Not being one to jump too readily onto a bandwagon, I only yesterday signed up on Twitter. With the benefit of that vast experience, I won’t yet wax lyrical about it. But I’m not about to diss it either – far from it. It’s clearly a useful tool for you to do with what you will. Once you figure out the architecture (which takes all of a few minutes), you can see the potential.
What could I get out of it? I asked Goog why people tweet and why people use twitter. Here’s a couple of snips that made sense to me:
David Armano – Twitter Love + Hate
What was once initially designed to answer the question “what are you doing?”, has turned into a free-form communications service where people are having bursts of shorthand conversations, sharing links and information in rapid-fire fashion.
Sharon Sarmiento – The Top 5 Ways Smart People Use Twitter
To be honest, my first impression of Twitter was that it was for folks who had way too much time on their hands who narcissistically wanted to broadcast every random thought that crossed their brains. While this may be true in some instances, there are also some very smart, professional, forward thinking people whom I respect who are using Twitter intelligently.
Sharon suggests smart, professional, forward thinking people are/could be using it for:
- marketing and communication
- microblogging
- business networking
- breaking news and getting scoops
- streamlining your electronic inboxes
ReadWriteWeb has crunched the numbers and analysed what people say when they tweet.
And me? Well for now I’m tweeting to find out about tweeting.
Hi Nick:
I have been using Twitter for over a year and consider it my main networking tool. A couple of my blog posts that may be of interest:
Twitter: What it is and How I use it and
Is Twitter Changing the Way We Communicate?
Cheers!
Connie
Twitter can be used effectively for microblogging. Lawyers can get quick updates on legal areas of interest to them at the office or on their cell or PDA. I blogged about it earlier today at
“Using Twitter for Legal Updates” (http://singularitylaw.com/?p=63)
Cheers!
Mike Scott