A week and a half into my dalliance with Twitter, and I’m pretty well convinced it is powerful and useful social tool. Why?
- It’s an instant part of my lifestyle of declarative living. I have services to share where I am, what I’m listening to, taking photos of, bookmarking, and more.. so why not what I’m doing too?
- It’s fairly ambient, and asynchronous. I follow it at my own pace. It’s a handy way of keeping up with my friends, as well as learning about our overlapping social networks. I’ve learned who was watching the lunar eclipse, as well as when it would happen, discovered tubmlr, and got an invitation to Joost (of which I will be posting more soon), all within the last few days.
- Enough people use it. My initial fear was that only a few of my friends would be using it, but it turns out that lots of my friends already use it, and lots more quickly caved in to peer pressure.
- I can also stalk people I don’t really know, including Robert Scoble,
Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, … - …and on the less serious side there are also postings by ‘Bill Clinton‘, ‘Condi Rice‘, Homer Simpson, Darth Vader and The Emperor.
- There are lots of helpful bots. Some of the bots I’ve discovered so far include…
– Weather for Boston, Brighton, Chicago, Helsinki, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Singapore, and Vancouver
– lots of BBC news feeds
– bbcradio1
– bbcone
– London Underground status for various tube lines as well as the San Francisco BART
Have you got a spare Joost invite of your own now?
You know, I’ve always respected you as a person…
Have to say i’m coming around to twitter after initially being sceptical, it’s quite addictive.
Yeah, I’ve been digging it too… http://twitter.com/fjania
None yet minifig, but I’ll bear you in mind when they do arrive.
Glad you’re getting into it too Rob and Frank. :-)
Looking forward to your Joost post.
I think there are a range of interesting use cases for Twitter. Location-awareness lite, IM lite, blog lite.
The pervasiveness of the updates and notifications is cool, although the thing appears to be quite patchy – things often don’t work.
What can I do with Twitter?