Twitter

Twitter is a microblog service. You join the service, subscribe to individuals and groups you are interested in and then you receive "Tweets".

A tweet is almost identical to a text message on a cell phone. It is very similar to an instant message sent via AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and Microsoft Messenger.  The salient points of twitter messages are, they are short, being equal to or less than 140 characters. They are distributed to every subscriber to the twitter feed/account.

EOSS will attempt to use Twitter to send very occasional tweets with important news on the group's activities. I've "tweeted" the current landing coordinates for our upcoming flight. I might tweet that a significant update to the website is made. I will NOT tweet minor news such as a page update, an upcoming meeting.

This is an experiment and at first I intend to minimize the use of the medium so as to not flood someone with tweets about mundane issues.

First you need to join twitter. BE CAREFUL - When you first join Twitter they now attempt to dump 10 or 20 famous people on you as friends. You can OPT OUT of that when you sign up. However, if you miss the opt out you can simply go to your home page, sign in and go to your "Following" page and remove all the celebrities keeping only those folks you are really interested in following. So, to sign up go to:

http://www.twitter.com

It takes a few seconds to join and only asks for a name to identify your tweets should you decide to send out information to your followers and a password so you can control access to your account. Then you can subscribe to the the EOSS twitter feed.

Once you've done that you visit the "eossorg" page and once on that page, click on the "Follow" link.

 http://twitter.com/eossorg

So, why should you do this? Well, you can install twitter on many different types of mobile phones, and you can leave twitter clients running. So, if any news your are interested in is tweeted, it will automaticlly arrive on your desktop or phone. This may be of interest to flight planners, and mission coordinators. Others may find it interesting also. You can join the service, follow "eossorg", and then decide it is a waste of time and unfollow eoss and quit twitter. It is a fairly easy to join and leave service.