How to see what people are saying on Twitter without using Twitter:
- Go to twitturly.com, search.twitter.com OR (my top pick) tweetgrid.com. Now just type in a search term. For example, want to see if any people have posted anything on Twitter regarding “home school” – just type it in and – Bingo! See the results pop up in real time. You’re seeing what people are posting on Twitter regarding this topic at this very second.
Subscribe to the RSS Feed of a particular Twitter user. You can use online services such as Google Reader (which works with your Gmail acct) to do this or just subscribe to it using Internet Explorer or some other web browser. I use Flock and love it!
Once you have subscribed to the RSS Feed, then you really don’t have to bother with Twitter. Just follow the RSS updates.
More details . . .
Maybe you’re not ever going to jump on the Twitter Bandwagon. As for me, I’ve jumped on – I’m not addicted but I like it – and after a brief learning curve have found that Twitter actually has definitely improved my communication in the online world.
So, you may not even really know what Twitter is. Don’t feel bad. It is newer than Facebook and it can be a little hard to understand. Let me just say however, if you have a mobile phone which can send/receive text messages – better yet, if you have a mobile phone with web access – then Twitter will probably become much more powerful and useful to you!
The beauty of it is that a Twitter update – called a “tweet” – is a simple status update message posted by anyone with a Twitter account and it MUST be simple text; NO MORE than 140 characters. Talk about getting to the point! Some people call it micro blogging.
See an excellent explanation of Twitter here on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
According to them, in February 2009 Twitter had a monthly growth of 1382%, followed by Facebook with an increase of 228%
Here’s why VP of Global Campus says Twitter works for him: http://www.onleadingwell.com/2009/07/10/why-twitter-works-for-me/
Anyway, big news media outlets such as FoxNews and CNN now post breaking news updates on their Twitter Feeds. Ah, now there’s another term I’d like to zero in on:
Let’s say you don’t give a rip about Twitter but you’re interested in hearing the latest updates from FoxNews, ESPN, Apple Computers or even . . . David Hand!
All you have to do is go to Twitter, search for the person, company or service you’re interested in and then find their page. On the page you should notice a little RSS Feed icon = . This is the key to retrieving the Twitter updates coming from this particular person or company.
Also, I haven’t tested it, but Tweetbeep.com has an email service especially for Twitter Feeds. They can send you an email once an hour if there the feed has been updated.