In the recent months I’ve noticed an Amateur Radio explosion on the Internet. It’s not the same as we’ve seen before with the QRZ forums or eHam.net or even Echolink. Those are great services and are still around today, but new sites like Twitter.com, 73s.org, HamBrief.tv are on the forefront of this new interactivity.
Twitter.com is a free “social networking” and “micro-blogging” service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. Some even call it “micro-messaging” which is more the way I think of it.
Based on “Following” principle, you follow people you know or find interesting and then people follow you.
Uses:
1. keep up with friends
2. news aggregation/discovery
3. blog integration
4. Conversations; with the use of @ followed by user name.
How you interact:
1. Web
2. Desktop
3. Mobile (Web/Clients)
4. SMS
Web Explained:
Web is where it began, use the web to create your account customize your profile page. Use it to keep up with your friends.
Desktop Explained:
Desktop clients bring you Twitter as a program you install on your pc.
Twitter clients, there are more twitter clients out there than you can shake a stick at. I personally think TweetDeck is the best out there. Has follower grouping, easily see your replies and direct messages in separate columns, TwitScoop so you can see common words all users are talking about (great way to see breaking news), and even a custom twitter search column.
Mobile Explained:
Similar to the Desktop if you have a smartphone you can get on twitter’s mobile website or install Twitter clients. Some of the better mobile clients have a nice feature that I don’t see on desktop apps and that is that you start with your last update and move through the timeline instead of having to find your last update and going from there.
SMS Explained:
From your twitter profile you can configure twitter to interact with your cell phone via SMS. I usually enable this for very important people I follow! Using 40404 you can post updates to twitter via sms.
73s.org created by a fellow Ham Chris Matthieu, N7ICE.
Hams can create an account, customize a profile.
1. You can post status updates (short like twitter).
2. Blog post
3. QSO log entries
4. QSL’ing
5. Post video’s
6. Built in forum
HamBrief.tv created by fellow Ham Chris Matthieu, N7ICE.
Chris host a short Web program about various topics on Amateur Radio. Sometimes he gets demo radios from manufactures that he un-boxes and shows on this site.
That’s it (at least all I can ramble on about).
I hope to demo some of this at the next ALERT meeting hope to see you there!
73, Russell Thomas, KV4S
UPDATE: Thanks to Twitter I have 2 more sites to add to the list:
Both sites appear to give you blogs, classifieds, photo’s, events, and polls ect. Since I just heard about them. I don’t have many details. As I work with the site I’ll post more details.
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