Well you sure don’t look human, said the man.
But that doesn’t make me a fluid, twittered the ape.
– Russell Edson in “Ape and Coffee”
I’ve been twittering for a while now. At first, I limited my twitter friends to only a couple. Then Twitter wasn’t well integrated into Adium or much else. I didn’t want to spend my time going to one more social site except for notes from actual friends (okay, John Edwards too but then he asked first and he is a pretty good twitterer unlike Obama whose first tweet Fred disses).
Then SXSW happened. Twitter had a major rollout/PR push there. I wasn’t there but a lot of folks there started twittering me and friending me and twitter made more sense.
Even more useful was Fred’s article “The 12 Minute Definitive Guide to Twitter.†There I discovered Twitterific which links your tweets to Adium and is itself a very nice constantly updating collector of tweets.
Finally Twitter was easy and useful. If you manage your friend list.
And if you want yet another news flow, you can make a twittering news site like CNet your friend.
Since then new twitter friend and musician Robbie Link put me onto the insanely simple to use “post it to twitter” add-on to the Firefox search box. This makes posting a tweet as simple as typing in the search box once that feature is selected. The downside is that it doesn’t collect tweets — you go to your Twitter home page for that — and it doesn’t update your Instant Messenger status. So I’m sticking with Twitterific for most of my tweeting.
Jason Griffy tweets that Google’s free Teletwitter (Windoz only) looks a lot like Twitterific (Mac only).
I’m still not using twitter actively, I keep thinking I’ll figure out what it’s good for for me.
I must admit that I just don’t get twitter, but then I don’t think IM is that useful either 🙂