Thoroughly Anderson Cooper: The Art of Twitter

In case you are wondering what or where Lufkin is; according to Wikipedia: Lufkin is a city in Angelina County, Texas, United States. The population was 32,709 at the 2000 census making Lufkin the 76th largest city in Texas.

QUARLES: Tweeting my life away in 140 characters or less

By Edwin Quales
The Lufkin Daily News

Sunday, June 14, 2009

I tweet. Twitter has me hooked. I follow people like Shaquille O'Neal, Mark Cuban, Lance Armstrong, Anderson Cooper and Taylor Swift.

Did I really just admit to following Taylor Swift? Not that she knows who I am since she has more than 40,000 followers.

It's interesting to read Shaq's tweets about how fat his head looked a few years ago and say it's because he "loved dem burgers." It was funny to read Taylor Swift's tweet about being on a boat and how she wanted to sing "I'm on a boat" — a reference to a profane ''Saturday Night Live'' skit.

Twitter, a social networking tool that allows updates of 140 characters, is similar to how Facebook uses status updates.

Media use it to send out links to stories or give a brief summary of an event without giving a link. It draws hits to Web sites.

Twitter allows insight into celebrities' lives. Assuming it's the actual celebrity and not a fake. That's a problem Twitter has with anyone being able to put in a user name without verifying that's who they are.

It's changing the way we communicate. No longer do we actually have to talk to people.

The era of writing and mailing letters and/or cards has long since passed. The era of talking on the phone is diminishing as well. If you don't really like someone, but you want to know what's going on in their lives add them as a friend on Facebook or follow them on Twitter. You get to keep up without actual contact with the person.

That's kind of nice. I admit to doing that as well.

Updates can be inane and a lot of mine are. They've included:

* A pic of an "I love my wife" bumper sticker and I asked why I kept seeing those and didn't see any "I love my husband" bumper stickers.

* A tweet about my wife dropping me and my daughters off at the mall to watch the movie "Up." Yes, I'm in my early 40s and I got dropped off and picked up at the mall. Embarrassing.

* Last week after having a discussion with a friend older than me I tweeted, "why are older people scared of Obama." That got a few responses. Ooops. Got more than I bargained for there.

* A tweet about "my happy place" with a picture of Wal-Mart linked to it. That got a lot of replies questioning my sanity.

Items learned this week included:

* Lance Armstrong and his girlfriend had a baby.

* President Barack Obama has changed his agenda after visiting a Denny's. Not true, but a funny video.

* Jon Stewart of the "Daily Show" called out Fox News' Sean Hannity for only reporting part of a story.

Those are not useful, but do provide entertainment.

Twitter can provide useful information.

* Texas Weather gives warnings.

* Our Twitter account, lufkindailynews, gave half-inning updates on the Panthers baseball team at the state tournament. We also put links to stories and breaking news.

* CNN gives breaking news.

* Houston Chronicle provides links to stories.

Twitter, as are other social networking tools, is available on phones.

My uncle asked me a while back to look at my iPhone and show him some of the features. This was more than a year ago when there weren't near as many applications as are available now. He looked at a few of the features and then asked, "Can you call someone on it?"

It does make calls, but with all the other ways to connect with people, what sells phones is not whether it can make calls, it's what else can it do.

My 10-year-old wants one. Not to make calls, but for the applications that come with it.

I'm sure it won't be long until she says she wants her own Twitter account.

Edwin Quarles is night editor of The Lufkin Daily News.