Gareth Howell - Agdon Associates

I've been using twitter for a while now, so it's time to take stock.

I subscribed ages ago but after playing with it for a bit, put it to one side as I couldn't really see it's purpose. That started to change at this year's Lotusphere, where there was a pseudo-user called lotusphere2008. I kept an eye on that using twitterberry and contributed a bit, but it was still a sideline in the social networking universe as far as I was concerned.

That changed after a I read an article (which I can't find now) that gave a really good use case for twitter. In this use case, twitter was positioned as a replacement for casual office gossip. You know the sort of thing: you are sitting working at your desk and you can hear others chatting in the background. Most of the time you ignore them, but occasionally they say something that prompts you to join in.

Now in our case (elastictime) this can be a valuable replacement for the fact that we are virtual and don't have an office. If we (i.e. me and my co-workers) drop the occasional non-specific comment into twitter (e.g. I just tweated that "It's hammering down here", or earlier I tweated that I off into town to post a letter) then I am dropping digital bread crumbs that build a partial picture of what's going on. Similarly, if I see that Ian is reading a particular article and I have also read the same article, we can chat about the content.

Like most companies, we use instant messaging to support 1-1 chats and the occasional group chat. I see twitter as a lower level background information feed.

Once I got that model, I started to use twitter a lot more and now tweat regularly throughout the day. I use Twhirl most of the time (unlike Sametime or AOL I can have Twhirl running on multiple machines simultaneously which suits my working environment). I also follow a number of external non-personal feeds: examples are bbctms (Text Match Special), bbcnews, bbcpolitics, marsphoenix, macrumours, and bbc5live).

I now see twitter as an important addition to the tools that reduce the occasional sense of isolation created when one works from home. This makes it all the more infuriating when twitter goes off the air! It has to be said that twitter is a bit flaky at the moment and there have been occasions when I have been tempted to throw it out in favour of (say) friendfeed. I haven't, mainly, for two reasons: no offline tool support for friendfeed yet and the absence of the non-personal feeds.