Hi folks. I just added my Twitter feed (the feed will always show my latest 5 posts) to the sidebar near the top of my page. For the most part, these are my 1-liner ideas as they occur to me. Some of ideas the I post on twitter may later appear in a blog post where I have plenty of room to do them justice.
One of the things that stops me from doing some blog posts is that the idea is either too short or too involved. Now I have a place to put my quick insights, opinions and finds.
Lately, I've been surfing the social web. These are the sites that take advantage of exciting social web and web 2.0 concepts like friends, groups, ratings and comments. The top one at the moment is Twitter. I like following the thoughts of smart and interesting people who are interested in some of the same things I am.
If you are going to use Twitter as an information source, all you need to do is find people whose thoughts and discoveries you want to follow. A good way to do that is to use TweetScan or Summize to find people who are engaged with some of the things you are.
If you just bought an iPhone, you'll probably want to search for the word iPhone. That sort of thing.
Oh, you'll want to get yourself a free Twitter account, of course.
The second thing you can do with a Twitter account is to post your own thoughts and discoveries in 140 character blurbs. You can include URLs by typing or pasting them in.
You'll want a Twitter client if you get more serious about it just because then you have a more powerful tool at your disposal. I'm using and enjoying Twhirl on my Mac these days.
As far as what to post, the rule that unless you are only trying to communicate with close friends, don't post about the mundane things you are doing, is a good one. If you are going to watch or finished watching a movie and can add some interesting comment about it that's good. You can really post whatever you want. Maybe just type something in for now.
Later on, if you enjoy writing to an audience, you'll be thinking of them when you write and that will guide what to post. If you use Twitter professionally or want to build up your blog readership, this could start feeling like work. That's OK in those contexts, but otherwise, have fun with what you want to do and if something seems like a good share, share it.
This really wasn't meant to be an introduction to Twitter, but I wanted to explain what the Twitter posts are doing on my blog page and while writing, thought of a few tips for those of you who are interested in what Twitter is all about.