I am starting to explore Twitter as an add-on to railroad activities, not just my professional life.

Any of the RYPN regulars using it? I am @robertjohndavis

Rob

We're rail preservationists, man.

Some of us no doubt just upgraded from cranked party-line phones to them new-fangled rotary dial thingamajigs. SO much better than Morse code, mind you.

Twitter? That's the birds out sitting on the telegraph wire.

I've started using it (@ekapus), but not for preservation stuff, generally just amusing things that go on in my life. (The self absorbed way it was designed ;-) ).

I'm thinking about ways to integrate it in with the TheCRHS.org site, maybe create a Conrail Historical Society account, and use it to post quick news updates to make the site a little more "fresh".

I found the components to do it last night, so maybe next week.

I'm curious about others experiences as well.

My life just ain't that interesting. Nor do I think anyone else has a life interesting enough to warrant twitter.

Sorry.

I just signed up this week. Not sure how I am going to use it.

I just signed up for Facebook a couple of months ago, and my wife and I both enjoy it. I'll have to learn how to maxmize it before I think about Twitter.

Yes, we are set up as "eldiner". I hope to use it when events or major milestones are reached.

I have absolutely no idea what it is.....................

This thread has actually prompted me to get my butt in gear and do something.

There's now an RSS feed of a twitter search for #TheCRHS. Should be interesting.

That doesn't stop anyone else :)

As far as Facebook and Myspace are concerned, while both my adult children use them to stay in touch with friends, we spend a great deal of time discouraging kids in the middle and high schools, where I work, from using them. Reasoning? A great number of "sickos" spend time combing what kids post, looking for potential targets. Plenty gets posted with very little oversight from parents and site managers. Plenty of people use those sites to post resumes and job search.

Now, as far as "Twitter" is concerned, while I don't "twitter", I know lots of people who are "twits".

I haven't become a "twit" yet, although I do have a MySpace page (the photo shows me working on an LATL PCC car). I learned about Twitter a few months ago when I ran into the term failwhale in the N-Judah Chronicles website (for those outside the urban-transit field, "N-Judah" is a San Francisco Muni streetcar line which honors Theodore Judah, who pioneered a rail route through the Sierra Nevada). Greg Dewar, the "Chronicler" had to explain what he meant in a posting about a "Muni Failwhale"--Twitter uses a distressed cetacean as a graphic symbol for system lockups and collapses.
Regarding Mr. Mitchell's comments on hand-crank telephones--I'm a retired So. Cal. Edison communications tech, and up to the early 1990's, SCE still used local battery, magneto signalling phones in our smaller substations, with (in some cases) open wires on green glass insulators to connect with the attended subs. In my area, some subs went from open wire phones and alarms to fiber optic multiplex in one jump, and I suspect some railroad locations may have done the same quantum leap. When I retired, one of the obsolete "mag phones" became part of my "bon voyage" gifts.
Here's a question for telecomm artifact collectors--did anyone preserve a "cowbell" phone? It's like a regular magento telephone, except that instead of round gongs, it has square sounders that look and sound like miniature cowbells. I saw one back in the 60's at Slauson Tower, where Pacific Electric crossed Santa Fe south of downtown LA.