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Thus far 70 subscribers have signed on to DU’s new Twitter feed, www.twitter.com/uofdenver, which opened this February as a new communication tool to alert students, faculty and parents about what is happening around campus.
Twitter is a social networking site that allows users to post short text-based messages, deemed micro-blogging, for others to read.
The messages are limited to 140 characters and are used to let others know information quickly. Users can get updates from Twitter pages by text message, RSS feeds or through Facebook. The site is free of charge and anyone can join.
Twitter will help make communicating with students quicker and easier, said Jim Berscheidt, associate vice chancellor for University Communications. He also noted that this could be another way to alert students of emergencies.
“DU is always exploring new ways to communicate with students, faculty, parents, alumni and anyone interested in the latest news from the university,” said Berschedit.
“Twitter is a great way for us to provide short updates to those groups.”
Twitter has primarily been used for socializing between groups of friends, but companies have followed suit.
“We’ve seen many successful Twitter pages by corporations and decided that DU should be an early adopter in this area,” said Berscheidt.
Chase Squires, senior public affairs specialist, is the primary person in charge of maintaining the page. National Public Affairs (NPA) decides what the message of the day should be and updates it for readers.
Berscheidt hopes more students will subscribe to DU’s page. “We look forward to having more people follow DU so they can know how much is going on here every day,” he said.
“I would check it every once in a while to see what is going on at school,” said junior Jenna Mamorsky.
However, junior Leah Schwartz wasn’t a fan of Twitter when she used it.
“I found it kind of slow and boring though. There’s not a whole lot you can do to customize it like MySpace or Facebook,” she said.
Other DU Twitter feeds are www.twitter.com/dupenrose for Penrose Library and www.twitter.com/danielsatdu for the Daniels College of Business.
