There are two ways to use Tweet Cascade. The first is as a regular old user. If all you want to do is participate, then all you need is a Twitter account. Chances are you've already got one. If so, you're done! You don't have to do anything else besides find a Tweet Cascade group you want to join and then join it. Easy as pie. (It's actually slightly more complicated than that. If all you want to do is read the conversations, it is that simple, but if you want to participate then your Twitter account must be public, not protected, because Tweet Cascade uses retweets to keep the conversation going.)
The second way to use Tweet Cascade is as an administrator of a new group. If you want to set up your own group for discussion around your favorite topic, and want to handle managing new members and all that jazz, then this is the page for you. Keep on reading!
Much like an email-based listserv needs its own email address, each Tweet Cascade group needs its own Twitter account. We call these Cascade accounts because it's fun, and to help us distinguish them from regular ol' Twitter accounts.
If you want to set up a new Tweet Cascade group, the first thing you'll need to do is go on over to Twitter and set up a new account to use as your Cascade account. Once you've got that done, go ahead and have that account follow a few people. You need to do this because the people that your Cascade account follows when it gets registered here with Tweet Cascade will all auto-magically be turned into administrators for the group. Once you've got that taken care of, come on back here to this page and sign your account up. You'll be sent back over to Twitter to verify that you want Tweet Cascade to have access to the account. Click allow, and you're done!
Let's go over the steps again, shall we?
- Find a group that would benefit from using Tweet Cascade to let them talk to each other about what brings them together.
- Go to Twitter and register a new Twitter account* there to act as the Cascade account for your new group.
- Go ahead and get that account to follow the Twitter users you want to have administrator privileges over the Cascade account** and the group as a whole.
- Come back here and register your new account with Tweet Cascade***, telling Twitter to grant us permission to access it.
- Take a look at the available (and growing) list of Tweet Cascade commands that are available to you as an all-powerful administrator.
- Make a sandwich, or eat some ice cream, or do whatever it is that you do to reward yourself for all your hard work!
- Shoot us an email at tweetcascade@tweetcascade.com to tell us what you think. What works, what needs improvement, what should we add next, and what tiny little change would make Tweet Cascade the best thing ever?
*: Seriously, create a new account. Using a personal account for Tweet Cascade will simply make you and everyone who follows you want to kill us. And we're behind on our life insurance premiums, so that'd be a real bummer.
**: Before you sign up for Tweet Cascade, it is important that your Cascade account is following at least one other Twitter account (it can follow more if you like). That account (or those accounts) will then be set up as administrators, able to add new users and drop old ones. (See the commands section.) If you don't do this then Tweetcascade will still set itself up, but it will have NO admin users. This will make it impossible to update and can only be changed directly by us at the server side. If this happens to you, drop us an email.
***: When Twitter asks you whether you want to allow Tweet Cascade access or not, please double check that you're logged into Twitter with the desired account. Enabling Tweet Cascade on a personal account can really mess things up! If you do this by accident, shoot us an email so that we can make Tweet Cascade stop screwing with your account.