What Twitter Is Doing For Me
It’s been almost two weeks since I said I’d get on Twitter ‘full-time’ and really have a go at it. I signed up to it back in October last year and updated sporadically; doing lots and then doing very little.
Recently I’ve been posting pretty much every day and have accumulated a nice lot of friends [...]
It’s been almost two weeks since I said I’d get on Twitter ‘full-time’ and really have a go at it. I signed up to it back in October last year and updated sporadically; doing lots and then doing very little.
Recently I’ve been posting pretty much every day and have accumulated a nice lot of friends and followers. Is it doing me good, or is it just another time sink?
The Good:
- I’ve ‘met’ some interesting people and found out about more events than I would probably have normally - MTUB4 this Thursday.
- It still appears to be a pretty good platform to promote my other sites and stuff I like.
- I get good suggestions for sites and news to check out that don’t appear in my feed reader or standard web surfing.
- My housemate Ned became attracted to Twitter, joined and began posting regularly also. Although he doesn’t quite ‘get it’ [not that I claim to] he is still in the process of trying it out further.
The Bad:
- There hasn’t really been that ’self-reflection’ that I was hoping for. Although I can see what I’ve been doing, there isn’t enough information for me to really gauge where my time is going and how I spend my day.
- The solution would be, I guess, to Twitter more; but that’s a stretch. There is still a lot of things I don’t put up there. In fact, I’ve really been using it more as an idea bank or to ask questions of the internet world.
- It’s a distraction. I notice is taking my mind off work or better things. Not in an overly bad way, but a bad way non-the-less. This is a small observation that doesn’t really bother me. However, I did wake up one night and realized I had been dreaming about Twittering. LAME>
Where To Go:
I’ll keep it up. I still see some merit in using Twitter. MTUB4 this week should be interesting. If I can meet some interesting people there then I would see this as a success.
In reading a little recently about ‘rubber ducking’ and vocalizing problems etc. I can see Twitter as a good method of doing so.
Also very handy is the Twitter integration of other web apps such as Remember The Milk. You can direct message tasks to add to your RTM profile from Twitter [mobile also].
Incidentally, although I don’t use it heaps, the SMS feature is still Twitter’s strong point. If I had more close friends using Twitter, I would definitely use it to group text people and keep track of things.
Missing Features:
The biggest missing feature at this stage, for me, is the ability to search through your own updates. You can use a bunch of decent Twitter search sites to search people in the same city as you, who talk about particular things etc. but not just your updates.
Why do I want to be able to do this?
So I can do things like tag my updates and use Twitter for things like bookmarking, task management and GTD. If I could search back through my Twitter archive for things like #work or #lifehack, then I could set updates using similar tags and do a bunch of stuff.
Twitter Blocks, on the other hand, is doing nothing for me.
Tags: Shorter
