Rowles Media, Design & Photography

Twitter Web Design & Photography Research

// February 19th, 2009 // Social Networking

Twitter is good for keeping up with your friends, but its even better for Research and generally staying upto date in whatever your chosen field, whether its Web Design and Photography, or even train spotting.

When I first started twittering I treated it much like the status updates in Facebook. But very quickly I realised that the Twitter experience is somewhat different. For a start only a few of the people I follow are actually friends. The majority are web designers, graphic designers and photographers, from around the world. You see alot of these guys ‘tweet’ when they’ve published a new article about what they do, or when they come across something that they find interesting, and they think other like minded people will also find interesting.

Twitter Search and Retweeting

 So soon after following all these people, somebody mentioned Tweetdeck, an application for twittering. So I downloaded it and started using it. Now the most powerful thing about this is the search facility. I have two searches setup that are regularly checking the world of Tweets for the keywords ‘Web Design’ and ‘photography’. This way I know whos talking about these subjects across the world whether I’m following them or not. Then if I like what I find, I can then start following them because they might have something else interesting to say, then I can ‘Retweet’ it on so people following me can benefit. easy eh!

I imagine this would work for many fields of work and research, also alot of people use this search functionality for conferences so a particular conference uses a keyword, and people can then follow a sort of timeline of tweets related to that event.

The people at Twitter have recently blogged about extending the search functionality on the Twitter website so we will see what that brings, and I say bring it on, it looks like this http://search.twitter.com