Saturday, June 26, 2010

Twitter and DnD

Twitter has been around for a few years now, and while I have poked around with it a little (@rogerleemills), for the most part it seems like a lot of nothing. I have a Facebook page and this blog, so I am not immune to the lure of new technologies. After all, what is the point of being a geek if not for all the toys?

Morrus at enworld.org has put together a list of #dnd and #rpg Twitter feeds and has linked to an article by a fellow gamer with an explanation of how to maximize the possibilities of Twitter for the gamer (Article with additional links here). Even if you have no interest in actually joining Twitter it does provide some level of description of how to wrangle this Twitter thing into some sort of usable format.

Per the suggestions provided I did download and install Tweetdeck on my home PC and on my IPhone. There is an IPad version as well, which would seem to be an excellent platform for this. I have the tool configured up so I get Twitter posts in one column, Facebook posts in another, and I am still tooling with the inputs for other columns. Of course my Facebook feed never loaded this morning (it had previously), so the tool itself is a work in progress. It is a bit of a pig on resources sometimes, but then my PC is way under-powered to begin with.

The idea of being able to tie up all of the various social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Myspace, Foursquare, Google Buzz, others), instant messaging (AIM, Googletalk, Windows Messenger, others), and e-mail (Any? All?) into one (free) tool is intriguing, but this isn't it, at least yet anyway. Would we be able to run a video link like we do on Sunday night for instance?

Which leads back to my original question as to what exactly is the purpose of Twitter? It seems that most users just babble on about nothing, but if you can filter that out the mindless chatter and find topics to focus on it might have some value. At least for gamer purposes Morrus has done a good job of providing an initial set of DnD-centric links so I'll play with it a bit and see where it goes.

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