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

By gCaptain Staff On December 15, 2008

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:

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.

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

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

Mariners That Tweet:

John Konrad
cconover

Maritime Industry Twitters:

Coast Guard & US Government Tweets:

USCoastGuard
Amver
uscgd13
GovTwit

You are now following GovTwit

USCGNewEngland
uscgd5pao
USCG
TSABlogTeam
NOAAOceanToday
DHSJournal
femainfocus
HomelandSecurit
cgchealy
BarackObama

Cost Guards Unofficial:

Boaters We Follow

twitter Experts (who happen to be mariners)

ChrisCree

Groups

Maritime Group

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About The Author

gCaptain Staff

gCaptain is the top-visited maritime and offshore industry news blog in the world. Since 2006, gCaptain has proven to be a highly effective platform for information sharing and source for up-to-date and relevant news for industry professionals worldwide.