豆知识 2009-04-12&04-18 Twitter—沟通零距离

 So, what are you doing? It's one of the first questions we often ask friends and family. Even if the answer is just mowing¹ the lawn or cooking dinner, it's interesting to us. It makes us feel connected and a part of each other's lives.

 

Unfortunately, most of our day-to-day lives are hidden from people that care. Of course, we have e-mail and blogs and phones to keep us connected, but you wouldn't send an e-mail to a friend to tell him you're having coffee. Your friend doesn't need to know that. But, what about people that want to know about the little things that happen in your life? Real life happens between blog posts and e-mails, and now there is a way to share.

 

This is Twitter in Plain English. 

 

Thanks to Twitter, it's possible to share short bite-sized updates about your life and follow the updates of people that matter to you via the web. Here’s how it works.

 

Meet Carla, she is addicted² to her mobile phone, reads blogs every day and has contacts all over the world. She heard about Twitter and was skeptical³. After some of her friends couldn't stop talking about it, she gave it a try.

 

She signed up for free and saw the Twitter pages look a little like blogs with very short posts. Each page’s personal and has updates from friends. She got started by looking up her friends on Twitter.com. After finding a few, she clicked “follow” to start seeing their updates on her Twitter page.

 

Within hours, she began to see a different side of people she chose to follow. She didn't know that Steven in Seattle was a baseball fan or that Julia in London was reading a new investment book. The little messages from Twitter painted a picture of her friends, family and co-workers that she’d never seen before. It was the real world.

 

Soon she became a fan of Twitter and posted updates every day. Her friends followed her updates and learned that she recently discovered a passion for Van Halen. They could see Carla's life between blog posts and e-mails. 

 

For Carla, Twitter worked because it was simple. The updates were always short, under 140 characters. Plus, she could post updates and follow her friends using the Twitter website, software on her browser⁴, a mobile phone or instant messages. By asking members to answer the question: what are you doing? Carla found that Twitter brought her closer to people that matter to her, 140 characters at a time.

 

Find out what your friends are doing at Twitter.com.

1 mowing   

n.割草，一次收割量，牧草地v.刈，割( mow的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• The lawn needs mowing. 这草坪的草该割了。 来自《现代汉英综合大词典》
• "Do you use it for mowing?" “你是用它割草么？” 来自汉英文学 - 中国现代小说

2 addicted   

adj.沉溺于....的，对...上瘾的

参考例句：

• He was addicted to heroin at the age of 17.他17岁的时候对海洛因上了瘾。
• She's become addicted to love stories.她迷上了爱情小说。

3 skeptical   

adj.怀疑的，多疑的

参考例句：

• Others here are more skeptical about the chances for justice being done.这里的其他人更为怀疑正义能否得到伸张。
• Her look was skeptical and resigned.她的表情是将信将疑而又无可奈何。

4 browser   

n.浏览者

参考例句：

• View edits in a web browser.在浏览器中看编辑的效果。
• I think my browser has a list of shareware links.我想在浏览器中会有一系列的共享软件链接。