Twitter is an interesting beast — social application? — tool? When I first tried it out a few months back, I couldn’t really see the point (for me), partly because I didn’t quite get it: what was I supposed to do with it?
The first obvious use was “waving” — letting everyone else (your “followers”) know what you were up to at any given moment. I think this was the original intention/design goal behind Twitter. Fair enough, but not for me. You need to have friends for that to be useful. 
Looking at it, I get the impression that some (many?) users are using Twitter for social bookmarking, letting others know what interesting things they stumbled upon. (Oops!) OK, but, I thought, why would you want to use that when you already have an account with del.icio.us (or Digg; or StumbleUpon; or whatever)? And in truth, Twitter is not really as useful as those other tools for bookmarking.
Twitter really is designed for more ephemeral notifications, so good, I guess for the quick-and-dirty “look at this” kind of message, and its probably better for that than delicious, which is more about permanent bookmarking. Twitter also has some nice mobile phone integration, allowing addition of notes by SMS, and receiving of updates on your phone. Good for those who must keep in touch, and excellent I dare say for today’s “road warriors”.
But six months ago, I wasn’t interested in all that, so … another dead account.
Or so I thought. Recently, I’d been thinking about how we might more easily manage our library web site “news” items, and wanted to be able to feed them directly to the home page from somewhere. The way we manage news now doesn’t lend itself to RSS, and is a pain to update. In one of those ah-ha moments, I realised that Twitter may be perfect for this.
What I have in mind is a Twitter account for the library (with a number of staff having the password). Brief news items (with links to more detailed pages if necessary) would then be posted to Twitter by those staff — not so that users can follow through Twitter, but … ta da! .. so that we can use our RSS feed script to add the feed to our home page. (I wrote a simple AJAX script a while back which will take any RSS feed and write it into a web page as dynamic content.) So … we already have everything we need to make this work, except for that Twitter account — which is there for the asking.
Cool huh?
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