It’s been a year since I encouraged readers to follow me on Twitter. If anyone still doesn’t know how Twitter works (after all the publicity as of late), it is a micro-blogging service where people can micro-blog about their daily routines as they would in a LiveJournal. But you don’t have to actually answer “What are you doing?”.

The actual concept of Twitter is to be creative and talk to your followers using the “@” symbol next to their name (e.g.: @sanjo_chan; If you already have a Twitter account, drop by and say Hi! ^_^).

Once you get into the hang of Twitter, there are several things to be aware of, such as spammers, and Twitterers who cheat the system to inflate their follower count, usually to promote their service. The cheats can follow you at first… but if you follow them back, they can unfollow you within 24 hours after returning the favor (or just follow you and unfollow in the same moment). I had a follower who kept following me every couple of days just so they can grab my attention–which lead me to using the Block option. It’s a really dirty trick.

I’ve also found Twitterers who seem cool enough to follow back—only later end up getting dumped after reading disturbing “tweets” (Twitter posts) about political leaders or just about other Twitterers they don’t like. It’s because of this that I’ve decided to keep a close eye of who I follow. Sorry, “social network internet marketing gurus”. (Although, I will make an exception of serious “gurus” who use Twitter in moderation).

I have found a lot of useful Twitter tools to keep up on my Twittering, even a Greasemonkey (Firefox Browser Only) script like the follower tool that tells you whether or not if the person is following you by visiting their page without having to browse through the Followers page (this really helps when you get Followers who “tap on your shoulder”—as mentioned above). And if you don’t like the basic Web interface, there’s TwitterFox (Firefox Extension), Thwirl and TweetDeck. I love TweetDeck as it lets your organize the people you follow into groups, so you can have many followers as your please.

Jamaipanese is also a big Twitter fan. He even wrote a blog post on his own experience with the micro-blogging service. You can follow him at @Jamaipanese. ^_^