I’m doing a package on the swine flu for one of my classes, and decided to use Facebook to find people who had had it.
Kyle Quintero: One of my best friends has
Alexis Zotos: I know someone! I’m trying to call you right now so answer!
As you can see I got responses, and was able to contact both. I have an interview now set up for Saturday. Thanks Facebook!
Since Twitter is a semi-new forum that I’m not completely familiar with, I decided to follow all of my newspapers/media sources through that. I was immediately impressed with Slate’s tweeting, if you will. They tweet about every hour, and always use a short sentence, pretty much a headline, and then a link. I really appreciate that their tweets are short and sweet, and really catching as well. For example, this was a tweet from earlier on today:
Too fat to fight http://bit.ly/xg1vgabout 8 hours ago from bit.ly
Who in their right mind wouldn’t follow that link to find out more?
Just as much as I was impressed by Slate, I was disappointed with the LA Times’ use of Twitter. To begin with, they have multiple Twitter names, which is really confusing at first. Also, many of their categories seem to over lap: LATimesBreakingNew, and LATimesHeadlines. Then when you actually follow them and view their tweets, every single one of them is a run-on sentence that ends up cutting itself off at the 160 character max point. So readers are left with half of a sentence, and half of a word.
LATimesbooks
‘When the Game Was Ours’: Larry Bird and Magic Johnson look back on the era when they ruled — and trans.. http://tinyurl.com/yj3rapv about 2 hours ago
