Thing #12: Twitter

I've been Twittering for about a week now. It's not a tool I'm finding very useful yet.

I installed the Twitbin extension for Firefox on my home Mac and have it running all the time. Oh sure, it's fun to see who's online and what they're thinking and doing, and tweets from my favorite organizations are interesting, but Twitter seems to divert me from my primary tasks. Distractability was already a problem for me and Twitter simply enables the ADD part of my brain to lose focus.

For folks who process their social network lives in information "droplets", I can see Twitter would be a valuable adjunct to IMs and text messages. Twitter could be a secondary way to communicate quick messages to customers who are online. It'd even be useful way to communicate withing CML - at least as useful as a quick email message.

If I was more committed to Twitter-style communication on a personal level - and if more of my friends outside of CML used it - I'm sure I'd value it more. As it is, it's an amusing and occassionally informative novelty for me.