All a-Twitter

… thoughts for the uninitiated tweeter …

Twitter, Tweeting, Tweetchat, and Twerbose (my new favorite). It’s all the rage and has folks everywhere, well, all a-twitter.

I’m just getting my Twitter legs, but already I can see that it’s a pretty cool tool.

It took me a while to fully climb on board this latest and insanely popular networking train. I was among the many reluctant people who “don’t get it”, but still feel intrigued – or societally pressured – to find out what it’s about.

It can easily be seen as another time-waster, another thing on the to-do list, and for what purpose? And there’s the bit about “following” people, and they in turn following you, which basically means you can see what they’re up to via small word chunks. But really, besides friends and family, who honestly cares what I did today, or what I’m thinking or what I had for lunch?

Then folks began using it for business. Which made me wonder how anyone gets their work done between blogging, tweeting, linked-in-ing, facebook-ing, plaxo-ing and the scores of other online ways to connect.

Turns out though, it’s not the great intrusion I thought it might be. It’s actually a valid resource, as well as a way to expand contacts tremendously and easily. It’s a very open, uncomplicated place.

You can make short announcements, write brief words of wisdom, share a website, a book, a video – whatever is on your mind. You can use it to promote, learn, grab an idea. See what the President is up to. Receive inspiration. Chime in on tweetchats of interest. All very quickly. Because it caters to “soundbites” (small bits of info), it doesn’t take much time to update or to scour through others’ tweets.

Of course, you can ignore it, too. Up to you.

But one thing is for certain, tweeting is evolving. What started as a social mechanism has also become a business medium and a news medium. There are new uses being created by Twitter users all the time – which makes it feel very alive and adaptable.

Signing up is about as painless as it gets. Jumping in is a piece of cake. It’s what’s happening. And it’s actually pretty tweet.

http://twitter.com/saxtonstudio