Follow your favorite athlete on Twitter

One cool thing about Twitter is that it can bring you closer to people you wouldn’t normally be connected to, such as celebrities (who have really starting using Twitter a lot lately) and professional athletes in order to see what they have to say.  I’ve tried to follow celebrities before, such as Ashton Kutcher when he was trying to beat CNN to 1 million followers, but I never found them that interesting.  Recently I stumbled across Twitter-Athletes.com which is a website that contains a directory of professional athletes (and winter olympians) twitter accounts so you can follow your favorite athlete.  Just about every team has someone who tweets even a little bit, so most teams are covered.

Here are a few sports related athletes that I currently follow:

• Denard Span – MN Twins center fielder
• Pat Neshek – MN Twins pitcher
• Ozzie Guillen – Hated Chicago White Sox manager (just to see if he says something bad about the Twins!)
  
• TC Bear – MN Twins mascot
• Minnesota Twins – Official MN Twins account
• Kelly Theiser – MN Twins beat writer

tp://twitter-athletes.com

Learn one thing: Twitter Lists

If you haven’t heard of or used Twitter before, Wikipedia defines it as “a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets.”

I have been using Twitter for a while now, mainly to follow a few bloggers that I’ve come across that I’ve found interesting enough to follow their posts on Twitter as well. I don’t “tweet” much myself, but I do gain lots of useful information from the experts that I do follow.

If you begin to follow a lot of people, the stream of tweets can become overwhelming, and I believe that is why Twitter rolled out Twitter Lists.  I learned today that you can basically build lists of people you are interested in, but maybe don’t want to follow and have their tweets show up in your main daily feed.  You can check out these lists on your own schedule, when you feel like seeing what that list is saying.

For example you may have your main feed of people you follow like close friends/family for which you want to see updates often and as they happen.  Then you can build a list of people who you are interested in, but may not want to have show up in your main feed.  For me this is handy for keeping up to date on what people who tweet about my line of work, SQL Server Database Administration, are saying.  For them I have a list, so I can look at it every day or two and see what important topics they are talking about, but most likely I don’t need to know about instantly in my main feed.

The cool thing about Twitter lists is that you can share them with other people (I actually got my SQL list from SQL expert blogger Brent Ozar, who created it of all the SQL related people he follows).  Listorious is a website dedicated to sharing these lists.  If there is a topic of interest to you, you can probably find a list for it on Listorious and quickly add it to your collection of Twitter Lists.

If you want to follow me on Twitter or see my lists, you can find me here: www.twitter.com/aarontc