More About Twitter

On my previous entry about Twitter, Nelson commented:

I still don't really get what Twitter is... would it be useful to me?

I could describe Twitter as to blogging what IM is to email but that's not enough.

I admit that I didn't get Twitter at first. For months I just thought it wasn't my kind of thing.

Then something changed.

For me Facebook status was the gateway drug. Once I got interested in what people were doing, thinking, and responding to in their Facebook status, Twitter started to make more sense.

The other thing that changed was I built a critical mass of interesting people to follow. Some of them were people I only vaguely know but who I knew had interesting things to say. Some I confess are just fly-on-the-wall eavesdropping.

But the two most interesting categories are the friends who I can keep more in touch with about day-to-day stuff and the acquaintances (or strangers) with common interests who I strike up spontaneous conversations with.

Here is fun example last week. Someone mentioned that Game Neverending (GNE) was back. So I went and checked it out. It closed down a couple of hours later so I never would have known about it in time if not for Twitter. Later on in the week, I twittered that I'd like to write a GNE-clone in Django. As well as a number of people asking me what GNE was, I also had a reply from a guy I met at PyCon saying he'd love to be involved. So we worked on it together over the weekend (see my post about it. All this happened because of Twitter.

To build the critical mass of people to follow (what I did, anyway):

• if you're on Facebook, see which of your friends are twittering and start following them
• import your contacts (I did this via gmail even though I don't use gmail) to see other friends who twitter
• look at who your friends are following and start following some of those people
• look to see who your followers are replying to and start following them
• if someone follows you, check them out and, if they're not spam, follow them

The other thing that helped me get into it was finding a client app. I've used Twitterific and Twhirl and like both a lot.

Incidentally, I twittered that I was writing this post and immediately received a number of suggestions and links (thanks @moof and @epoz)

Suggested blog posts on this topic included:

• Nearly a million users, and no spam or trolls by Russell Beattie
• On Twitter by Tim Bray

I'll also twitter with a link to this post for people to add their comments to.

Will it be useful to you? If you like finding out what friends are up to; if you like learning about new things going on from smart people with common interests; if you like making serendipitous connections based on overheard conversations, then Twitter will be useful to you.

Hope this helps!

P.S. If you follow a lot of people, never be afraid to just ignore the river of tweets when you're busy (or sleeping). I generally don't look at Twitter at work, for example, and only rarely ever go back to skim what I missed.

UPDATE: Definitely watch the short video http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter that David recommends below!