I still can't quite understand the broad appeal of Twitter, so I decided it's time to start my own full-immersion Twitter experiment, and if you've been using Twitter for a while, I'd appreciate your help: what's your favorite Twitter client and which Twitter-related apps or services would you consider must-haves? Any other advice on how to get the most out of Twitter?

Many thanks for your tips and suggestions!

Jochen.

Hi Jochen,

There are a lot of folks who consider Twitter the perfect venue for event chatter. Sort of a 'pulse-taker' for a crowd's mood at an event.

On an individual basis, some folks use Twitter as a way to find out what friends are up to without the back and forth commitment of an IM session (though you can have the back-and-forth in Twitter too, if you wish.)

Sometimes notable opinion drivers use twitter as a less-formal way to offer thoughts for easy dissemination to large groups of people. (For instance, check out: Tim O'Reilly's Twitter Feed

I've found that there are a lot of good arguments for Twitter use, even commercial applications.

Companies venturing into using Twitter as a PR tool, though, may not always be aware of the time investment involved with Twittering -- best done with a live person at the controls.

Twitter's best use is for spontaneous, informal, chat provoking thoughts, especially at an event.

Let us know how your experiment goes!

Hey Laura,

thanks for your reply.

Your comments confirm one of my initial impressions of Twitter, namely that it is surprisingly many things to many people. I'm not so sure, yet, what it will eventually be for me, but I don't feel like abandoning that platform anytime soon. It's been too much fun already.




Hmmm, maybe something along the lines of a blog post about "My first 90 days with Twitter?"


Greetings,

Jochen.

Jochen, here's another cool example of Twitter use -- courtesy of Brady Forrest of O'Reilly's Radar.

He hooked our Get Satisfaction customer service messaging system in to a service called Overheard which allows O'Reilly to scan for and answer company related Twitters via our Get Satisfaction account. (Disclosure: OATV has an investment in GetSatisfaction.)

This is true pulse-taking, and allows us to answer questions and comments out there about O'Reilly that we might not otherwise have heard.

I have to admit I was hard-pressed to think of an example of good Twittering outside of an event venue, and here is the perfect example! And with a corporate application, yet!

Check it out:
Get Satisfaction and Overheard on O'Reilly: Don't Miss a Tweet!

And here's a post Brady made about setting this up:

Brady Forrest's Radar.oreilly.com post

http://getsatisfaction.com/oreilly/overheard