About the title: I wanted to write a post & call it “10 trusted ways to Twitter Ninjadom” but that would have been linkbait! *wink wink* There are already dime-a-dozen posts about Twitter but still I couldn’t resist this! Hope somebody finds some value out of this… 
Twitter for me is blog, IM, SMS, social bookmarking & news ticker — all rolled into one. I don’t think this was the way it was envisioned to be but guess nobody is complaining!
From dabbler to devout fanboy:
I heard about Twitter for the first time in early 2007 & signed up. To answer the question – “What are you doing?”, frequently, seemed too narcissist a thing to do for me (it helped that hardly any of my friends were on Twitter at that time!) Later I read that it was growing rapidly but was still having uptime issues with blogs like Techcrunch frequently questioning its architecture. Meanwhile, I had signed up for FriendFeed & was there lurking. I found a lot of cool stuff with some very involved & intelligent discussion going on on various topics but found it difficult to jump in and participate. Late 2008 & Twitter was growing, the architecture issues seemed to be sorted out & Mumbai 26/11 happened. That was when I really got hooked to the medium & I have abandoned FriendFeed for some time now! Another casualty is the Google Reader shared items. I find more value in sharing stuff with my followers in Twitter than my Google friends (FriendFeed can pull my Google Reader shared items & post to Twitter but I prefer direct posting).
Twitter seems to provide me a way to:
- meet interesting people sharing similar ideas
- ask the occasional question
- have a timeline for what i have been doing over time
- share interesting & current stuff
C’mon, where else can you casually chat up with SRK? (On his blog maybe, but does he have one? And not everybody has the nerve/time/patience to write a blog these days). The USP is its simplicity — making the entry barrier very low. Also, unlike RSS, there is no point in trying to keep up. It’s much better to drink from the firehose (although I do RSS subscribe to people to who’s tweets I don’t wanna miss)
The Ways I’ve seen people using it (other than answering – what they are doing?):
- Public IM – People chat with others tweeps almost as if they are on IM. The followers get to spy on these tweets & in the process, could also stumble upon somebody interesting to follow.
- Marketing tool – People like Guy Kawasaki & Leo Babauta use Twitter (from what I’ve seen lately) to publicize their webpage/blog by posting links, asking for suggestions etc.
- PR handler – Large corporates are using Twitter as a PR tool & as a way to capture the pulse of the Twitterati. e.g. Infosys
- Breaking news source – Twitter is the place where breaking news is first appearing with first person accounts, Twitpics taking the cake
- Means to share cool, useful stuff – The followers get to see all the interesting stuff that the tweeter dug up while surfing the Net
Other interesting aspects:
- Retweeting – I like retweeting since it’s an easy way to reshare a tweet which I think might be useful to my followers. It also gives credit to the original poster & gives me a chance to interact with that person.
- To reciprocate a ‘follow’ or not – Some people use tools like Socialtoo to autofollow their followers. This could be one way of not losing followers but I don’t do it. There is an interesting discussion here about this & I like what the author says. My ‘follow’ decision is usually based on whether the Tweeter is -
- Thought leader
- Celebrity
- IRL friend sharing interesting life tidbits
- having shared interests
- belonging to the same city (thus providing a local aspect to tweets)
- a news breaker
- plane damn interesting
Other than all this, the tweeter should have a good SNR ratio & there should be enough bandwidth in my Twitter stream to effectively listen! No point in superficially listening to somebody!
As an added bonus:
I guess that’s about what I wanted to say about that!
Twitter: Finally where less is more!
