Sean Reiser

OK, about a year ago I joined twitter, where I'm not sure of the exact date I joined, I'm working backwards from my post Twitter: A week with a new toy. I figured it's time for a follow up post on how I've used twitter and what I've learned in the last year.

1. I have made a good number of friends via twitter some of whom I had minor connections with IRL some of whom I met via twitter. In some ways it reminds me of IRC back in the day for meeting new folks based on their random comments (of course twitter is not chat... we'll cover that later).
2. I have made a point of following some smart people who don't always feel the same way that I do about things. This has given me an opportunity to challenge my point of view on some important topics.
3. Twitter is an interesting way to receive first hand news reports. I found out about the steam pipe explosion at Grand Central last summer, and the earthquake in CA over the fall via Twitter. In both cases I had complete information before the traditional media outlets were reporting on it.
4. Firefighters were using twitter to help locate each other and pass information during the fires in CA. Municipalities and new outlets were letting people know what areas were safe using twitter.
5. I try to avoid following folks that are "collecting friends" and not providing interesting content. If you're following 20,000 people you're not listening to me, and if you're not providing interesting tweets, I have no incentive to follow you.
6. Where a lot of my twitter followers find my blog via a notification tweet, it is really not an effective method for pimping your blog / project. Twitter is about the relationships, if you only pimp yourself out on twitter, folks will drop you like a hot potato.
7. Where, at first glance twitter looks like a chat room, it's not. You make your twitter experience unique when you decide whom to follow. This is an important distinction, not everyone sees what you are seeing.
8. Because everyone's experience is different, rules of etiquette have not gone over well.
9. Twitter is not an effective medium to spam people. If someone starts to spam me, I can always unfollow.
10. The convenience of a defined social network is greater then the inconvenience of outages. As twitter has had it's growing pains you'd expect its competitors to take over. People always seem to come back to twitter, because that's where your friends are.
11. The ability to crunch away at an API has made twitter the success that it is. The ability to mash it up with other services such as flickr, google maps, or even autopost when I post a blog entry has been very powerful.