Twitter

I have been playing with Twitter over the weekend and have to confess that when I saw it I thought it would be a complete wast of time. However ...

You know that feeling when you wonder what your mates are up to - well Twitter lets you know. Users can update the system with what they are doing from their mobiles or from the web and then all of their friends can opt to be pinged with this information.

Now I can imagine you all thinking what a nerdy, obsessive, male thing to do but trust me - it gets interesting. I have already had several occasions in a couple of days where people have doing things that I either found useful to find out about or was able to offer help in some way and I started thinking how useful this could be in a business context.

I can think of loads of times when it would have been useful to find out that someone was working on a particular thing, or about to go into a meeting that affected me or visiting my building when meeting up would be useful. If you get enough "ooh that's interesting" moments then Twitter could quickly become a useful business tool.

Comments

[christianhauck]

thanks for the tip - and for the link.One thing that came to my mind: it's a great complement to plazes, together they answer: "what are you doing", and "where are you". I even created a new blog, just to be able to play with the respective badges.

[Euan Semple]

My pleasure!

[Bernie Goldbach]

After a week of lurking and occasionally typing, I think Twitter is the texty side of Bebo.

It's also very illuminating when used to scan through what your social network is doing.

I wish I could restrict its screens of info by other limiters, such as by age or by a check-out list that allwed me to get updates only from a selection of my choosing.

[Euan Semple]

Yeah I wish I could automatically file them in a special folder on my N70.

[Stephanie Booth]

After a first nudge from Stowe, your post got me to sign up to Twitter and try.

Seems nice. Only frustration for the moment is that I haven't figured out how to send updates from my mobile phone.

I think their privacy settings definitely need more granularity (create groups amongst contacts, be able to send updates only to certain groups, etc).