The journalist’s guide to Twitter — This handy post is a great starting point to get people into Twitter. And yes, BeatBlogging.Org and your humble editor are mentioned in this Mashable article. This post goes over:

• How Twitter enhances reporting
• Twitter tools like Muck Rake
• Tracking tweets
• Sourcing, networking
• Find and follow directories
• How to get back to the basics and more

This is a great post for not only people new to Twitter, but also for people looking to get better at it. Also, check out our screencast on using Twitter for reporting. It’s one of the easiest ways to learn how to use Twitter.

Twitter Repairs #fixreplies With #ducttape — A few days ago Twitter created a big firestorm by changing how @replies worked for a lot of users. This, of course, caused a huge outrage with #fixreplies and #twitterfail being two of the top trending topics.

Essentially this is what happened. Let’s say you were following me (@jiconoclast) and I sent a tweet to our social media boss @MsBeat. If you weren’t following @MsBeat, you wouldn’t have seen my tweet at her. This really hurts new users to Twitter and people looking for new people to follow.

I find the best way to find new people to follow is to see who the people I follow are conversing with. If I like what you have to say on Twitter, I might also like what someone you are conversing with has to say as well. It was really a fantastic way (the best in my opinion) to find new followers and have people find you.

Twitter originally said they removed this feature because it was confusing, before later admiting that it had technical issues. This brings us back to to the post at hand. Twitter has sort of brought this old feature back. If you create an @reply without clicking on the @reply button it will show up in people’s timelines.

This is a pretty janky fix to a popular feature. Twitter promises that they are rebuilding the feature and adding more functionality. I hope so.

Otherwise, Twitter starts becoming just another publication tool, instead of a place for people to interact and have conversation.

Reports point to widespread Google outages –BeatBlogging.Org does almost everything either in the cloud or via other Web apps. So, when Web services from Google go down, it makes our life a lot harder. We were unable to access both e-mail and Google Reader earlier today, two fairly important tools for what we do here.

While these outages rarely happen — especially with Google — they do point to one major issue with Web app adoption: uptime. Granted, I find Google Apps — especially GMAIL — have a far greater uptime than when I used to work for corporations that ran Windows and Exchange servers. My e-mail once went down at Stripes for more than 24 hours. GMAIL is rarely down and never for that long.

But it’s not all roses and butterflies with Web apps.