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.

You may be sceptical about the value of being on Facebook. Yes, it is a largely-pointless and addictive procrastination tool. But there are strong arguments for signing up. And if you get sick of it you can always quit, although deleting an account is not as simple as it looks. But it has been nicely described as “a giant lobster trap with your friends as bait.”

Bear in mind, though, that you must set up your privacy so your personal details are not shared with the entire internet (more on that here). And be careful about sharing some personal details with anyone: a man in Wales was sentenced to prison for murdering his partner after she changed her relationship status on Facebook to “single.”

What can Facebook be useful for?

• Organising a non-profit group, with event scheduling, announcements, and a photo gallery
• Setting up a site for your band, allowing Facebookers to become fans and watch your videos
• Sharing photos with a semi-private group of people, not the whole world (though again, this requires careful use of the privacy settings)
• Maintaining contact with people who live far away, via the background noise of their daily activities
• And last, but not least, it keeps track of birthdays for you

Many of these activities, though, could equally be done by other technology: blogs, RSS feeds, DIY social network sites like Ning.com, and Flickr. There’s a certain danger in putting all your eggs in one basket. Facebook is currently privately owned, but who knows who’s going to to buy it? Rupert Murdoch paif half a billion dollars for MySpace. What happens to your personal data then? Social networks rise and fall, and in a few years Facebook may well be as uncool as Friendster.

Facebook is potentially insecure. As well as letting you be stalked by your ex-partners or parent, your activities and unguarded words can be visible to your current or future employer, and your personal details (like your full date of birth) can be harvested by identity thieves. The police have even posed as Facebook friends to catch careless underage students who posted photos of themselves drinking. The good news is that young people in particular are recognising Facebook’s privacy problems, and are adjusting their settings to protect their personal information.

The key to Facebook security is distinguishing different levels of “friends”: those who are your actual friends, people you just know, and those you’ve never met but have friended for some reason. And your family and workmates. Each needs different levels of access to your information, but Facebook lumps them all together. The solution is to create Lists, sort your friends into them, and different lists access to different private information. This Engadget post outlines one way to do it with three lists. I manage with just two, creating “ACTUAL friends” and “Contacts”, using the default Facebook settings for most friends. I can then make some things (like my contact details) available only to ACTUAL friends, and exclude Contacts from seeing some other categories.

So what information should you share with each group? Sophos maintain a good, conservative guide to privacy settings. It’s full of useful advice: don’t reveal your birth year—that’s what identity thieves need, yet many people even include it in their username (in the form melinda86); don’t make your phone number or email address visible to anyone—they can always mail you through Facebook if they need contact information; and disable Public Search, or your information could end up indexed by a search engine and out of your control.

Even if you’ve properly set up your own security settings, you are vulnerable to someone posting a photo of you doing something embarrassing (for example, wearing a leather tie printed with piano keys) and tagging you. You do have the option of de-tagging, and it’s not too hard to do.

It’s important to remember that all the information and media you post to Facebook is being hosted by a large, profit-making entity, who have repeatedly changed their privacy rules without warning. There is no guarantee that your personal information will not be sold, misused, or made public to the internet forever at some point in the future. If this worries you, set up your own website: one that you control.

Check out the articles on Facebook privacy at ProfHacker, noting that it’s been updated. You might also enjoy the 12 most annoying types of Facebookers and fifteen things you should never do on Facebook.

If you’re a graduate or postgraduate student, you need a web space and email address that are independent of an institution—somewhere you can upload your publications, link to achievements, and supply contact information. Your target audience includes employers, potential collaborators, future students, funding agencies, and the media. I think the following are all important considerations:

• Your web identity has to be portable, so the address stays the same as you change institutions.
• It should use open standards such as HTML that aren’t going away soon, rather than proprietary formats that might go bust (like some ePortfolio companies) or change their terms and conditions tomorrow (like Facebook).
• If there’s a learning curve involved in creating that web space, the skills you gain should stay as useful as possible in the future.
• It should be simple enough for you to keep up-to-date, but should still allow you to demonstrate you have some internet savvy.
• It should be more than an online résumé; you should be able to showcase your actual skills and professional experience by linking to them or putting them on the page.
• And it should be your first result on Google.

To do this, I recommend the following steps.

1. Get a web-based independent email address
2. Register a domain name
3. Arrange some server space from a web host and point the domain name at it
4. Set up some email addresses, forwarding them to your main address
5. Create a simple blog as a basic website
6. Make your photos available online
7. Make your work accessible under a Creative Commons license

I’ll be blogging each of these steps as I run workshops and create handout for them.

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.