Finding Outlander information on Twitter

My first impression of twitter- stampede of rabid hamsters all carrying bits of potentially interesting information if you could slow them down enough to catch it.

Second impression- hamster traps are available if you know where to look and what you’re looking for.

Your 2 main options at any given time are whether you want to join the stampede completely or watch from above selectively deciding which hamsters to grab. For all of these I’m just going to describe how to do things at the official twitter site. There are a gazillion different apps out there with different features and if you have one, you probably already know what you’re doing.

Watching from above– By this I mean you don’t even need to get a twitter account or login. You can just click a link and view what’s going on. There are 3 types of links for this:

1. Account. You can check out what someone with a specific account is saying by going to twitter.com/accountname. Some of what you read this way will be completely confusing since it will be responses to other people. To see the context of the statement, click the view conversation link right under the comment. If you check these once a day, it will probably take less than fifteen minutes and you’ll at least have a good idea of what’s going on. For these purposes, you’re probably most interested in:
   • Heughan– Sam’s official twitter account.
   • Caitrionambalfe– Cait’s official twitter account.
   • Writer_DG– Diana Gabaldon’s official account.
   • Outlander_Starz– The official account for the Outlander series on Starz.
   • Heughligans – Official Heughligans account.
   • I’ve now started collecting these names elsewhere, so if you go to this page, you can find a long list of official people on Twitter: http://www.outlanderhub.com/viewlinks.cfm?by=People
2. @account. At the top of the twitter page is a search box. If you search for @accountname (e.g. @heughan or @writer_DG) you will get a list of everything written by the account as well as all messages sent to the account. This will be a much larger number of posts with a wider range of comments.
3. Hashtags (#). These are topics. You can get to them either by clicking on one in someone’s post or by searching for #topic (e.g. #heughligans). This is a way of people grouping posts with other posts similar in some way. It is also used for emphasis or humor. The main tag being used for the heughligans conversations right now is: #heughligans.

Become a Hamster- For this you need to get an account. That’s the easy part. Their are two main advantages of this. One, you can “follow” people, so that you can get everyone you want to view in one place. Two, you can jump in and participate if you want to. The biggest disadvantage is that it can eat all of your time if you aren’t careful.

• Following people is easy once you’ve logged in. Find an account (e.g. heughan or writer_DG) and then click follow once you’ve logged in. You can also click on the name of someone that has been mentioned and follow them as well.
• Sending your own tweets to individuals or conversations. If you include @accountname in a tweet it will show up for that person when they check things sent to them. If you include #topic it will show up when someone views that topic. So “@heughan @writer_dg #heughligans visit the new heughligans.com website” would show up in Sam’s feed, Diana’s feed and the Heughligans thread. This can be terrifying, but no one’s been bitten yet, though there are rumors of heart palpitations and swooning when getting responses from Sam or Diana.