Microblogging: Twitter

I have had major reservations about Twitter. I have never been interested in 'joining the tweeted conversation' because I assumed that I would have to wade through so much drivel to find anything of interest or worth. This is without even considering it as a tool to be used for my professional life.

Having created a twitter account in our second week of classes I have found it hard to motivate myself to really explore and actively use it. My buddy Emily had to run through what @ and # were in class and show me how to RT etc. Her enthusiasm and pithy definition of it:

Twitter: a postmodern, organic convergence of the masses; facilitates digital pub conversation.

helped to scrape off some of the negativity I've smeared on Twitter. 

Last week in the tutorial I raised that I was concerned and confused by how my professional and private lives might co-exist under this one Web 2.0 tool. Ie would it be inappropriate to tweet to friends about things that interested us personally but would have no relevance for anyone else but would see anyway? 

I have discovered TweetDeck which I found out about reading a blogpost on whether Twitter is worth it. This sums up the supposed value of TweetDeck (from the same post)- 

 "Tweetdeck effectively allows you to screen out messages from people you don’t care so much about and create individual matrices of conversations, (ie lumping all personal contacts into one frame, all business contacts in another, all news sources into a frame and so on)."

I have downloaded TweetDeck and will explore in the following weeks whether this solves my worries about having Twitter be both a personal and professional tool. I'll keep you posted on trying to create a divide between the two, and wonder if anyone else is using TweetDeck?  Also I'll post a screen grab of it once I've fully understood its functionality so you can see how its layout is different to the twitter interface and see the public/private list columns.....

I was interested to see how well Twitter did as a note taking device during week 3's lecture using 

#isys1166 (John spoke about the value of collective note taking at conferences).  I contributed during the lecture but found I was quite slow at processing what John was saying so as to type it in the correct spot etc. Emily was excellent at summarising the lecture. In the tutorial following the lecture people had mixed views on the value of twitter as a collective note taker based on what was written in the lecture. Whatever your take you can get the general gist of what week 3's lecture was about for sure. I think in terms of conferences this would be a good way to document the lectures/symposiums but would rely on more than just a handful of people doing it (sounds like its already happening!).

But its only today after a conversation with my housemate/friend/academic who uses it do I feel as though I might have come to see its benefits. That has been because I haven't understood its real purpose (or at least a way to use Twitter that I would find relevant and beneficial). I though that it was a repurposing of the status update from Facebook and allowing people another platform for tweeting micro parts of their life - eg. going out to get the paper and milk. Now I see it as a more impersonal way to keep up to date with interesting organisations, people, events and topics. My friend Rob was saying that he followed, during the last American Presidential election, noted commentators (around 90!) from both sides of the fence to come to terms with how the pre-election race was unfolding. This allowed him to access information well ahead of it being printed in newspapers or reported on newscasts. Once over he un-followed all of these commentators. So in this way Twitter acts in a more fluid way where who/what you follow changes when your interests do (hence it being more of an impersonal tool).

He also mentioned that he RT articles or webpages of interest mainly to serve as an archiving device. He can look back through his tweets to find these again. He tweets maximum once or twice a week so looking back over his tweets wouldn't be a very arduous task. I am guessing that for a very active tweeter this would be too time consuming to do.

So I've learnt that Twitter can be used -

• to follow or to learn more about an isolated event or topic
• as a form of bookmarking pages/bogs/articles sourced from the web where tweets become your archive. 
• you can follow and un-follow people and institutions according to your interests at any given time

I will now be paying closer attention to library/information management organisations (eg ALIA, SLV, Library of Congress...) and people to see whether I can get a feeling for where the information management profession is at right now. 

I will focus on the more public aspect of Twitter (not the private/friend one) and see whether I can use it to my advantage! 

Thanks for reading, E