Agility Loop

I have noticed recently that several of my friends have started getting Twitter accounts.  However, I have also noticed that the same folks have not tweeted anything, or have asked me "What is the point of Twitter?". It's a fine question.  One that I actually ask myself. Twitter is one of the newer trendy online services that allows you to keep in contact with your social web.  Users can post tweets (short messages) up to 140 characters in length for their world to see.  You can choose "follow" other users to see their updates, and of course others can choose to "follow" you.  Tweets are public by default, but you can choose to keep these private only to those who follow you. So that brings us back to the original question.  What's the point? To me, the importance of Twitter is the concept it has introduced, less the service itself.  Twitter popularized the concept of micro-blogging.  The idea is that Twitter gives you a forum to tell the world about something you found, a useful web resource, or what you had for breakfast.  So instead of writing a full blog post, or sending a group email, you can post a very quick short message declaring that the eggs you just had were too runny.  I actually do use it in the morning to check up on anything new going on in the world of PKI.   I run  TweetDeck (a twitter client, there are literally dozens of them) which has the capability to store searches.  I browse through the Twitterverse for new items related to PKI (b/c I'm a PKI geek) and post items that I may think are relevant. The real problem that I have with Twitter is that trying to keep up with others users and relevant information is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.  Some Twitter users literally post tens or not hundreds of tweets a day.  If you start doing the math of how many updates that is to sort through, the numbers are staggering. Instead, to keep up with my social web, I actually use Facebook's micro-blogging service.  Yup, Facebook's status updates are more or less a micro-blogging service.  Most just don't really refer to it as such b/c Facebook offers so much more.  However, every time you post on Facebook about what your baby just did you are micro-blogging.  What's more is that Facebook is smart enough to loosely define an inner circle for you so you don't always see everyone's updates, just the ones it thinks you care about.  Then, you can further define what updates you see by creating groups. What you can do (and what I do) is have your Facebook status updates automatically become Tweets for your Twitter account.  That way anything you post on Facebook will automatically make it to the Twitterverse.  There are several ways to do this, and so far I haven't found a real easy way.   Per instructions found on the FriendFeed blog, I actually ended up creating a free FriendFeed account that pulls updates from other services (including Facebook) and posts them to Twitter.

1. Create a FriendFeed account.
2. Click on "settings" in the upper right hand corner.
3. Click on add/edit next to "services".
4. Click Facebook and add your account.
5. Click on "settings" again and then "twitter publishing preferences" and configure for your twitter account.

I know...a bit of clunky workaround.  You can also add other services to FriendFeed and they will update your Twitter account.  I have added Facebook, LinkedIn, Picasa, Twitter, Yelp, and Delicious.