How to get started with Twitter (QUICKLY)

I've outlined 10 quick steps to getting started, in video and text. Play the video while looking at the text?

1. Sign in at twitter.com.
    *Your username will become your identifying "handle." I recommend going professional. I'm @astupple.

2. Click the drop-down at the upper right, choose "settings," and attend to "tweet privacy."
    *Before you share content, decide if you want it public.

3. Click "profile" and upload a picture.
    *Better to use a photo of your cat than nothing- otherwise people will think you're a spammer.

4. From the homepage, click "who to follow" and enter "@astupple," "@westr," and "@kentbottles."
    *You can sample our "feeds" by clicking on the links.

5. "Twitter clients" are programs, apps, and extensions that interface with twitter better than the website.
    *I recommend the web browser extension "chromed bird" for google chrome. Fast. So fast and easy.
    *Others love "tweetdeck" and "hootsuite" as desktop programs to use instead of the twitter website.
    *For your phone, I like the "echofon" app, but tweetdeck and hootsuite apps are great too.
 
6. Know this: Only those who follow you will see your tweets EXCEPT...
    *If you include a handle, @JohnDoe, in the tweet, then John Doe will see it even if he doesn't follow you.
    *If you include a hashtag, #thebeatles, then anyone following or searching #thebeatles can see it.
    *If someone searches your for terms that you used in your tweet, they MIGHT see it.

7. Q few quick terms:
    *Tweet- Any time you send a message via twitter.
    *Retweet- You resend a message that someone else tweeted, the originator notices (and appreciates it)
    *Reply- A tweet that starts with someone's handle, it's viewable by your followers who follow that person.
    *Direct Message (DM's)- Private message someone by entering "d astupple Blah blah blah..."

8. When including links, shorten them with services like tinyurl.com or bitly.com.
    *The twitter clients usually do this automatically, you'll get a sense of how to condense links quickly.

9. If you want to see crazy, sign in to tweetchat.com Sundays at 9PM and enter "HCSM."
    *I dare you. (It's the H.ealth C.are S.ocial M.edia weekly tweetchat and it's FUN.)

10. Finally, I'd follow @tweetsmarter to get LOTS of great tips on Twitter use and everything else.
    *The Twitter Guidebook answers questions like "What is a hashtag?" and others far better than me.

Happy tweeting!

Twitter is a vastly rich medium that's worth your time.

It's 10 minutes, and it's all been said before, but I hope this video is worth your time.

Summarized below are three reasons (among many more) to give Twitter a shot.

1. Taking
You don't have to give in order to receive. By following people without ever delivering a keystroke, you can quickly consume information that is relevant to your interests. Like surgery? Follow Atul Gawnde (@Atul_Gawande). Curious about the latest in neurology? Check out @NeurologyNow. Interested in healthcare policy? Follow @GarySchwitzer. Thirst for everything? @KevinMD and @KentBottles.

2. Giving
If you want to create content, there are gradations of involvement. You can innocuously resend what you thought was interesting (called retweeting), or post websites that interest you, along with short descriptors. More boldly, you can share experiences, make statements and judgements, or use Twitter to broadcast your own creations (warning- you might find yourself creating a blog and posting videos about how awesome you think it all is). See how medical student Allison Greco unifies blog and Twitter at md2bGrecoa3.com and on Twitter as @GrecoA3, or gastroenterologist Bryan Vartabedian at 33charts.com, @Doctor_V.

3. Networking
While conventional circumstances narrow who we get to know in this world, Twitter offers a great way to connect with people we don't know but who otherwise share our interests, our quirky insights, idiosyncratic hangups, or outrageous perspective. If nothing else, consider establishing a Twitter account before attending your next conference, whereby you'll more easily meet attendees with your motivation. And, it's not just for connecting with those across the country, but also for meeting local people and maintaining relationships you've already started. I know @Peds_ID_doc pretty well, and gain much clinical insight, considering I'm rarely physically in his presence on the floors.

Caution: Don't say anything that would would bother you were it printed in the newspaper. Envision each tweet on a billboard outside your hospital. In the digital world, it's hard to know where the walls are that enclose your statements, and depending on your personality, it's easy to lose yourself, or to outright forget yourself, and say something boneheaded (or worse).

Aphorisms and The Black Swan and Twitter

The most compelling aspect of Nicholas Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan was his dissection of the narrative fallacy. We continually concoct explanatory stories to comfort ourselves in the face of an irreducibly complex world. Crucially, stories compel not only by their truth, but by their very nature as stories. (Taleb cites those fantastic split-brain experiments where intelligent patients, faced with their own obviously contradictory behavior, will fabricate wild explanations without hesitation or doubt.)

However, stories often fail (even the best inevitably fail at the hands of unpredictable, rare, black swan events), and we rewrite our stories and hang on until they fail again.

But these stories do have kernels of insight and nuggets of experiential wisdom. How do we pluck out the insight?

Enter the aphorism, short statements that focus on the insight and dispense with the time-consuming and misleading narrative. Nietzsche authored many of my favorites:

"A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."


"Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it."


Are Twitter, status updates, and the sound bites of social media digital aphorisms, dispensing with the narrative and going straight for the insight?

The Race Is On: To the victor go the spoils (of 21st century medicine)

In the past, the medical profession was aware of groundbreaking technologies and applications well in advance of patients. Their first experience with EKG’s and genetic testing was mediated by their doctor from the beginning. Today however, patients can get their hands on mountains of genetic data through the mail at the price of a fancy meal. As these tools are made ever cheaper and more sophisticated, as inexpensive and inobtrusive devices are networked with smartphones and mobile health apps, and as patients increasingly adopt these tools in an effort to define themselves as empowered members of the doctor-patient relationship, the traditional medical world will be trying to catch-up. Today’s doctors will have to learn how to adopt these advances into their practice on their own, and it’s hard to think of a better time to start than now. The challenge of a patient armed with a dossier of Google searches pales in comparison to an empowered patient who has the motivation and time to enlist several features of 21^st century medicine: direct-to-consumer genomics, mobile health apps, personalized medicine, social media tools, personalized health records, and more.

While the current medical education curriculum still labors under an educationally conservative structure, medical students might paradoxically see great opportunity. Today’s medical students are largely digital natives who, importantly, have not been shaped by what has been described as a bygone era of medicine. They are uniquely suited to learning about these breakthroughs, experimenting with the devices and tools, and innovating their application. In the teaching hospital, the medical student can familiarize his or her superiors with the tools while gaining insight into effective uses. Thereafter, medical graduates so informed would be highly sought after to shape the clinical and commercial future of these initiatives. There is a wealth of opportunities for the student who buys a BodyMedia armband and talks about it with clinical faculty while on the wards, or, by comparing their experiences interviewing patients in the clinic with the dialog at PatientsLikeMe.com, becomes proficient at distinguishing what patients want to know from what is helpful to know. Precisely because medical schools struggle to incorporate this material into a curriculum means that students who take the initiative to become proficient in 21^st century medicine stand to be particularly valuable to many stakeholders in the healthcare field.