If you’re a Twitter user, and you’re “tweeting” about openSUSE, here’s a way to add some additional context to your tweets and help get the word out about openSUSE. While I was at Sun’s CommunityOne, I started noticing other users adding a hash tag in their posts — i.e., posting about #communityone instead of just “communityone.”

While Twitter doesn’t do anything special with hash tags, you can track hash tags on (of course) hashtags.org. As you can see, there’s not a lot of activity under #openSUSE just yet, but I’d like to see that change. I’ve been using #openSUSE a lot on Twitter lately, but I just realized this morning that your tweets are only indexed by hashtags.org if you follow the @hashtags bot, but (at least for now) the bot doesn’t post often (last post was about 3 months ago) so it’s not going to be a major pain to follow.

I’ve wondered whether it’d be reasonable to suggest following Twitter accounts on Planet SUSE, but it might be better if interested users could follow the #openSUSE RSS feed instead.

It’s still important for openSUSE contributors to blog about their work, I think, but Twitter might be a good supplement for blogging when you have something short and sweet to say. (You’d be surprised what you can pack into 140 characters, if you try.)

On an unrelated note — I think the 140 character limit might be a good one for slides in presentations: If you can’t fit an idea into a 140 character tweet, it’s too complicated to go on a single side.

Maybe we should have some real-time Twitter presentations about openSUSE for new users when 11.0 is released? Is that a good idea, or do I need more coffee? I’ll have some more coffee just in case, but any ideas about how to to use Twitter (and other methods…) to promote openSUSE are welcome in the comments.

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