CELEB STALKING

Who doesn’t want to get to know their favourite stars better? Priyanka Chopra, Preity Zinta, Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan are some of the biggest — and real — Bollywood stars on Twitter. Sample tweets:

Aamir Khan

(Usually excerpts from his blog) I see there has been quite a discussion on what I wore to my event with Secretary Clinton…. I don’t usually give much importance to what I am wearing.

Priyanka Chopra

Exhausting day ma tweeps last three days of pyaar impossible.. Impossibly tiring… Hehe

Shah Rukh Khan

What’s your favourite Sandman volume?
Curious

Sonam Kapoor

Watched Harry Potter. Loved it.

Gul Panag

Finished work. Friend over Making lemon coriander soup and pasta for dinner. and then watching electric mist on DVD!

 

FAKE CELEB PROFILES

They’re so much more fun than the real ones! But to help screen out imposters, Twitter has now started a Verified Account feature, with a little tick to confirm that the celeb you are following is not a random dude with malice — or mockery — on the mind.

Sarah Palin

OMG I am SO BORED. The media keeps IGNORING ME now, because they’re conspiring.... (Also) K guys I quit governing so I could come back to twittering.

Megan Fox

(This one was suspended. We wonder why...):
Sometimes I just spend the night grabbing and regrabbing my ass. You would too, if your ass was nice as mine. Admit it.

Osama bin Laden

154 people are following me on Twitter — far more than from the American army!

David Hasselhoff

Sobbing in a corner with a huge bag of coke… Scheduling more plastic surgery

George W. Bush

Queenie Lizzie’s birthday party today. She’s lookin’ good for 110 years old, or however old she is. Hottt! Hottt!! Hottt!!! With three Ts.

TWITPIC

If you have a Twitter account then you already have a Twitpic account. This app deserves a separate mention because it is very popular. You can upload pictures in near real-time, as an event takes place. Comments on photographs are sent as a reply tweet.

Sample twitpics:

Priyanka Chopra:

“in my car heading to shoot.. Just a beautiful drive..”

Shah Rukh Khan:

“OMG. I know what I’m watching on Thursday.” (With an uploaded twitpic of the DVD Ashes Of Time, a film by Wong Kar-wai)

How to make your twitter profile hot

• Don’t worry about who your followers are and where they come from. It doesn’t matter. Think of Twitter as a radio station as opposed to Facebook/ Orkut/Myspace, which is more like a telephone. Here, everyone can listen in. There, you choose who you speak to.

• There could be many reasons why people aren’t following you. You could be posting protected updates, writing plain boring tweets (who wants to know if you’re confused, we’d like to know why), your tweets may all be links, you could be using tweets for marketing (such a bore!), not being regular enough, and lastly, as one Twitterer puts it, your profile may not have “the Holy Trinity: a bio, a location and a link”.

• Don’t be like Mallika Sherawat, who tweets every half hour. No matter how popular you think you are, not everyone wants to hear that much noise.

• Expect followers if — you have a great sense of humour, a wacky profile pic, post interesting pictures on TwitPic, hook your blog to your tweet or share web articles you find interesting.

• Interact. Don’t sit idle. Get help on any subject you like: ask if the latest film is worth a watch, or ask for recommendations on restaurants. Help others by answering their questions, too.

• Spread the word. Was that an earthquake you just felt? Tell people about upcoming events or a cool sale.

• Don’t shy away from interacting with people that you might never know otherwise.

• Use hot Twitter lingo like

RT: An abbreviation for ReTweet, which is like repeat. If you see something really cool from one of the people you follow, you may want to ReTweet it so that the people following you (and not the original person) can see it.

OH: Overheard. If you hear something interesting or funny outside of Twitter, and you want to repeat it, you can prefix it with OH.

#: A hash tag in your tweet helps to create a community. For example, if five friends went to see Love Aaj Kal and each one uses #film in their tweet, a little group is created.

TWITTERHOLIC.COM

A website that provides a list of the 100 most followed Twitterers, how many people they follow and the number of updates. Ashton Kutcher (username: aplusk) leads the list with 3,032,102 followers, followed by Ellen DeGeneres with 2,666,379. Britney Spears ranks third with 2,667,109. Barack Obama has 1,888,049 followers, Oprah Winfrey has 1,974,029. As on Monday morning.

Check out your Twitterholic ranking, too!

TRENDING TOPICS

These are “popular topics by the minute, day, and week”. If you want to know what everyone’s talking about on Twitter, check out the column on the right hand side of your home page. Harry Potter and Michael Jackson have been in the list for the past few weeks and Happy Friendship Day popped up on Sunday.

#followfriday

A game Twitterers play every Friday, where people suggest who to follow on Twitter. This way, you get to follow some really interesting Twitter users, especially if you’re new on the site. How to do it? List the users you recommend following and add “#followfriday” anywhere in the Tweet so others can find it. Don’t forget to add the “#” sign!

TWITTER APPS

Some of the applications you must check out are Tweetdeck (streamlines notifications and tweets), Twitterfeed (feeds your blog to Twitter), Twittervision (allows you to see in real-time where tweets are coming from) and Tweetscan (a search engine for Twitter).