Twitter

Today I (finally) became a Twitter addict. This was one service I have not used at all until today. I failed to see how and why is it useful to read someone's posts in real-time. And I, kinda, still do.

However, while hooking up with some trance DJs, I found a world I have not seen so far. There were sites that distribute music, photos, communication, and news, all meshed together in a way. These people all used Twitter to post updates, and these other sites for media attachments to Twitter messages. So I created an account and started following them. 

What was quite important in the decision to go with Twitter, is that it is very easy to link Twitter posts to both Facebook AND Google Buzz. I have two groups of friends on those two networks and these groups are almost mutually exclusive. Now, with one post on Twitter I can post to both Facebook and Buzz at the same time, without any additional effort. In Facebook, the easiest way is to add Twitter application and allow it to post to your wall. Buzz allows linking Twitter as the source, it is that easy. There is also link to LinkedIn social network.

Another cool thing, that I still haven't found in either Facebook or Buzz, is that one can search any person's public feed. This was one of the main reasons I used blogs - they were searchable and were a sort of a diary that I could refer to both in terms of time of posting and the content inside. Now I can do the same with Twitter. So many Facebook posts fade away never to be seen again. Some of them I was looking for in order to refer friends to but could not find a way to search for them ever again. The same happened with Buzz posts. With Twitter, one can both post to other social networks *and* search the posts for those useful links and tips. 

This, in effect, will cause less posts on the blogs, I guess. Blogs are now looking like more static content holders. Something similar to web pages of the last century. I still find blog posts useful for longer text content, stories, images, and so on. Tweets could simply point to these stories with a short description.

Another cool feature is a permanent link to the tweet. Guess I'm into discovering the good side of web 2.0 where services finally talk to each other.

There are also RSS feeds with updates, replies, profile, searches. And it also works the other way around. One can link to any blog and have  Twitterfeed tweet any updates to the blog with the link to the post. Awesome! Twitterfeed also links to Facebook and a few other services. Now you can have automatic updates from your blogs all the way through to your social networks. Scary! And very practical, at the same time. :)

One thing to investigate is the usage of lists. I wonder if and how to best divide different topics/tags. I do a lot of posts for IT topics, some related to finance, some related to ordinary lifestyle issues, etc. There's probably no use of mixing these in the same stream.
Quick glance to Help section on Twitter shows that there are #hashtags that can be used to easily search for related posts on a certain topic.
Searches can also be saved for later reuse. Advanced search allows for some more complex syntax and filtering.

Lists are useful because one does not need to follow another user in order to see their tweets. Lists are a good way to categorize others' posts but not link to all of them and see the tweets on one's main page.