Twitter - an introduction

I have several friends who tweet, but have never really looked into it, being put off by the prescribed 140 limit. But having spent a fun half hour looking at some of the Twitters suggested, I can see it could get very addictive. Ana Samways, she of the wonderful Sidswipe, has used Twitter as a clever way to gather content for her column - a canny lady indeed. Sadly a lot of the tweets there were of the "OMG isn't **** AWFUL???" sort of screaming you get on Facebook, but once you'd sifted through those, there was some very amusing stuff, and as a way of eliciting fresh new content it's a great tool. I had a look at John Key too, but his was a bit too dry and dusty - I suspect he has a press person to sift his tweets to keep the nutters at bay. I also looked at Auckland City Council - great for road closures, events, etc - let's all do this once we're a Supercity; Jodi Picoult; Grammar Girl, the Guardian and Cookbook via Twitter. This last one was a real eye-opener. A friend of mine recently wanted to make a New York cheesecake. I watched with fascination as she downloaded the recipe from the Internet, carried her laptop into the kitchen and proceeded to whip up the ingredients. Being a dinosaur, I would have printed the recipe so that only a piece of paper got splattered with cream and strawberries, rather than a lovely keyboard and screen, but she didn't seem to care. However, if you used Cookbook for Twitter, you would simply have one teeny weeny screen - preferably on your cellphone - so could avoid splatters and also avoid having to scroll down a page long recipe. At first the recipes there looked like something out of Doctor Who (that dates me) but actually they were very easy to follow, and I have even printed a couple out (yes, I know, but it's hard to drag a desktop PC into the kitchen and we have no cellphone coverage here). Just the thing for those of us who are daunted by huge and complicated recipes - no nonsense, just ingredients, oven temp and time. Loved it!