Project 365 Day 308: Twitter

Lately I have found myself trying to explain what Twitter is and what it's good for to people who don't use it, and I understand that it's not obvious. I never quite understood what good it was either before I started using it. All I knew was that celebrities like Ashton Kutcher used Twitter to let everyone know what they had for dinner last night and other terribly important announcements.

When Conan O'Brien had his brief stint as host of The Tonight Show, he and his writers put this notion of celebrities posting useless updates to good comedic use by featuring a regular segment called Twitter Tracker in which actual Tweets (the short messages posted by people using Twitter) from celebrities about mundane everyday things were presented as if they were earth-shattering news items.

Since then I have become a regular Twitter user, mostly using my account to follow what other people are Tweeting. I have discovered the utility of Twitter through the following experiences:

• By following Conan O'Brien, I got a daily dose of his brand of humor, and found out the minute tickets went on sale for his comedy tour last summer. We got tickets shortly before they sold out.
• By following various Iowa State University related accounts, including CycloneFanatic for sports information, I have learned about player, coach, and university news as soon as its available.
• When Ames experienced the latest round of flooding recently, I searched for "Ames Flood" on Twitter to get up-to-the-minute information from the city's official account, as well as local newspapers and residents, on things like road closures, availability of bottled water, and safety of the tap water.
• Today, when a seemingly random error message started appearing in the web browsers of users who access the web site I work on for my job, a quick Twitter search revealed that it was a Microsoft Internet Explorer problem affecting many people around the world.

The last example is related to today's picture. I took a photo of some of the relevant Tweets about the Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 bug, which helped me avoid wasting hours of my time researching and troubleshooting a problem that was not related to our code. I tried searching on Google for the same information, but at the time no news websites, blogs, or other "normal" publishing sites had any information about the problem, including Microsoft's official websites. Twitter helped me be more efficient at my job today.

So in summary, Twitter is useful to me because information on any subject can be published by anyone around the world, and I can search through that information in real-time. Like the rest of the Internet, the barrier to entry is very low, so that means there is a lot of information of varying degrees of value to sift through, but search makes it easy to zero in on specific topics. Since each individual Tweet is short (140 letters), it's easy to scan through many messages looking for something of value.

I won't be posting hourly updates on my daily activities on Twitter though, since I haven't quite reached celebrity status yet, so if you want to know what I had for dinner last night, you'll have to go the old fashioned route. Send me an email.