Twitter: Where the Party Is
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Pssst... hey, did you hear about the party going on over at Twitter? It's huge. Hundreds of the most fun, interesting, informative, and playful food bloggers are hanging out on this social networking website, yakking away about almost everything, food and non-food related. Ever want a peek into the lives behind the pretty pictures and recipes of your favorite food bloggers? This is the place to be. (Simply Recipes is there too.)
So what's Twitter? It's a little hard to describe without just diving in and signing up (which is free by the way.) It's a service that lets you post 140 character updates about yourself and broadcast them to anyone who might be following you on the service. It also lets you follow the public updates of anyone you want. The end result is that, if you follow enough people, stepping into Twitter is like stepping into a party, with just the people you want to be there. (See this New York Times article; Twitter coverage starts page 2.)
If you want to see how this works in action, sign up for a Twitter account at http://twitter.com. Once signed in, go to http://twitter.com/simplyrecipes and click on "Follow" under my photograph, to start following my updates. You can always click on that button again to un-follow. Now you'll want to follow a few more people (otherwise, where's the party?). Notice on the right hand side bar of the Simply Recipes Twitter page there is a group of tiny images. Each one of those images represents a person whose updates I'm following. Click on any of them to see if you want to follow them too.
Here are a few fellow food bloggers whose updates you might find fun or interesting.
David Lebovitz
SteamyKitchen (Jaden)
Cooking with Amy
Hedonia (Sean)
Matt Armendariz
Karina's Kitchen
Eggbeater (Shuna)
Kitchen Parade (Alanna)
Kalyn's Kitchen
Garrett McCord
Perfect Pantry (Lydia)
There are actually hundreds of food bloggers (and millions of people) to follow on Twitter. My brain can only handle a few dozen; I tend to follow mostly people who I know personally, otherwise it can easily get overwhelming.
A somewhat cool thing you can do on Twitter is search for words that people are talking about. The search tool can be found at http://search.twitter.com/. Search for "earthquake", your favorite political candidate, or your favorite sports team or celebrity, and see at a glance what people are saying about them.
If you are interested in using Twitter to be notified of the most recent recipes posted on Simply Recipes, follow http://twitter.com/recipeupdates. That's where I post just the updates to this site, nothing else.
Twitter is not everyone's cup of tea, so if you check it out and find it utterly uncompelling, it's just as easy to leave as to join. But since I've been having fun hanging out with some of my favorite food bloggers there, and in the process getting to know many of them better, I thought you just might find it interesting too.
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I have avoided Twitter until now because I don't think I can possibly have time to add yet another fun Internet activity into my life!! Yet your post is drawing me in. I've bookmarked it for a rainy day :)