Use of Twitter
Tonight I signed up for “yet another” new Web 2.0-based tool, Twistory, which maps your tweets from Twitter onto your favorite calendar.
Presumably, you could also subscribe to other folks’ tweets, too.
I find Twitter to be used in a variety of ways by the folks I follow. When I talk to people about this tool, they often ask what it is. They don’t get it, really.
I always reference it to iChat, the AIM-client we use at work on all of our Macs.
You know how you can change your status message in iChat? You know how teachers are changing them to reflect their mood, some event, or the fact it’s Friday?? Twitter is like that, by itself.
Often, I get in return, “Who wants that?”
We use Twitter among our team to report what we’re up to throughout the day. Some folks still use Twitter in this way, and I think it strongly mimics the way it was intended to be used. After all, the website asks you in the form: “What are you doing?”
I change locations (schools) throughout the day. I report that. I report what big projects I’m working on. I occasionally report interesting links to things I have written or found online. What I try not to do is use it as a microblog, a style of blog that’s made up of really short posts.
And that’s why this new tool looks interesting to me. If I managed a small team of folks, having a record of what they’re working on in a calendar-like format would be interesting to me. It’s not what you plan to do throughout the day, week, or month; it’s what you actually ended up doing.
Whether or not that’s necessary should be up to you; I simply find it interesting at this point.