New to Twitter? This page has information to get you up and going, and links to different resources that can help you use it more effectively.

Whether or not you have a Twitter account, you can follow the privacy chat (#PrivChat) conversations via Twitter Search at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23privchat or using TweetChat at http://tweetchat.com/room/privchat

If you want to join in the conversation, you'll need to have a Twitter account. If you don't already have one, sign up at http://twitter.com/signup. There are a couple of steps to the signup you’ll probably want to avoid: Twitter will ask to go through your mail to see if your friends are on Twitter, and then suggest people for you to follow. Just click on “skip this step” at the bottom of the page and move on. You’ll now be on your Twitter “Home” page.

From here you can tweet by typing a message in the "What are you doing?" box on your Twitter home page. See instructions in the section below about how to make your tweets easy to find by fellow CFP-ers.

• Twitter's FAQ and Howcast's How To Use Twitter video have more information to get you started
  

Making sense of what's going on

Experienced Twitterers use a lot of conventions and abbreviations to maximize how much information they can fit into 140 characters, and it can be very bewildering getting started. Here's a quick cheat sheet:

• @ is used to refer to a person or Twitter profile; for example, @cfpconf is the CFP Twitter profile
• RT stands for a "retweet", forwarding on information somebody else has tweeted
• shortened URLs enclode longer links to help them fit -- for example, http://is.gd/IlhH is a shortened link to this page. .
  
• # is used for "hashtags", which are used to organize information and make it easier to search. #privchat is the privacy chat hashtag; #privacy has tweets about, guess what, privacy; #tsa and #wontfly discuss airport security; and so on. @rjleaman's "An Introduction to Twitter Hashtags" on Wild Apricot has more on hashtags in general; you can find out more about a particular hashtag at WTHashtag and hashtags.org.

CFP-related information on Twitter

http://twitter.com/cfpconf is the conference's Twitter profile. To follow us, click on the Follow button – and you can browse through our followers to see who else is interested in computers, freedom, and privacy. To contact us via Twitter, start your tweet with @cfpconf.

If you are tweeting about the conference, be sure to type #cfpconf in your tweet. This will allow other CFP-ers to find tweets easily. You can view all the tweets to #cfpconf using Twitter search at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23cfpconf.

The #BillOfRights hashtag is for discussions of the Social Network Users Bill of Rights and Social Media Bill of Rights. You can see the discussions at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23BillOfRights. Or you can use Twitter search magic to see both hashtags.

Accessibility

Accessible Twitter is an application (still in the "alpha" stage) written by Dennis Lembrée that provides web accessibility for Twitter that works with or without Javascript. Items currently implemented include making all links are keyboard accessible, large default text size and high color contrast, and forms marked up for optimal accessibility. Follow @AccessibleTwitr for more.

Twitter clients

Rather than interacting with Twitter's somewhat-clunky web interface, many people prefer to use a "Twitter client" for a better user experience. For example, Tweetchat lets you focus on a particular hashtag and treat it as a chat room. http://tweetchat.com/room/cfpconf shows all tweets with #cfpconf in them would be visible. Anything you type in that room will automatically have the #cfpconf hashtag added.

Twitter's downloads page lists some of the most popular clients.

More information

• @randomdeanna's two-part Why Twitter, anyways? and A non-fanatical beginner's guide to Twitter, @pogue's Twittering Tips for Beginners in The New York Times, and @CharlotteAnne's Twitter 101 are good starting points
  
• @hrheingold's Twitter literacy (I refuse to make up a Twittery name for it) presents reasons for using Twitter and the perspective of tuning the network of information you receive and feeding the network of people who follow you.
  
• @copyblogger's The Art of Writing Great Twitter Headlines has excellent suggestions on how best to make use of those valuable 140 characters.
  
• @OliviaMitchell's How to present while people are Twittering discusses the value of a "backchannel" and has tips for presenters
• @Jesse_Newhart's How To Effectively Follow 15000+ People On Twitter Using These Tweetdeck Tricks is an excellent tutorial even if you have a lot fewer friends.
• The DigiActive Guide to Activism on Twitter, written by Andreas Jungherr, includes case studies, a step-by-step strategy, and additional resources. @DigiActive's blog posts on Twitter also have some excellent reports on how activist organizations are using Twitter.