Twitter has made online communication, in my opinion, 1000 times easier. If you want to follow a celebrity you can—and sometimes they even answer you. This, for college journalists, is an unbelievable opportunity that had never been offered before. News organizations can also be contacted, and thus you can get your name (and your writing) out there before you even leave college. It allows you to follow and search for specific trends so that you can find others with similar interests. This helps to aggregate content and promote your work online.

The main thing to remember with Twitter is that it is another facet of your online identity, and therefore should be maintained as such. Twitter doesn’t have as precise privacy settings as Facebook; you can set all your tweets (or updates) to private, but you cannot pick and choose who sees what. So if you allow someone to follow you they can see everything you post. Remember that at 3am when you get the bright idea to post a picture of you dancing on a table!!

Twitter also works incredibly well with both the iPhone and Blackberry interface. My favorite application for the iPhone is Tweetie. It allows you to add multiple accounts and manage them exactly as you would on your computer. Tweetie is also available for Mac. It costs $1.99, but is definitely worth it. Another application that can be used on both Mac and iPhone is called Tweetdeck and it’s free. It works via Adobe Air on the Mac, and integrates MySpace, Twitter, Facebook and a variety of other clients. You can also use it on Windows and Linux based systems.

Go sign up and follow me–Giornalista515 I’d love to get to “tweet” you!