AFTER A 30K on Twitter, I thought I'd ask Google, "What is Twitter?" I got birds. So then I scrolled to the bottom of the first page of results and I got Simply Zesty's answer. In his post, Niall Harbison challenged readers to summarise their answer in a few words. I can: RTi. Twitter is Real Time information for me. That doesn't mean it's the public timeline that newbies see when they glance at the trending topics or stream of information on the front page of Twitter.com. After 33,333 tweets (on my main account), I have figured out that Twitter is worth my time if I manage its flow. So I manage by lists. I manage by time which means I shift a lot of my Twitter time onto newsfeeds and alerts. That means if someone is saying something I have deemed important, I get the information pushed to me relatively quickly via email or via the iOS alert system. I use Boxcar on iOS 4.3.2 and its bells, chimes and foghorns serve up an assortment of social networking alerts that help me through the day. I also subscribe to business intelligence by setting up tag alerts for venues, events, destinations, speakers and nobs.
Niall Harbison -- "What exactly is Twitter?" on the Simply Zesty blog, January 14, 2011.
By the way, I am topgold on Twitter.
