Social Media and Twitter

I have continued looking at social media and recently Twitter. I have been trying to understand the value of the service. The interesting thing is the broad usage of the service and the classic challenge of trying to understand what it is and can do for you. My thoughts are that it is very cool but can be a time sink.

Twitter is a micro blog site. Anyone can sign up and start micro blogging 140 characters in each blog. You can write whatever you want whenever you want and many people do exactly that! You can follow whomever you want and anyone can follow you. There is a block feature but this is really just to block someone that is abusing the system by saying inappropriate comments.

What I like about Twitter is not as much posting personally but following leading thinkers. I look forward to growing my list! I selected several book authors, speakers, business leaders and also linked to Senior IT #v12n, #vsphere (those are hashtags for virtualization) technical professionals that I read something and thought it was interesting. You can go to people you respect and see who they are following – this is a good source of who you may also want to follow. I added in the top celebrities and major news feeds. Then you just read every once in a while to get the latest information and tidbits. Occasionally, you will have someone that just keeps posting information that you are not interested in so you just stop following them. You can also search on hashtags to find information.

So this is how I use Twitter so far and I am neophyte - In either case I think it is an interesting social media and worth taking a look at. I am not the world authority so below I have put a link to a Guy Kawasaki article on how to demo Twitter:

http://blogs.openforum.com/2009/04/19/how-to-demo-twitter/