I have been resisting Twitter. Well, I'm "on" Twitter and I tweet as part of a blogging group on Mondays and Thursdays, however, I think that I have to get a smart phone. I know I have been avoiding this as well, partly because I spend too much time on-line as it is and partly because I was waiting for the phone wars to decide a winner. However, I think that I may have to buy the new I-pad tablet, that is soon to be released, because it is about the size of an I-Phone - no kidding, what took you so long :)
Anyway, back to the astonishing!!! Mashable just posted to my FB wall an article about 8 activities and/or apps for Twitter. There are several I have to have.
1. Botanicalls originally allowed your house plants to call your cellphone when they were thirsty. But like you, those plants have moved on to social media.
With a Botanicalls Kit, an ethernet connection and a bit of patience, you can set up an electronic sensor for your plants; it will automatically send you a Twitter message when your plant needs to be watered. You'll even get a thank you note when you complete the task. Pothos, a plant that tweets with Botanicalls, has amassed 4,000 followers.
I knew there was something wrong. I have always said that in one of my other lives I was a green cymbidium orchid. I should have stayed that way. Just look at all the followers, I might have had.
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What would a Bleeding Heart say? |
2. Anybody who tweets knows that making a compelling sentence out of 140 characters can be incredibly difficult. Now try adding in a solid beginning, middle and end.
A number of Twitter accounts have taken up the challenge with great success. @VeryShortStory tweets humorous micro-fiction in 140 characters or less. A recent tweet: "Today is special. Getting out of jail. I will not go see Donna. I will not see what shoes she's wearing. Too much trouble to dig her up."
In 2012, A Visit From the Goon Squad author Jennifer Egan posted a short story called "Black Box" on The New Yorker's fiction Twitter feed (@NYerFiction), breaking the story down into a series of tweets which were later published in the magazine. @GoodCaptain likewise created a novel out of serialized tweets.
If poetry is more your thing, check out "The Longest Poem in the World", an epic poem composed of rhyming real-time tweets.
I think that I have to get on a few of the poetry sites. I'm sure that you can do a Haiku in 140 characters; I'm not sure about Limericks. Then again, Twitter has probably come up with a shortened version - Twimricks, anyone?
3. There are quite a few ways to turn Twitter into an interactive game. In 2010, BuzzFeed founder Jonah Peretti (@peretti) created a short Choose Your Adventure game for Twitter using Bitly shortlinks. @Artwiculate is a vocabulary game that gives you a word of the day and challenges you to use it in a tweet. The person whose tweet gets the most likes and retweets wins. There are real-time Twitter games forchess and Mad Libs, too.
I'm not much of a gamer, unless it's word games or Freecell, however, I can see where I could spend the rest of my life on Artwiculate. I may have just found a new definition for AA.
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Go on - just try to figure out what I'm thinking!! |
There are 5 other ideas on the list of 8, however, I really like the three that I have mentioned. I am not interested in having my dog send me 1 of 500 preset tweets on and off during the day. It would be a little like those talking dolls that were all the rage a while ago. A rage indeed. They had about 10 preset phrases and after hearing them for the umpteenth time, you just wanted to throttle the damn doll!!
On second thought, I might like hearing from my cats :) Now I ask you, would a cat ever accept something, as banal as, a preset loop of phrases? C'mon, we're talking highly sophisticated animal species. Now I could accept a loop of preset phrases as my sending tweets - there's an idea!!
Also, I don't need to diet by telling everyone what I am eating at the moment - most often for me anyway, it's crow :) I probably do need the reminder app to tell me to do the things that I am supposed to do during the day - meh! why change the habits of a lifetime. You're on your own for the others.
Have a wonderful day
Even though I am a total geek and constantly connected via laptop, iPad, Kobo Arc I don't have a smart phone either. I do want one, but refuse to pay Rogers $300 to upgrade on a contract that isn't up until next year.
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