I am now on Twitter (and more active on Facebook)

It started posting articles electronically back in the BBS days in the late 1980s.
I create a web page with my own domain name in 1998 (back in Brazil with a ".br" domain name that I no longer own).
I moved to a US domain when I moved to the United States in 2000 (it’s still there at https://www.barreto.us and it hasn't changed much in years).
In July 2004 (around five years ago, almost to the day), I started blogging here at https://blogs.technet.com/josebda.
It’s actually kind of fun to go back and re-read that very first post at  https://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2004/07/06/173623.aspx
I stopped posting in both English and Portuguese two years later (too much work to post in two languages, side-by-side), but kept posting in English regularly to this date.
To this date I have posted 270 blogs (not counting this one :-), an average of about 5 per month.

As of this month, I am also starting to use twitter. You can follow me at  https://twitter.com/josebarreto
There were a few things I learned in the last few weeks as I got started.
Obviously you need to visit the site and create the account, hoping no one grabbed your name before you did.
Next, I spent some time getting the lingo: tweets, shortening URLs with bit.ly, retweets, following, replies, @name, #subject, etc.
Then I tried to find interesting people to follow and  watched what they tweet about, how frequently.

I soon figured out that I could retire my RSS reader in favor of a twitter client, which is now how I am getting my basic news.
I am pretty OK now with the number of other twiterers I am following, and it does pretty much match my old list of RSS feeds, plus a few new finds.
I chose to use TweetDeck on the PC and PockeTwit on the phone (any suggestions there?).

I started writing my own tweets a few days ago, mostly one for every blog post I get out the door. I guess I am too tied to old models, huh?
I am also starting to retweet some of the stuff I am following, as my next step into the new model.
If you haven’t already, you should get started. It is a different way of doing things, but it has worked quite well for me so far, especially as it replaced some of my old tools.
I find myself using the twitter clients for most of my news and updates (personal or work-related).

An interesting side effect is that it got me back to Facebook (at https://www.facebook.com/jose.barreto) and I started posting updates there as well.
I created the Facebook account a few years ago, added a few friends over time and even got a “vanity URL” earlier this year, but I never really got into posting frequent updates.
Not that Twitter and Facebook are directly related, but it sounded simple enough to post updates on both.
I learned that there used to be a Facebook app to do that automatically, but apparently that no longer works.
It even got me to load a Facebook application on my Windows phone. How about that?

There’s a lot of hype about Twitter, but it does seem to have an interesting model, a new twist on things.
You’re not likely to find out what I had for breakfast every morning, but you will at least learn of any new blog posts I publish (RSS is so 2000-and-late :-).
As with most things, time will tell if the model does work.  We will find out when I post about it five years from now…