So i joined twitter...

[BEGM83]

...at the behest of a friend.

I joined.

I rolled my eyes.

I left.

Or am i missing a trick with it here?!

[nickbedford]

Twitter is for networking. If you have no one following you then it's kinda pointless (and visa versa).

I use it to chat to my friends and acquaintances whilst also promoting new work I throw up on the interblag.

The problem is that most kids use it as a way to whinge about all their problems and make people wonder why they follow them.

If you want, you can follow me: http://www.twitter.com/nickoraptor haha

[BEGM83]

lol nice plug!

[nickbedford]

Originally Posted by BEGM83

lol nice plug!

Follow me at your own risk, I should say

[DravensHalo]

i joined because Nine Inch Nails were having competitions to win tickets to their concerts and guitars and stuff (and that would be my dream - a signed guitar from these guys) but i couldnt stand it - so i left...

[faeriegodess612]

I tried Twitter for about a week. Then couldnt see the point in it. I cant express my complex opinion in 120 characters or less. Pfftttt!!

[OsmosisStudios]

The trick to Twitter is getting connected. It really is boring by yourself: you have to find friends (from real life) and make friends (from others). Follow some photographers, follow some businesses, etc. Follow celebrities if you must (I have both Katy Perry and Adam Savage)

I have to say, most of my tweets arent personal in nature: they're networking.

feel free: Adam Montpetit (OsmosisStudios) on Twitter

[jdepould]

Agreed. My feed is mostly photo-related. A lot of the people I follow are real-life friends and acquaintances, and they share interesting articles and thoughts. Very rarely do any trending topics show up in my feed.

I try to keep a good balance between personal and professional tweets, and generally avoid inane lunch-related posts.

[Peter Ahrens]

I use my Twitter for getting to know people, networking and marketing my own work. Twitter is one of the regular sources of traffic for my website.

[wulf]

Knowing other people who tweet makes a difference. Of course, so does being a person who tweets so that other people who know you will know someone who tweets too!

For me, twitter serves three purposes:

1. It raises my peripheral awareness of how friends and acquaintances are doing

2. From the less personal contacts in my list, it increases my chance of discovering useful information, whether that is a link to a techy article or breaking news of another big event somewhere in the world(*)

3. It lets me share little snippets and, because I have connected it in with Facebook, lets me keep my profile there alive without having to log in all the time.

You can find my twitter profile via the link to my blog although, to be frank, I don't promise to follow back unless I either know you well already or you have lots of interesting tweets. One of the things that devalues the experience is when anything useful gets lost in too much background noise so I would encourage regular "weeding" as a key to ongoing twitter success.

Wulf

(*) The value of this goes down when a big sports event is on or when a popular fake-reality show reaches its final stages!