In 2008, only 5% of the U.S. population was aware of Twitter; today, it’s 87%, about as many as know about Facebook. But far fewer people use Twitter than Facebook, which is a shame, as Twitter has lots of uses, and is not as evil. If you’re interested in getting started with it this Profhacker article is good value. Read it first, then go to Twitter and sign up with a nice short lower-case username. I’ve posted a few thousand tweets over the last few years (@adzebill) so here’s my advice, for what it’s worth.

Following

Don’t be a wimp: to get the full effect, try following 50–100 people. That’s enough to get some variety without being completely overwhelming. Remember, you can just dip into Twitter once a day or so: you don’t have to read every tweet! Equal proportions of professional colleagues, friends, and random interesting people seems to work well. Look for noteworthy tweets quoted (or “retweeted”) by your friends, and check out the writer’s twitterstream. People will sometimes suggest folks to follow on Follow Friday (look for the hashtag #ff).

What to post

Share something that people might actually be interested in: links to web pages with your commentary, interesting photos you’ve taken, funny observations, and breaking local news like a fire or police emergency. Find a specialised area of interest and post on it regularly; you’ll attract similarly-specialised followers. You’ll need to use a URL-shortening service for your links; I like SnipUrl, because it lets you pick your own keyword to use as the url.

Retweeting

RT preceding a Twitter name means a reposting of someone else’s tweet. Retweeting works best if you add a comment of your own; I tend to use square brackets to make it clear what is commentary. It’s OK to edit a retweet a little to make it fit.

Hashtags

A common label for multiple tweets, identified by a # sign, you can click on a #hashtag to see all the tweets using it. Hashtags take three forms. They’re fabulous for tracking discussions about a particular event, like a conference (and many conferences publicise their official hashtag well in advance). They can also be used to mark a spontanous mass joke or conversation—you’re welcome to chip in with your own contribution. Finally, a hashtag can be a parenthetical comment on the tweet you’ve just written, not really intended for reuse.

Replying

Starting a tweet with someone’s @username means they’ll see that tweet, and it’ll be visible in your Twitter stream, but it won’t appear to all your followers. If someone happens to be following both of you, they’ll see it.

Messaging

You can also use Twitter to privately message someone, but here’s the catch: they have to be following you. (You don’t have to be following them.) To send a message to strangers, then, this means you’ll need to use an @reply (but then other people could read your message), or follow them and hope they follow you back (which is considered fairly polite), or @reply to them asking them to follow you so you can message them privately. All a bit more complicated than email.

Searches in Twitter

A Google search tells you facts about something; a Twitter search tells you what people think about something. It can be fascinating to compare the two, whether it’s with movies, natural disasters, or political events. Twitter tends to respond faster than the mainstream media to breaking news too: whenever there’s a quake in Christchurch, there’s a flurry of activity on the #eqnz hashtag as people try to guess the magnitude.

More advice

Tweet regularly but don’t obsess about frequency, or how many followers you have. Your tweets are public, so don’t get too precious about who’s reading or following you. You can block anyone you don’t like the look of, though, and if they are following thousands of people but only tweet advertisements they’re probably spammers, so go ahead and report them. You can delete a tweet mistake if you catch it on the Twitter page fast enough. Give Twitter a try: follow a decent number of people for a month and check in each day, and only then decide if it’s just people prattling on about what they had for breakfast.

The best place to start is this excellent overview of Twitter with lots of detailed ideas, quotes, and links. The Twitter Book by O’Reilly and Milstein (O’Reilly, 2009) is the best printed introduction, and I like the 100 tips to being a better Twitterer. Twitter in also taking off in universities as a teaching tool: see how it can be used with students, and ideas lists for academia in general and the classroom.

To create a long-term presence on the Web, you’ll need a permanent email address that’s not tied to a university, workplace, or phone company. You want to still be using the same email address in five years’ time, when you’ve changed jobs three times and countries twice. But you don’t want to be deluged with spam. And you want to have an address that’s private and different from your institutional one. How to arrange all this?

The strategy I’d recommend is to have four addresses.

1. Disposable address

   This is the one you give out to online surveys, when filling out forms, or to anyone you’re not sure you completely trust. It should be a free webmail address; I use Hotmail. You’ll hardly ever need to check it, and can dump it every few years as it fills up with spam.

2. Workhorse address

   Your main public email address: the one you give out in emails, when purchasing online, subscribing to mailing lists, and so on. It needs to have good spam-catching capabilities and have a nice web interface, so I’d recommend Gmail. Any address you make public will get a lot of spam, so this should be the only address you post to a web page.

3. Professional address

   If you have a consultancy or business, create a domain name for it and make an email address based on that. If you post it to your business website, protect it from spammers in some way. When you get a job, ask for your work email to be forwarded automatically to this address. If you set up other sites and domain names, those email addresses can be automatically forwarded to this one as well.

4. Personal address

   Based on the domain name of your personal site. This should never appear on a web page, and should only be given out to people you trust, perhaps on personal business cards.

If you work on the web and use several computers, you can arrange for your professional and personal mail to be automatically forwarded to your Gmail account. This means you only need to go to one place to check webmail.

If you use your own laptop, however, you might want to install actual email software like Thunderbird or Apple’s Mail, and create accounts for your workhorse, professional, and personal addresses. You can download local copies of all your mail, which means you can read and write email when you’re not connected to the Net.

When you’re setting up your online identity, create your workhorse email address first; you’ll need it to register domains and set up web hosting. Email your entire address book for any other addresses you might have (from your internet provider, or previous workplace, or last educational institution) and let them know your new address; then cancel those old addresses. Good riddance.

Emailing an academic

Michael Leddy wrote a very popular blog post on the topic. My version:

1. Include your full name somewhere, like in the signature. A “From:” like “abc123@canterbury.ac.nz” doesn’t tell me who you are.
2. Have contact details in your signature: website, office phone. Otherwise keep the signature short.
3. Start with some sort of informal salutation, however brief. Hi there, or Dear Mike, depending on degree of deference. You do not have to call me Dr. Dickison. This is New Zealand.
4. Finish with some sort of signoff: Kind regards, or Thanks, work for me.
5. Punctuation, a few capital letters, and no txting please.

Remember that if students only write to their lecturer once a month, the average lecturer will get a couple of student emails every day, and most students expect a detailed reply. Lecturers wonder why they don’t come to office hours instead. See Weiss and Hanson-Baldauf’s (2008) North Carolina study. My favourite bit: 53% of faculty thought students were “too friendly” but only 5% of students agreed.

General email advice

• Avoid Reply All; instead think about why you are writing to this person, and what you need them to do. Don’t make them think “Do I need to respond to this?”
• You can always print, file, and then delete the email rather than leave it lurking.
• When sending a bulk email, address it to yourself and BCC all the recipients. They shouldn’t be able to see everyone else’s address.
• Good subject headers: Review needed for Smith conference paper, or Your car is on fire.
• “Thanks!” is a perfectly acceptable reply. One school of thought suggests no reply at all is OK.
• A 30-second telephone call can get more done than a 20-minute email.
• Tone down your automatic email checking. Once an hour is fine. You could even set aside a couple of times each day and check manually.
• You can always declare email bankruptcy: trash your inbox and let everyone on your address book know you won’t be replying, so they should mail you again if it’s still applicable. Then insitute Inbox Zero.
• It’s not a bad idea to have a general-purpose email account, such as Gmail, that you can give out for online shopping or mailing lists. Gmail has pretty good spam-catching abilities.

See also: Becoming an email ninja (from 43 Folders)

Inbox Zero

Instead of filing into numerous folders, rely on the search capabilities of your email software. So you only need an Archive mailbox for mail you choose to save. Then, create something like the following mailboxes:

• Respond: only a quick reply needed. Plough through these when you get a moment.
• Action: needs to be turned into one or more items on a To Do list before you can archive it.
• Holding Pen or Purgatory: for mail you can’t yet archive–either you’re waiting for a person to reply, or you need to refer to it again in the short term. Process this once a week and delete or archive the contents.

When you choose to check email, process everything into one of those mailboxes. If it only requires a “Thanks!”, do it right then. Otherwise get to each mailbox when you’ve set aside some time to blitz it. Don’t let unprocessed mail just sit there, taunting you.

See also: Inbox Zero (from 43 Folders), and Merlin Mann’s article in Macworld.