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I seem to be blogging more and more about Twitter, recently. Oh well, it's an interesting topic.

As well as following interesting people on Twitter, there are a number of other accounts that can be very interesting and/or informative. Here are some of my favourites.

1. @BreakingNews


I believe I covered this in a former post, but it's something that nearly every Twitterer should know about anyway. Formerly BreakingNewsON, this account posts breaking news as soon as it happens, often faster than mainstream news networks. I've found out about several breaking news events almost instantaneously since I started following this account, and it's also very handy for tracking ongoing news stories.

2. @Veratect


Continuing in the same vein, a very informative and topical Twitter account is Veratect. Only set up a few days ago, Veratect has only one purpose - to provide breaking news about the spread of swine flu. Posts are always prefaced by the country that the post applies to. If you're at all concerned about this porcine virus, then Veratect is a must-follow account.

3. @playtwivia

Now for a bit of fun. There are a multitude of Twitter games, and Twivia is among my favourites. It's very simple - they ask a question, you DM or @reply your answer, and get featured on their scoreboard. The questions are of a challenging but not ridiculously hard difficulty. Definitely worth a look.

4. @twitterfiction

Another account I've mentioned previously - this one in my last post about Twitter and writing. Twitterfiction tells user-submitted stories in, of course, 140 characters or less. There's something fascinating about a succinct, concise, but well-told story.

EDIT: It has come to my attention that @twitterfiction hasn't been updated in over a year. Oh well - it's still fun to read through the posts.

5. @thewordoftheday

Okay, a gratuitous plug here. I run this one. And while it's nowhere near as famous as the others I've mentioned, I am very pleased with the popularity it's gained - over 900 (over nine HUNDREDDD!) followers as of today. Every day, you get a cool word, pronunciation, and definition. And you can suggest your own words and probably get a mention. Come on, it's awesome.

I hope this post was of some help to you. Happy Twittering!

Tim

I've been endeavouring to do quite a bit more writing recently, and like any aspiring author or poet, one of the biggest problems is inspiration. To attempt to solve that problem, I've found help from a site that I am on far too much - Twitter.

One of the things I both love and hate about Twitter is that it forces you to be concise. In an email, blog post, or similar message, you can rattle on about anything in as many damn characters as you like. But Twitter's 140-character limit forces you to get your point across succinctly and explicitly. How is that good for a writer? Well, the shortest stories are often the best. I've been quite addicted to @twitterfiction recently, and I love the stories on there. Whether you're like me when it comes to a short attention span or not, it can be a lot more interesting to read short, well-written stories or poetry than to read a novel.

Twitter is sporadic, instantaneous, and provides a real insight into people's minds. Many people tweet in a "stream of consciousness" style, just typing whatever comes to their heads. And as annoying as that can be for some, it's an amazing tool for inspiration. Apart from just reading your Twitter feed or the public feed, there are many tools that bring that data to life. Twittervision is one of them - you can have it as a flat map or as a 3D globe, showing you tweets from all around the world. But by far my favourite is called twistori. It grabs tweets from the Twitter public feed that have either the words "I love", "I hate", "I think", "I believe", "I feel", or "I wish", and shows you results for whichever phrase you pick. It's a very simple yet captivating way to see how the public feels.

So next time that you have writers' block (and it happens a lot, at least for me, anyway), take a look at Twitter. Take a random post from somewhere, completely out of context. You don't know the story behind it, nor do you know how the tweet's author is feeling. But that doesn't matter. As a writer, it's your job to make that up.

Happy writing/Twittering!

Tim

Cross-posted here.