The Usefulness of Twitter, Part 2
Twitter Searches in Seesmic
In The Usefulness of Twitter, I talked a bit about the useful of Twitter concerning finding great product reviews, getting product support, and finding communities of interest. All of this is done through saving Searches.
I want to extend this concept, as I am discovering Twitter is also making self-learning easier for me. I have found by saving Searches on the software I use that I get a lot of links to great blogs and tutorials, and tips for using software. As a big fan of online tutorials, I decided to create a Search called tutorials. I skim this Search, looking for keywords of interest that direct me to tutorials in my areas of interest. Not only software tutorials come up, but tutorials in other areas of interest as well.
The screen shot on the right is of my saved Searches. A lot of people say they don’t have time for Twitter. They don’t want to have to read through a bunch of posts to find just a few nuggets of useful information. I don’t either! The idea of saved searches is that they filter out the noise of no interest to you, and I don’t know any Twitter fanatic who actually reads every post. Save a Search, and then skim through the list quickly for posts of interest. With each post being less than 140 words each, this is easy-peasy to do.
I want to end this blog with tips for squeezing the most usefulness out of Twitter in the least amount of time:
- Find the right Twitter reading tool (don’t use the Twitter web page): Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, Twitter Tools. Ask for recommendations from Twitter users through a tweet!
- Save Searches in your areas of interest, using the tool of your choice.
- Create communities of interest to you through hash tag words, and look for other communities with Search.
- Note Twitter is one of my saved Searches. You’ll get great Twitter tips with this Search.
- Ask questions in your Tweets, and you are sure to get responses quickly.
- Give back to the Twitter community. Posting tweets teaches you the usefulness of Twitter.
- Think of Twitter as a multiverse of communities, a variety of social networks, not a whirlpool of noise.
Enjoy!!!
@DanaNourie
July 6th, 2009 at 2:46 am
I think Twitter defeats the purpose of whistling
July 29th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Thanks for the pointer, Dana. I hadn’t seen these Twitter entries… I am finding the same things you are, even tho I am using Twitter to do other things. To borrow a phrase from today’s business news; I think we are successful with our searches because the Twitter community is just too big to fail.
However, I can’t help thinking that Usenet did most of these things more efficiently, ten years ago. Usenet newsgroup concept is still very, very efficient for many purposes — it’s too bad the Usenet community has shrunk so much over the last eight years.
milt