Twitter is a young shoutbox solution, great for emptying you mind and generally shouting in the forest. I went to look at it when it launched and my initial reaction was pure horror, but I checked back in today and signed up. The Public Timeline is still pure mayhem, but it sure is cute mayhem, and quite entertaining for a minute or two, and who could ask more from random encounters with online strangers?
The mind is a terrible thing to waste … on thinking
But now over to what make it work for me (and I guess everyone else):
Twitter is great for emptying your mind when no one else is online. Like right now, when most people are celebrating Easter, and the rest of the family is sleeping, and I have a thought about anything that would be nice to share, you can just post it (I use the firefox sidebar plugin) and be done with it, and go back to doing whatever. I don’t have to check MSN Messenger to see if anyone is online, and pester them with random rants, I can just dump it on Twitter, and I someone reads it, great, if someone likes it, wonderful, but if not, who cares!
I also use their little Flash Badge to include it on my blog, in case someone is foolish enough to want to read it, if not, it looks great, it works better than a picture and some boring bio.
Twitter and productivity
Screw productivity, let’s have fun! That said, I have been trying some tricks to help myself focus better the last few months, like working more from home to avoid some of the distractions. According to The Twitter Curve article Twitter is just another distraction, and a pretty big one. Well, perhaps, but only if you actually read what other people write (but who would, that is just crazy, stop it! :)). But since one of the tricks in Getting Things Done is emptying you head, Twitter has great potential. Instead of writing a todo about some idea you have for an article, or talking up a storm on IM, you can simply purge yourself on Twitter. Think of it as meditation, acknowledge that the thought is there, write it down, and move on. Because if the thought was really important, it will come back to you later anyway, or you can find it on Twitter.com.
(PS: I only twittered once while writing this post.)
(PPSS: Ok, so I twittered twice while writing this post.)
Read this: The Twitter Curve + Is twitter too good
Update 02.04.2008:
Twitter is getting press in Norway, lately by jounalist Jan Omdahl at dagbladet.no , who asks if Twitter is the new Facebook. There are over 1 million Norwegian Facebook users, but currently, by the etimates made by NRKbeta using twitdir, the number of users who has registered as Norwegian is a measly 500. But there are probably more, and judging by the number of new people following me, it is about to explode. Cool!
You can also read my «one year post», it is a commentary titled : I have … followers?
