Moreover, I'm the only person regularly posting stuff about handicapped parking issues that I've seen so far (I plan to develop and post a "handicapped parking manifesto" later on). At the least, it's put me in touch with a lot of folks in my various areas of interest that I would not have otherwise.

Anyway, as you can see, I have a tool to the right that displays my most recent Twitter posts just in case people find it interesting. Because I've already had a few questions from friends and family regarding the wonky language I thought I'd throw out a quick, helpful Twitter translation:

First of all, in Twitter Land your posts can only be a maximum of 140 characters. Thus, most of the language wonkiness results from making everything as short as possible. So @shawnrdean or @whoever is just shorthand for the username. "RT" is shorthand for "retweet" which is analagous to a forwarding an email message. The http://bit.ly/ or "tinyurl" thing is a way of shortening your internet url. Again, only 140 char. per post, so you don't want to clog it up with a webpage's long url. Thus http://onemansaccess.blogspot.com/ becomes http://bit.ly/s78ER. I think someone should have come up with that idea years ago. You don't need to be on Twitter to use it either.

So maybe people didn't care either way, but at least now those interested can follow my Twitter posts a bit easier.