Two new developments on the Standardbred Canada website reach out to both fans of harness racing and people who might not be familiar with the SC website through
the use of microblogging platform Twitter.
For people who are unfamiliar with Twitter, the service uses the tagline "what are you doing?" and provides updates in 140 characters or less. The purpose of the service is twofold: to keep people up-to-date on your activities and also to follow the activities of others. In June 2009, Twitter had a reach of at least 44.5 million people worldwide.
The SC website has started two accounts: TrotInsider and CAHarnessRacing. The TrotInsider account is a real-time feed of the SC website news headlines. The minute a news story or notice is posted, the Twitter account posts a link to the story as well. The format looks like this:
Rideau Preferred To Best Show In Town - http://bit.ly/VZo2w about 10 hours ago from API
For people wishing to follow when entries, results or condition sheets are posted on the SC website, the CAHarnessRacing account provides this information as well, up to the minute. The results links also state the number of races included by stating what race number the results are up to.
Race Results Upto R11 GEODF 11-Aug-2009 N
http://standardbredcanada.ca/
Trot Magazine Associate Editor Kim Fisher manages the TrotMagazine Twitter account, keeping you up to speed on all the happening's with American's Horse Publications General Excellence Award Winner for an association magazine under 15,000 members.
Those people who have been asking about RSS feeds can also rejoice. The Twitter accounts can be followed with through RSS as well. Just visit the Twitter page of each account and look for the RSS link on the right-hand-side.
If you're already on Twitter and wish to follow the SC accounts, click the links on the account names above and follow the Twitter feed. People new to Twitter who wish to sign up can go to twitter.com and sign up for a free account.