Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Finding an Internship or a Job: Using Twitter Revisited


On Monday I posted about using http://Twitter.com to research internship possibilities and described the Twitter client application Summize. Such is the speed of the internet that this info was out of date just as I posted. Because, also on Monday, Twitter announced it had just acquired Summize and that the URL for this feature is now http://search.twitter.com.

You can access this function without a free Twitter account. So if you want to see what people are saying on Twitter about a certain subject, go ahead and type in the subject and see what tweets pop up. (I just put in the word internships and got some interesting tweets.)

And for the last two days I’ve been trying out http://twhirl.org after MaryPat Kavanagh (www.queenofmarketing.com) advised me that she uses Twhirl to access Twitter. (Twhirl is a desktop client for Twitter based on the Adobe AIR platform, which I downloaded for free.)

At the moment I’m of two opinions about Twhirl: On the one hand I like the pop-up tweets that appear in the bottom right-hand corner of my computer screen whenever anyone I’m following posts a tweet. On the other hand I get distracted from what I’m doing by reading those pop-up tweets. So for now the jury is still out on what I think of this client application.

And here’s a Twitter feature I’ve just started using – http://twitter.com/direct_messages. It’s when you want to tweet someone on Twitter but you don’t want everyone following you and following the tweet receiver to be able to read the tweet. I’m using the direct messages feature to send my primary email address to someone with whom I’ve been exchanging tweets on a specific topic.

Okay, I’ve now given you more research tools for finding contacts for internships and jobs. Let me know if you use these tools and if they help lead you to what you want to find.


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1 comment:

MaryPat said...

Phyllis,
This is good info in bite-size chunks for people to learn about Twhirl and Twitter.

Another feature of Twhirl that helps me sort my tweets is the @ (replies) and the DM (Direct/Private Messages) features at the bottom of the chat box.

There may be some better applications for TWitter out there, but until I have time to learn a new one (and that just may be Tweetdeck), I am sticking with this.

MaryPat