I finally joined Twitter a few days ago when Father John Zuhlsdorf started experimenting with it.

It’s actually pretty neat. Twitter hosts millions of decentralized micro communities. I started to follow Father Zuhlsdorf and then started to follow some of his followers and then their followers quickly joining in a growing network of faithful Catholics. Many of these people started to follow me back.

Quick Tip: Twitter makes it hard to search for people. The search link is way down in the footer of the page.

There’s a free application called Tweet Deck to organize the tweets on your desktop.

Another interesting concept is the hash tag such as #catholic or #TCOT. I can enter #catholic in the Twitter search field and find tweets (posts of 140 characters or less) from people using that #catholic hash tag. This led me to other faithful Catholics. Many of these faithful Catholics also followed anything Mac. I’m a Mac geek, so I followed the big names in the Mac world from there.

Another interesting use of Twitter happened right after the election on November 28. A couple of Reagan Republicans started the #TCOT hash tag. #TCOT is Top Conservatives on Twitter organized to link conservatives together to deal with the next four years of the Obama presidency.

I’m planning a new website for first-time Catholic novelists and currently working with a site designer. In the meantime, I’m going to ask my Twitter followers pointed questions about what causes them to stop reading a novel or what keeps them turning pages.

I haven’t promoted the Priests in Crisis Blog blog on Twitter although I link to it in my Twitter profile. I looked at my web analytics software and saw a steady stream of targeted traffic coming in from Twitter.com Cool!

One of my Twitter followers who discovered this Priests in Crisis blog mentioned it in her own blog: Homeschool Goodies - Resources for Catholic Homeschoolers

Here’s where some of the Catholic spark plugs are on Twitter

Father John Zuhlsdorf @fatherz

Father Roderick @FatherRoderick

The American Papist @americanpapist

The Curt Jester @CurtJester

Patrick Madrid @patrickmadrid

Our Sunday Visitor @OSV

Pope Benedict XVI (ok, not really him) @popebenedictxvi

EWTN @EWTN

Me (not a spark plug) @SuzanneSadler

TwiTip is a blog that explains anything Twitter

Now I’m off to figure out Plurk . . .

Leave a comment with your Twitter address or to recommend more faithful Catholic spark plugs!