I signed up for Twitter a couple of months ago, made a few posts, and pretty much abandoned it. If you’re not familiar with it, Twitter is a micro-blog. You make posts of 140 characters or less. I don’t follow many people and I’m not sure what value this whole idea has. I know that NASA used it recently to keep people up-to-date on Mars/Phoenix. That seems like a pretty interesting use. I have to believe that an interplanetary mission is far more interesting that most people’s day.
Last week I decided I was going to write down what I did all day for five straight days. Every 1/2 hour, or so, I will jot down a note about what I’m doing or what I’ve done over the last half hour. I think I have a good idea what I do all day, but I want some objective evidence to see if my perceptions match reality. I was thinking I need a little program that popped up a userform every 1/2 hour for me to type my note. Then I thought that Twitter might work well for this. It won’t pop up a reminder, but at least I could make my notes from anywhere.
I’m not encouraging you to follow me on Twitter. It will be excruciatingly boring, I can assure you. However, if you ever wondered it what you’re day would be like if you had chosen accountancy as a career, well this should be right up your alley. http://twitter.com/dkusleika
I see people doing some neat things with Twitter, like getting alerts from their security cameras, having their houseplants notify them when they need to be watered, and getting traffic updates, but I still don’t get why I should use Twitter for the basic service. I just don’t see the appeal to reading all these “Tweets” about peoples’ daily lives.
I’d like a Twitter fan to tell me what I’m missing.
Re: “It will be excruciatingly boring”
That won’t matter if you make sure to include lots of references to sex, cars and load explosions.
The movie version could make you famous. All you will need is an exciting title.
Dick’s Twitters (different than Dick’s Clicks) have cured my insomnia!
Dick, you need to twitter a sub-140-character joke every once in a while to keep me interested.
I’ve read with great interest Debra’s recent blogs on tracking “Excel” on Twitter. Taking the personal diary idea one step further, Twitter could be a market research tool.
However, when trying to explore his further, I ran into this: “Tracking is an SMS or IM only feature that allows you to receive all twitters that match a word you’re tracking”, “IM is temporarily unavailable while we work on making it better.” – let me know if I am missing something…
Lots of people over here telling us that Twitter is the next big thing. Did get a decent username for once
http://twitter.com/excelguy
and found that excruciatingly boring in public is still excruciatingly boring. Oh well. Hand over the userform.
Hmmm… How to go to mars … 140 words or less.
140 characters or less? It’s like high tech haiku.
Here’s a sub-140 character joke for your Twitter.
A man & a boy walking in the woods at night. Boy says I’m scared. Man says, You’re scared? I’m the one who has to walk out of here alone.
Mike – Dick wants to know if you work on commission.
i didnt get it to start with either
but then i found twhirl – a messenger type application that displays all your tweets and the people you are following in an application on your desktop
makes it make sense – now its like you are in a huge groupo conversation and you can chime in when you want to
hope that helps
go to http://www.twhirl.org
cheers
Thomas, you can do your research through Twitter Search: http://search.twitter.com/
Cheers, looking into both http://search.twitter.com/ and Twitter clients now.
Hm, I should tweet this: ad hoc workgroups, as Dick’s help tweets demonstrate, seem another intriguing application of twitter. May require better search and semantics, though.
I use twitter and have found a number of uses for it – like getting recommendations for a restaurant.
However, I thought you might be interested in http://www.ididwork.com/ for keeping track of your tasks. I just started using it last week and I really love it – you can tag and set time for what you accomplished. I found I spend way more time that I thought fielding questions and troubleshooting at work. Ididwork lets you export to a spreadsheet and get a graphical representation of your tags. It’s pretty new and I already sent them a number of suggestions – but I think it has lot of potential.
Oh and P.S. I really love your Excel tips
[…] were more Excel Twitters than usual this week, and some of that was thanks to Dick Kusleika, who decided to record all his activities in Twitter. I didn’t include those — you can […]