Walking briskly against the wind blown New Orleans Riverfront, my new friend, Shannon, began to peel away toward her parked car. I continued straight, heading for the Aquarium. We had met for the first time, in person, earlier that morning. After lunch at Brennan’s and a tour of the French Quarter she had to get back to her Baton Rouge home. As she veered away I leaned into the wind, putting the back of my hand to my mouth I called out,

“Hey, did you know it was me right away this morning?”

Nodding her head, she laughed back “Yes! It was the hair!”

Each of our Twitter pages has our profile pictures, but they are small, and, well, you know how peoples photos represent sometimes. Shannon, @Cajun_Mama, one of four travel writers for the popular Traveling Mamas website, was already waving at me by the time I spotted her walking along Decatur to where I stood outside the Cafe Du Monde. We were having a tweet-up, she recognized me instantly.

I know for a fact there are some of you reading this wondering “what the hell is she talking about?” Meaning, not only do you not have a Twitter account, but have maybe never even heard of it. Or, maybe you’ve heard the word on t.v. but just didn’t know what it meant. Certainly newscasters toss the phrase out with some regularity lately. In fact, Twitter has brought news well ahead of any network broadcast. The Airbus A320 landing in the Hudson is a prime example. I saw a tweet about a plane “crashing” into the Hudson, then we turned the news on just as coverage broke. US Airways began tweeting that day, but has not kept it up. Tracking the news of the bushfires my husband, @heligypsy was busy fighting in Australia, my best resource was using twitter.search.com using a hashtag #bushfire. Every 15 seconds there were hundreds of new tweets, with first hand information coming in.

Here is Jon Stewarts take on the Twitter Frenzy. He is not wrong, but that doesn’t make me wrong for being a twitterer.

I started using my twitter account a year ago to network with other travelers, RV’ers and writers. Right away the service proved to be significantly helpful. Using my 140 character allotment answering the question “What are you doing?” I typed out that I was researching riding the train from Alassio, Italy to Nice, France the following day. Quite unexpectedly, I received a response from Kelby, @Typeamom, the Go France writer for about.com. She replied with suggestions and helpful website links on what to see and do. With one positive experience under my belt, I decided to try it again, this time specifically asking for help on my upcoming three day trip to Milan. Whammo! Jessica, @italylogue, a Milan loving Portland Oregon resident and travel writer for the Bootsnall Travel Network was almost instantly at my service. Without her help I would have not seen the great and beautiful city of Milan from the top of the Duomo, nor would I have gotten on the tour that dropped me front and center at Leonardo Da’Vinci’s astounding painting, The Last Supper.

Google Twitter and not only will you get the direct link to the application itself, but the second result is a link to our President, Barack Obama’s Twitter account. The last update on the Presidents page is from Jan 19th, 2009, we all agree he’s been pretty busy, yes? There are also links to other applications that interface with Twitter in the hopes of helping to make it an easy and useful tool to stay connected and informed. You can find thousands of articles with tips for Twitter, top ten lists of how to make it work, rules of the “follow” (this is extremely individual), top lists of people to follow based on niche and on and on and on.

So, if you didn’t know before, you now may have a better idea of what twitter is, and why people use it. I’m @vagablonde on the site, no surprises there. If you jump in, look me up. Do you think you will engage in this new Social Media trend, or are you going to sit this one out?