Giving Twitter Another Shot…

Earlier this year I set up a Twitter account to play around with this “social networking” tool and see what all of the commotion was about. After a few days, I gave up. It reminded me too much of my old chatroom and instant messaging days where I’d spend hours hanging out chattering away with people and never really getting anything accomplished. I still remember the day that I swore off instant messaging applications and uninstalled ICQ and told everyone to email me or call me if they needed to talk to me. Things have worked out pretty well since then.

So after listening to people continuing to buzz about Twitter all summer, I thought… why not try again? Perhaps I was missing out on something, or things maybe have changed. So I signed back in and have been giving it another whirl for the last few days. Here’s some quick thoughts:

• Pro: There are a lot of interesting people using this application to share good information.
• Con: There are a lot of interesting people just chatting. I sometimes feel like I’m eavesdropping.

• Pro: Some of the local news media are using it to share insider information.
• Con: I find that information much harder to track than if it were in a more permanent blog format. I guess that’s just me.

• Pro: The interface is clean, simple, easy to understand.
• Con: There’s not much else to it. Essentially it’s a very well made world-wide chatroom / instant messaging application on the web. I only wish there were better filters for content/usage. There are people who I want to follow for their insight on specific topics, but I don’t really want to read the same person’s conversations about what they should make for dinner.

Anyway, I’ve been working on some major upgrades to Columbus Underground lately, and while I probably won’t be using twitter for personal use much longer, I will be taking the time to set up something to auto-publish CU content into a CU twitter profile for those who wish to receive updates that way.

There are new content distribution methods being born online every day. While some people prefer one over the other, you really need to utilize all of them (or at least all of the major ones) if you want to have all of our outreach bases covered.