I joined Twitter…
…nearly two months ago, and in the meantime I already try to bring it into our IT department as communication tool

This said, you can imagine I am quite amused about Twitter and see big potential with it for certain areas. What I like about Twitter is, when compared to for example Facebook, it only consists of messages. Like a message board. You do not really care about people’s personal profile – the value is in what they tweet.

So here comes also the first negative aspect.
If you follow someone, you get all his/her messages to your “timeline” (Twitter defines a timeline as a list of messages you are following, the most used is probably the ones which collects all posts from the people you follow). This includes good things, but also nonsense that you wouldn’t mind not having read. Fortunately each message is limited to 140 characters…

Twitter vs. Facebook?
What I also recognized after I joined Twitter was, that there are not yet many people I personally know that have an account (compared to about 150 friends I have on Facebook). I guess, this thing just did not yet hit Switzerland as it probably did in the United States or other some other countries with lots and lots of people twittering.
One of the problems may be, that people don’t see the clue behind Twitter. It’s not usual to hear someone say “Why should I post on Twitter, when I have a status message in Facebook?”. Well, Twitter is not Facebook, as I already stated at the beginning of this post. In my opinion, Twitter messages “should” contain 140 characters of valuable and interesting information. Something you want to share not only with other people, but probably also archive for yourself to lookup later. To write a new post to Twitter, you think twice (well, it’s recommended) before you hit “Send”, unlike on Facebook where typos and strange grammatics in your status update doesn’t matter.
As you have only your posts on Twitter to tell stuff to ohter people, you should treat each post with the according care (don’t hesitate to delete a post to fix typos and repost it again).

So, what is it really?
I also want to use Twitter as a communication platform to not only give information to others, but also get help on topics I am dealing with. May it be technical stuff (“What Mindmapping Software can your recommend?“, “What Twitter application for OSX is best?“) or anything else (“How should I travel to Malaysia?“) – and the responses will be amazing, most of them you’ll receive within minutes.

Private vs. Public Twitter-Profile
When I started twittering, I put my profile on private so only people I allowed to could follow my posts. But recently I made the step to go public – because otherwise what I described above will barely work Unfortunately with that step also came real-man-Spam. This are people I wouldn’t follow in a houndred years, because they simply just tweet nothing I would like to read. But they follow me for any reason I cannot understand. Fortunately, there is a little trick to kick them, if you really feel the need for it.

Twitter Clients
Twitter is quite big in the meantime; this I realised when I was confronted with the question “Which Twitter client to use on my iPhone? Which one on my Mac?”. There are already tons of solutions out there in the net. By now, I seem to have found my applications of choice: TweetDeck for iPhone (also available as Desktop Application) and Seesmic Desktop for my Mac. They are usually Adobe AIR based. But you can of course also use just the Twitter Website to post and read.
I also activated a web-service, Twitterfeed.com, that is looking up my Blog regularly and directly tweets any new posts with my Twitter account – this is quite handy and saves me some time.

Twitter’s value for business teams
As I wrote in the introduction to this post, I am trying to convince my boss that Twitter might be a valuable tool for the communication inside our IT department. Unfortunately I did not find any best-practice business cases that analysed this situation. So I decided to do one my own, based on my personal experiences and some rare information I did find in the internet. (Results will be published in my Blog in August 2009)
Because it consists of short messages, it would be an interesting approach to establish a new communication platform inside our team. But one of the most critical points will be, that it must be accepted and used by the people.

Me for myself, I will continue to tweet with my private account and hope to increase my Twitter network with more interesting people. Feel free to follow me @oliverattweetin