Twitter is definitely making itself known to the mainstream masses. In fact, outside of Facebook and Firefox, Twitter is the only other site I’ve mentioned to my real life friends who are not technically inclined.
We all know that a million Twitter projects and experiments have sprouted everywhere like the Twitter Packs project. I recently spotted a few other Twitter projects that I thought would be pretty cool to share.
Youth Twitter
Youth Twitter is one of the most interesting Twitter related projects I’ve ever seen.
We’re a safe, school-based twitter-like blogging network for students Paul Alison started Youth Twitter at the end of January 2008. Every teacher or adult who registers is immediately made into an Administrator with the same access that Paul has. Here’s a note from his blog about how Youth Twitter started. Paul has been teaching in the New York City public schools for 25 years and he is the Technology Liaison for the New York City Writing project. To learn more about Paul follow the link at the bottom of this quotation, and find “My Work Online.”
Utilizing the Prologue WordPress theme by Automattic, Youth Twitter is used for students to reflect on daily assignments, ask questions and of course, keep track of replies.
Remember the AOL Homework Help forums? You can look at Twitter Youth as an evolution of that. Social networks and social media applications are being used more and more not only for personal reasons, but also as educational tools. It would nice to see more projects like this, possibly for courses and universities across the US.
Tweet140
“Get Your Twoosh On” is the motto of Tweet140. The purpose of the game is for the Twitterer to get as close to as possible to the 140 character limit. The closer you get to the 140 character average, the more points you earn. A pretty simple time waster, but this could definitely become as addictive as Twitter itself (has 600+ followers on Twitter).
“Twooshing”, “the sound that Twitter makes every time someone sends a tweet that’s exactly 140 characters long“, would also be a great way to further develop those communication skills that Twitter helps to enhance with the 140 character limit. The coolest thing about their site? The FAQ section answers every question in 140 characters.
Wordy Birdie
Wordy Birdie is a twitter word game that’s “part buzzword bingo, part drinking game” and most definitely another time waster.
Wordy Birdie is a Twitter based word frequency guessing game. Predict which words people you follow will use in an update and earn points when they do! Wordy Birdie is simple. You don’t even have to create a separate account. Simply sign in and create a list of 10 words. Wordy Birdie handles all of the score calculations automatically, notifying you daily with your results.
Can anyone guess what the top 10 guessed words are?
- Twitter (107x’s)
- Blog (85x’s)
- Coffee (63x’s)
- Work (47x’s)
- Apple (45x’s)
- SXSW (45x’s)
- Mac (43x’s)
- Obama (43x’s)
- Lunch (35x’s)
- Post (30x’s)
Other notables include the iPhone at #11, Google at #15, and Clinton at #25.
