Our Twitter Account

[Saknika]

A good portion of you are already followers of us on Twitter, and so you've already witnessed the change that has been made to the account. Those of you that don't follow us however, and do have a Twitter, are strongly urged to follow us!

Our twitter can be found here: www.twitter.com/phototique

Originally we were only tweeting about the forum, and posting updates on there. It was meant to be members-only. Until it was realized that we gained quite a bit of guests viewing our forum to see what it was all about, and so we then made it more geared towards the community as a whole.

Now, with the advent of the website, and with so many members on the forums asking questions and needing inspiration, the twitter account is taking another turn towards change.

Instead of only updating about what's happening on the forum, we're re-tweeting things that we think members will benefit from as well. We're also going to be re-tweeting any imagery you post in your own Twitter, and we're tweeting your forum posts of photos as well so that more people see your work.

Because of this, we highly recommend that you have your own personal gallery listed in your profile somewhere! That way a visiting guest can find a way to contact you if they really love your stuff.

So now, in our twitter, you'll see the following:
-Retweets of inspiring photos
-Retweets of photography news
-Forum updates
-Updates about members' photography on here
-Website updates
-Retweets of members' tweets of photos
-Retweets of good resources and tutorials

There will probably be other things as well, but these are the main focuses for now.

If you're on twitter and we're not following you, make sure to let us know as well! Sometimes we can't tell who you are by your twitter name.

[enigmarose]

I cannot abide Twi**$r; if I even visit a web site that has a large Twi**$r logo I x out and leave.
Don't want to be associated with the damn thing so that may be me out of hear.

[Saknika]

Why not?

[enigmarose]

Twitter ~ a mata tag on steroids crossed with a sarch engine detached from a organised reliable world. I could not take anything for the truth on any of the searches that I might wish (NOT) to do.
I prefer to view information from reliable web sites that are reasonably well established to well established, searching through the likes of Altavista, Google, Ask, bing and Wikipedia.
I would never use Yahoo search either ~ just don’t like Yahoo never have done; a glorified indexing server/s only useful for a contribution towards optimising traffic flow to a web site (Twitter is similar).
Basically, I much prefer a web site to be able to attract it’s own web traffic without having the likes of twitter making a web site become fragmented. This can be difficult with sites such as proboards unless, if my memory serves me well, you use tags (XHTML or XML can;t remember which) at the start of a key sentence or group of words etc; that search engines latch onto without having to have submitted your site. This would also depend on the coder trying to think of a users search words/sentences, to trap these key words/sentences, similar to meta tags, and providing that these tags or similar being able to be used on the likes of probaords (One of the reasons I don’t really care for bulletin boards with the restrictiveness of them and PHP but they are a good starting point I guess.)

Just my views that's all.

[Saknika]

Well, you're almost correct about the search engines. Meta tags are actually a thing of the past for 90% of search engines because they're unreliable. So instead, Google and other search engines use an algorithm combined with robots that crawl your site to find text and determine what it will rank well for, and where it will rank. There's a bunch of other crap that goes into it too, but the only boost twitter gives it are the following:

1. Every time a link from twitter to here happens, it's like giving the forum a vote saying that yes, it's a good site. The more votes a site gets, the better.
2. The twitter account is followed by a network of other photography enthusiasts and professionals, and by tagging for photography, it makes it so that people who might be interested in our community take a look.

Twitter's actually really good for connecting with some people. Scott and I know each other from Twitter, and I often get my news from links that pop up on Twitter. The trick is to follow people you trust, and to go to the links and see if it's a source you trust. And if you use an application like HootSuite, you can mouse over the link and see what the tinyurl is actually going to rather than having to click it.

Because I agree, there are a lot of unreliable news sites out there. But you can check for yourself, and that's the beauty of it.

But to each their own. If you really don't want your work displayed through the twitter, I'll make a note on your account and won't link to your images and such when I'm building up tweets to go out at certain times.

[enigmarose]

That just shows how out of touch I am with the meta tag thing lol ;D.
I am not totally against it, I like to think I can be open minded but cautious.

If twitter is what you feel is good for the site then that's fine, nothing to do with me really .

If you wish to link to my stuff e.t.c then do so if it's good for the site then go for it. I may be converted eventually .

Lastly; I do come across negative at times but take it with a pinch of salt .

[Saknika]

No worries, that's why I asked why. I hear a lot of people who tell me they hate Twitter simply because it's trendy and such. Which is annoying, but in your case it seems to be more of a misunderstanding of how things had changed.

I'm glad we were able to talk it out civilly.

[enigmarose]

Feb 12, 2010 12:17:17 GMT -5 Saknika said:

I'm glad we were able to talk it out civilly.

Me to ;D

Blind ignorance on my part ~ maybe give it a try sometime and get a real feel for it instead of first impressions attitude; but first impressions counts for a lot in most walks of life and twitter just did/does not do it for me on that basis.

[Saknika]

And Twitter isn't for everyone. But, it has also changed a lot in the past year, too.

[ScottWood]

Twitter is possibly the single strongest thing to bring photographers together as a community than anything else I have ever been associated with.

I have been making images most of my life. The vast majority of that I was in my own photographic universe. I saw other peoples work by looking at books, magazines or attending displays. Flickr came along and it opened up a world of photography from other Flickr users. It was limited to Flickr users, and sadly there are some very real privacy and image protection issues with Flickr. Those same issues exist with any other social media site that you post your images to.

Then comes Twitter. Within 24 hours of my signing up, I had a small group of fellow photographers I was communicating with. All of my images were hosted on the online site I chose to post them to. I simply tweet the link back to them. Image views too all of my galleries jumped though the roof. Image sales jumped though the roof. I now have a circle of Twitter photographers that I regularly communicate with that number in the 100s ever day.

Places like here are great, but they simply can't match the community that exists on Twitter.

As for your comments about meta tags and using Twitter as a search/research means, I don't get it. That is not what Twitter is, it is simply a micro blog site. The beauty of Twitter is that it is what you want it to be. You drive it 100%. You choose who you follow, and if done the way I do it, your tweets are open to the world.