The USCG Joins Twitter- Plus Links To Friendfeed And Other Maritime Tweets

Today we noticed a new follower on our Twitter page: uscoastguard

Ok, so many of our readers are asking; What’s Twitter and why doesn’t gCaptain mention it more often? The answer to both questions is; Twitter is the most complicated and simplest to use messaging tool on the net.

What?

gCaptain has been a member of Twitter since May of 2007 and we even promoted it’s use as an emergency beacon back in January (note: can find out profile page HERE ) but this simple to use site is difficult to wrap your head around so we have not been good at marketing (or even updating) or profile page. This all changed recently after we listened to the advice of maritime tweeter Peter Mello and took the following steps:

• Installed a desktop client (our favorite is TweetDeck).
• Jumped into the conversation.
• Visited search.twitter.com and entered a few maritime phrases.
• Friended other maritme tweeters (more info below)
• Viewed the following video:

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Now updates about my life may not be of great interest to you so we set up two profiles. JohnKonrad is my personal twitter profile and gCaptain is the profile for all things maritime. On our gCaptain account we keep the information related to the maritime world providing breaking news and information that relates to shipping.

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Twitter Is Old News – Enter Friendfeed

Twitter has a number of problems. First it suffers from frequent outages and second it lacks advanced features. The future is FriendFeed as it aggregates news and information from various sources around the web.

The best way to understand FreindFeed is to dive right in, browse around and join a few rooms. Here are the important links:

Maritime Rooms

• Maritime News (great news service!)
  
• Coast Guard
• Offshore Oil
• PirateShips
• Maritime Academy News
• Maritime Jobs

An our two newest rooms, USCG-Links & Maritime Video. Be sure to Join the room to post interesting links from around the web.

Maritime Interests

• gCaptain

So who should I follow?

gCaptain has put together a list of maritime related people we follow on twitter to get you started (full list can be found HERE). Please feel free to add yourself or recommend someone by leaving a comment to this post below.

Image by mfilej

Maritime Twitters:

• gCaptain

• Pinoy_Maritime
• MariTalk
• Marine Buzz
• seafever

Mariners That Tweet:

• John Konrad
• cconover

Maritime Industry Twitters:

• Peter Mello
• Richard Rodriguez
• MaritimeJobs
• goldenshellback
• OilRig
  

Coast Guard & US Government Tweets:

• USCoastGuard
• Amver
• uscgd13

• 	GovTwit You are now following GovTwit remove
  	USCGNewEngland

• uscgd5pao
• USCG
• TSABlogTeam
• NOAAOceanToday
• DHSJournal
• femainfocus
• HomelandSecurit
• cgchealy
• BarackObama

Cost Guards Unofficial:

• CoastieChris
• Ryan_F_Owens
• CoastGuardNews
• FakeThadAllen
• USCGCOMRELTony
• rlabrec
• pastinson
• CGBlog
• medicjm

Boaters We Follow

• theboaters
• madmariner
• BenEllison
• TimFlan

twitter Experts (who happen to be mariners)

• ChrisCree

Groups

• Maritime Group