Twitter in space…

You know that social networking is soon to take over the planet when an astronaut tweets from space - it’s true that no matter where you are you can still stay in touch with your mates from school and space won’t stop the connection…

Mike Massimino, an Astronaut with NASA, has now become the very first person to use Twitter from space making sure that all his pals are green with envy by informing them that he is orbiting the planet and checking out the views.

Although you might be a bit worried that his attention has been distracted from flying space shuttles to send a mini-blog, Massimino sent the message� from the shuttle Atlantis STS-125 on its way to the Hubble telescope.

“Awesome” & “Magnificent views”

In his Tweet, Massimino said, “Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime has begun!”

But don’t worry, Massimino wasn’t browsing the web when he should have been working out complex astro-physics problems…he had to email his messages down to the Johnson Space Centre and then they posted the messages for him…that was nice of them!

In light of Massimino’s Twittering antics we’ve decided to take a look at the main tips newbies should know if they want to get connected through the Twitter experience.

URLs

A lot of Twitter users like to share websites they have discovered through their tweets.� However you are only allowed to type a certain number of characters in each tweet so you don’t want to be using up all your space with a single address.� Instead use a URL shortening service like tinyurl.com or is.gd which will shrink your URL allowing you to fit in some explanation with your site.

RT

Copyright applies wherever you are in the world, even on Twitter!� If you think that someone has said something of key interest to the rest of the world and you want to pass it on than you can by all means you just have to make sure you do it correctly.� Type “RT@name” in front of the tweet you are copying which means you are ReTweeting, giving a nod to the original author.

DM

DM stands for Direct Messaging which is something you can do through Twitter.� The DM function allows you to send private messages to your mates up to 140 characters long - unfortunately though you can only DM people that are following you.

Pictures

Everyone loves checking out each others pictures so surely you would want to do so on Twitter…obviously you can!� You can use TwitPic to upload all the photos you would want to share with the world and they will be posted directly onto your Twitter account - in just a few minutes your mates will be flicking through your pictures.

Tweet Tweet?

Are you on Twitter?� Do you think that Twitter is the way forward or do you think it will soon suffer the same fate as MySpace?� Let us know what you think about social networking…