From Wikipedia: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send "updates" (or "tweets"; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service (e.g. on a cell phone), instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Seesmic Desktop.

Here's a nice YouTube video, Twitter in Plain English, explaining its social use.

Purpose for Global DeltaV Twitter Community

Twitter offers a way for a community connected together to ask questions, provide answers, and link to content to share with others. The intent is help DeltaV users, project folks, support folks, and other interested parties be more effective through their interactions with this growing global community. It's a great communications medium to ask "how-to" and other questions around the DeltaV system.

You can get an idea of the conversation, both DeltaV-related and personal, by looking at the DeltaV Twitter page.

However, it's important to keep in mind that Twitter is a public communications medium. No proprietary information, customer names, trade secrets, financial information or other information restricted by your organization's human resource policies should be communicated via Twitter. If at all in doubt, review well thought out policies like IBM's blogger guidelines.

Getting Started

• Establish an account on Twitter.
  
• You'll also want to tie your twitter account to your cell phone to be able to send and receive twitter messages via text messaging. You can do after establishing your account, going to Settings, and then to the Devices tab.
  
• Visit my page, twitter.com/JimCahill and click the "follow" button. We're now connected and I'll get an email to connect back to you.
• Next follow twitter.com/DeltaV so you can see all the members in our DeltaV Twitter community.
• I recommend using Twitter Search to monitor DeltaV tweets- DeltaV query.
• When you post about DeltaV, you may want to include @DeltaV. This identifies your post with the DeltaV account, which follows all the known DeltaV-interested global community members.
• I use a PC client Seesmic Desktop to post and look at the posts from the people I follow because it updates in real-time. It requires that Adobe Air be installed first. You'll need administrative access to your PC for installation. Seesmic Desktop also has URL shrinker, Bit.ly. It's nice because you can can get metrics on how many folks click through on your links.
• A great idea came in from @MikeBoudreaux to include #PAuto somewhere in your "tweet" if it is process automation related. You can search to find who is using process automation related posts #PAuto
• For events like the Emerson Exchange, we've established an event tag for your posts, #EmrEx
  

If you know of others who might want to join us, please forward this URL to them. Also, if you want to collaborate and add to this page, send me an email and I'll add you to our list of collaborators for this wiki.