Citizen Wausau

Twitter – My Favorite Communication Tool

by Marcus Nelson on November 17th, 2007

This is my Twitter page. If you’ve never heard of it, Twitter is an excellent communications tool that asks one particular question: “What are you doing now?”

Users answer this as they see fit & read their friends’ answers on a web page, via SMS, Instant Messenger, or through a third-party application like Facebook, Twitteroo or Twitterific (which is what I use). Posts are 140 characters or less, which is a little longer than instant messenger, but shorter than a blog post.

Twitter is constantly being updated, which can suck up your attention span if you let it. That contrasts directly to those Getting Things Done type of people (which I still haven’t finished reading, Dino).

So how can it still be useful? Here are some tricks:

Use Twitter for Good:

• Quick Answers -

  Ask your friends, “What’s going on tonight?” Chances are you’ll get back a stream of responses.

• News Updates -

  Big events are covered quickly by Twitter. I heard about the Apple iPhone faster through Twitter than I would have via blog surfing alone. Similarly, people could report about activities or tornados that might take news sources hours to confirm.

• Friendsourcing -

  Let’s say you’re looking for a painter or a good carpenter. You could post to Twitter and within a very few moments, get three or four different replies from your friends. Much more reliable than paging through the yellow pages.

• Micro-Attention-Sharing -

  Like others, I use Twitter to direct people to newly posted blog entries written, news worth sharing, or entertaining things you find on the web (Twitter has a built in function to use tinyurl.com to shrink URLs to keep it under 140 characters). A very easy way to share bookmarks with your buddies.

• Direct People to Good Causes -

  Twitter allows people to use their friend lists to propagate information about charity walks, fund drives or other worthy activities, and try to draw more direct help to solve a problem.

• Bonus -

  As advertised, Twitter answers the question “What are you doing?” This means that you can stay in touch with others without being intrusive. Just follow their twitters.

Here’s some other local people who are actively using Twitter:

• Dino
• Andy
• Boogenstein
• Rob Mentzer
• Josh King
• Kevin Rector
• Jim Carlson

[note to iPhone users: There are several tools available for Tweeting with your iPhone.  See iTweet, PocketTweets, Hahlo, or Twitter Mobile.