Twitter is the current internet phenomenon that everyone wants to be a part of. The world is talking about it and on it (in 140 characters or less), and Twitter seems to be the place to launch stories and break news. The Journal of Experimental Biology now has its own Twitter site (http://twitter.com/J_Exp_Biol) where we ‘tweet’ about interesting articles in the journal, update you on conferences, keep you informed about developments at the journal, and which we hope will form the nucleus of a new JEB online community.
Setting up our Twitter site at the end of September 2009, we have already gathered followers and we are also following other interesting science tweets to keep up to date with what's going on in the scientific community. But to really have influence in the Tweetosphere, we need to build a dialogue with an online community: which is where you come in.
If you tweet already or want to enter into a discussion with the journal, start following twitter.com/J_Exp_Biol. The JEB is curious to know more about you and follow your tweets too. If you want to tell us about novel science that has just been published or you want to highlight the presentations at conferences that thrilled you, the JEB is keen to know what you are up to. You can even tell us about the highs and lows of your own fieldwork.
Our first goal is to attract 250 followers. We're already well on our way to that total, but we'd really like to build an online JEB Twitter community where we hear from you.
Registering with Twitter couldn't be easier. Go to http://twitter.com, click the ‘sign up now’ button and fill in the registration form to ‘join the conversation’. Once you have registered, you are free to post your own tweets, build a list of people whose tweets you follow, direct message (mail) other users and build lists of contributors that you follow. And if you don't want to register with twitter, you can just follow events at the JEB by going direct to twitter.com/J_Exp_Biol.
So go on, register with twitter.com now and become a part of the JEB's new online community.