Buck Lawrimore

Twitter is hot. No doubt about it. When CNN anchors give their Twitter address so you can follow them online, it has reached the high-level mainstream. Here are 10 top reasons why Twitter is hot:

1. It’s free. Anyone can enjoy it at no cost.
2. It’s easy. Anyone can sign up for their own account at twitter.com and be posting tweets in minutes.
3. It’s fun. You can follow other people - friends and strangers, nadas and gurus, to see what they’re saying and if you don’t like what someone is posting, with a click, you don’t follow them any more.
4. It’s new. Early adopters and social media lovers get a kick out of twitter because it’s new. Lots of people don’t even know what Twitter is all about and think it sounds silly.
5. It sounds silly. Yep somehow this puts it in the same category as Google and Yahoo. Names which start out sound silly seem to capture the public imagination and catch on faster. In time they become respected and admired if they’re good at what they do.
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Our news-aggregating website, CharlotteAreaNews.com, has a new feature, “Charlotte On Twitter.” It’s a continuously updated feed of posts on Twitter.com that include “Charlotte” or “Charlotte NC” in the message (”tweet”).

Check it out at http://www.CharlotteAreaNews.com/twitter.php

In case you are not familiar with Twitter, you won’t learn much by going to Twitter.com. It’s a rather plain screen that encourages you to sign up for your own account, free of course. However, a great way to monitor the messages on Twitter.com is to go to Monitter.com and change one or more of the keywords to anything that interests you - fashion, beer, sports etc. You can enter up to 3 keywords and watch messages with those keywords pop up regularly, unless of course you enter something obscure like Parcheesi or pistachio.

The “Charlotte On Twitter” page on CharlotteAreaNews.com uses a web script provided by Monitter.com, so it’s very similar - only it’s preloaded with “Charlotte” and “Charlotte NC.” It turns out that lots of people are named Charlotte, so they get mentioned in the first column, whereas “Charlotte NC” is much more restrictive. However not everyone writing about Charlotte the city adds “NC” so it’s a trade-off. Enjoy this new service and leave us a comment!