I know we’ve gotten a bit Twitter crazy here on ZNF lately, so I promise this will be our last post… for a little awhile, at least. With that in mind, I cramming several Twitter topics into this one article: software, tools, and etiquette.
As a quick refresher: Twitter is a web service, born from a brainstorm, to provide and peruse real-time updates. How you use it is up to you. I’ve found it valuable as a “micro blogging” tool. 140 characters is often sufficient to issue a brief opinion and/or link to an interesting tech-related story. It’s also been handy as a means of communicating both privately and publicly with readers, blogging peers, and PR professionals. In fact, Twitter replaced SMS for me at CES this year. Twitter’s usage is rapidly accelerating and they’ve just landed $35 million in Series C financing.
Desktop Twitter Software
While Twitter may have humble beginnings as a simple web page, their open API has led to all sorts of clever clients and integration. What actually inspired this topic was Scoble’s Twhirl versus TweetDeck desktop application showdown. He prefers the screen-encompassing nature of TweetDeck to follow and interact with over 64,000 people. I don’t follow nearly as many and prefer something with a smaller visual footprint. For many like me, the IM-esque client Twhirl is the answer. But I’ve even found that to be inefficient and a distraction. I’ve pretty much settled on running Twitter.com in a dedicated Firefox tab when I want to fully engage, and use the TwitterFox Firefox plugin to check in while preoccupied with other tasks – it’s ever-present, yet remains inconspicuous until called.
