Twitter in Costa Rica Worth a Try

Twitter is a great way to connect with other expatriates in Costa Rica and keep in touch with families and friends back home. While some people dismiss the micro blogging service as inane or annoying results depend on how you use the service and the kind of people you follow.

It’s definitely worth a look and also works reasonably well even if you do not have the best Internet connection, which is a plus for many in Costa Rica.

The central premise is that your entries or “tweets” must be 140 characters or less. You can link photos, videos, blog entries or just about anything, and there are services to “shorten” those URLs or web addresses to better fit in the character limit.

The easiest way to get started is to go to twitter.com, and sign up for an account. Sign up to follow me, and then send me a message to let me know you are a real English speaking person in Costa Rica. Once I am subscribed to follow you, then we have the option of having short conversations privately as “direct messages”. You can also let twitter review your email contacts and try to find people you already know.

While you can do plenty on the twitter.com webpage the service really comes to life when you use it with text messaging on your cell phone or an instant messaging program on your computer desktop. Unfortunately twitter does not have an SMS gateway for Costa Rica, and the only easy and reliable way to use it with your cell phone here requires a Smartphone with a 3G Internet connection. The options that exist in Costa Rica for connecting a simple GSM phone are not that great, and texting with a numeric keypad is tedious.

I use Twitter on my laptop through a program called Trillian, which also has an interface for Facebook and all the major instant messaging networks. It’s nice because apart from Skype the Trillian program is my one stop for all Internet communication. Using Trillian I am able to turn off email notifications for Twitter and Facebook, and use both social networks directly.

Twitter works by sending your tweets to anyone who “follows” you. So, you can links to pictures, videos, your latest blog posts or event simple messages for example, “I survived the latest earthquake”. Anyone can respond to your tweets, however replies are not sent to your followers, only to you and whoever is following the other person.

You have the option of “retweeting” the messages you receive to your followers, replying publically or simply ignoring the other person. As I mentioned before you can also make your conversation private with direct messages, however this requires both parties to follow each other bilaterally.

The brevity of the messages and potentially large group of followers makes it easy to call attention to something using Twitter. You don’t need a complicated blog to do things like tell people what you are doing or quickly share some photos or a video. Of course if you do have blog, then Twitter is a great way to Promote it, and it might even replace email some day as the distribution system of choice.

Twitter competes with Facebook as the dominant social network, and  prefer  Twitter because unlike Facebook it brings people directly to my webpage and not facebook.com. Users are also not asked to provide Twitter with detailed personal information.

These reasons give Twitter an edge against Facebook in terms of growth. I’m also comfortable thinking of twitter as a potential long term replacement for things like email or even talking on the phone. Perhaps in another ten or twenty years terms like “Follow”, “Retweet” and “Direct Message” may replace terms like “On Hold”, “Voice Mail” or “Busy Signal”.

Filed Under: Expat Living

Tags: internet • social media • twitter