I have had a personal Twitter account for slightly over a year now, however I have kept it locked/private recently as I found I was being added by an inordinate amount of (rather unsavoury!) spam bots. Also, I am definitely one of those people who gives Twitter its image of "people typing about what they ate for lunch" - so perhaps it's best not to inflict such ramblings on the world! For 23 Things, I have set up another account - so that I can post useful links and participate in all the #ox23 hash tag fun!
Thinking back to LinkedIn, Twitter (though quite often used in a more personal social manner) can have its benefits in terms of professional networking. For example, back whilst I was writing my dissertation, a complete stranger browsing the site stumbled across my tweets and told me about a conference relevant to the topic. There are certainly "communities" emerging amongst the seemingly disparate, condensed soliloquies - the graduate trainees, for example, seem to be tweeting away to each other quite regularly now! There is a flip side to this however - Twitter's ability to cross between the personal and professional worlds can be slightly unnverving, and it is even harder than a blog in terms of "getting the balance" right. Do I really want the world knowing of my love for Chicken Tikka Satay baguettes? If I posted something with more depth to it, would it get lost in the tide of so many people's tweets anyway?
Thinking back to LinkedIn, Twitter (though quite often used in a more personal social manner) can have its benefits in terms of professional networking. For example, back whilst I was writing my dissertation, a complete stranger browsing the site stumbled across my tweets and told me about a conference relevant to the topic. There are certainly "communities" emerging amongst the seemingly disparate, condensed soliloquies - the graduate trainees, for example, seem to be tweeting away to each other quite regularly now! There is a flip side to this however - Twitter's ability to cross between the personal and professional worlds can be slightly unnverving, and it is even harder than a blog in terms of "getting the balance" right. Do I really want the world knowing of my love for Chicken Tikka Satay baguettes? If I posted something with more depth to it, would it get lost in the tide of so many people's tweets anyway?
In terms of developing a Twitter for the library, these points become even more relevant - at the moment our Twitter consists mostly of Facebook updates, automatically republished. It is often difficult to condense all of the information needed into so few characters - and unlike with a personal Twitter, resorting to text speak can look rather unprofessional (as well as not being accessible for all readers). As a platform for engaging with readers, I feel that Twitter also requires even more attention than other Web 2.0 technologies. The 2 posts a week which might be acceptable on a blog, for example, could make a Twitter feed appear rather neglected (especially in comparison to personal - and some business - accounts tweeting pretty much hourly) and there is the issue of what information is going to fill such a volume of tweets in the first place.
Unrelated to all of this: my phone client of choice is UberTwitter - and I noticed that it was missing from the 23 Things list of clients! I find it to be a bit more advanced than TwitterBerry (which I used to use) in terms of features. The one issue, which I'm hoping will be remedied in the next update, is the lack of regional options for trending topics. Which clients have everyone else been using?
I use Snaptu for Twitter access on my phone, so far I've found it to be the app that works the best on my Sony Ericsson.
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