| Here's how I grok Twitter. Others may have a different opinion: A few years ago, I was working on some contracts that had me regularly traveling. Plenty of friends couldn't quite be bothered to keep track of where I was at any given day, so I started using my IM status line to show where I was and what I happened to be doing. And this was useful among the group of us. When I started using Twitter, I used it the same way: letting people who care (might not be the world) know where I was and what I was working on. Now I use Twitter not only for quick "what I'm doing" updates, but also for quick "what I just read" or "what I'm wondering about" updates. They're the sort of comments and thoughts that aren't worth a blog post, but are still worth talking about. For example: yesterday I spent a few minutes looking at ways to combine my IRC and Jabber clients and maybe Twitter too. So I wrote a few tweets about it. That night I was out at a tech social event and some friends commented about the tweets, sparking some interesting conversation. When I'm paying attention to other people's tweets (which isn't all that often), I'm surprised how much I learn about breaking news events, tech or otherwise. I don't use Twitter's website much at all and I can't stand any tweets being "pushed" to me. I use Moodblast (for mac) to send tweets since it also updates my Facebook, Skype and GTalk status. If it weren't that simple, I wouldn't do it. I still don't have a solution I like for reading other people's tweets. I like reading them on my iPhone using Twitterific, but I don't do that very often. I'm leaning towards using a Twitter Jabber or Twitter IRC bot so that it fits within the tools I already use. So that's how I use Twitter. |