Welcome Twitterers

If you just found this blog via Twitter, welcome! If not, maybe you're wondering why or how you should use Twitter. There are tons of valid uses for the service, but I'll try to share why I tweet.

Twitter is one part of my online identity: I'm @elunt. If you "follow" me, you'll be able to see whatever pithy comments I might share throughout the day. It's an outbound communication vehicle for me: I tweet and anyone who follows me may receive it (with a priority of their choosing). Also, if you include "@elunt" in one of your tweets, I'll probably see it, even if I don't follow you. So, in this way, it's a semi-public two-way non-guaranteed communication mechanism, with each message being limited to 140 characters.

What's the point? Tony Hsieh (@zappos), CEO of Zappos.com, wrote a great post entitled "How Twitter Can Make You A Better (and Happier) Person". He shares some of his thoughts about why Twitter is an effective communication medium for himself and his customers. I totally subscribe to the Tony-Twitter Doctrine. I especially like this quote:

There are many ways to be thankful, and many things to be thankful for, but one technique is to make a more conscious effort to notice and appreciate the little things in life.

For me, because I try to tweet every day, I've found that I'm always looking for opportunities to have something to tweet about. So I end up noticing and appreciating things that I would normally not even give a second thought to.

That's pretty cool, and that's kind of how I treat Twitter (say that five times fast). I generally just try to tweet random observations (some personal, most not) that I hope are humorous, but really it's a low-expectation medium. One of my personal credos that I try to live by is "I don't care if 99 people think I'm an idiot as long as 1 person gets the joke"; Twitter is a great medium to allow me to be an idiot.

There are more things to say about Twitter: how it enables ambient awareness or social proprioception, how its open API encourages adoption, and how its usage is molded by its users ... but that's stuff for later posts. For now, let's just say that it's another one of my online touchpoints.

If you don't currently use the service, I recommend you give it a try for at least a week to get a feel for it. Each online service has it's own vibe and it's own conventions ... some may resonate with you more than others. You may really get into it, or you may just find it to be pointless. But you really can't make that determination from the outside -- you've got to give it a try.

One more point before signing off here: should I have a gadget on this blog that shows my tweets in the sidebar? Ah, now we're getting into some interesting territory -- is the purpose of this blog to be an aggregated view of all of my online touchpoints, or is it just a hosting vehicle for 500-word posts? I'm going to go ahead and leave the sidebar off for now and we'll defer this discussion for a while.

Until next time, happy tweeting!