I have been posting on Adam Eason Inner Circle forum about twittering. It is very hard to explain quite how useful this technology is. There are some people on there who do a lot and I mean a lot of studying and sourcing the information they want. Google and Wiki are OK’ish for static data but there is a much more fluid nature to information now. Searching for relevant information via that old search method is slow, dry, tedious and boring.
Since my entry into ‘Twitterdom’ I can honestly say that I have learned more from others in a fun, social way and been recommended to pinpoint accurate sources of information for answers to my questions. Sometimes within seconds of asking around.
The thing about twittering is it’s brevity and flexibility. And if you get things set
up right your twitters get updated on your Facebook, WordPress blog and other social
media anyway if that is what you want.
So I find a cool blog – I put a reference to it on my Twitter (one line
- 5 seconds work) All my followers are immediately aware of the post
and can check out. I will also have posted it onto Delicious (social
networking site – another 5 secs) OK it might not be that urgent to get
to a blog – but yesterday evening as I was just casually looking
through some blogs up on my Twhirl (a desktop application that feeds
you tweets from people you are following) I saw that one of my IM gurus
was just about to go live on UStream which is a great interactive TV
style site. Unless he was recording it – it is a one off – so I was
able to go straight to it and catch it. Brill.
Re-twittering is even easier and is done in 1 second max. That is when somebody who I am following sends some really great piece of information that I think my followers will be interested in. Within Twhirl (desktop application for receiving tweets) there is a forward type navigation button – click that – Done.
The really
clever sites and tools out there are aggregating everything. Through
twittering yesterday I learned about these great sites which pull
together so much information in a compact and classified way. Content
Research becomes a doddle.
http://alltop.com/
http://popurls.com/
http://www.powerset.com/
I hang about with the gurus and developers to see what is emerging.
The whole emphasis at this time is about getting a handle on the
extraordinary amount of information out there and taming it so that
people can find efficiently what they are looking for. Google isn’t
very up to date or good at doing that. It also has too many commercial
reasons for doing the things in a way that doesn’t always help people
find the best information.
And as up to date as the sites I have listed above are – how about this site for knowing what is being discussed right now.
If you go to http://summize.com
and put in a search term – for arguments sake ‘hypnosis’ – it will show
you real time who is actually twittering about hypnosis today – right NOW!!. You can
eaves drop on their conversation – with their permission of course.
From summize you go to http://quotably.com
and you can actually then follow the threads of the person you have
found discussing hypnosis – and of course there is usually a link to
their blog etc etc.
‘Mind Blowing’
It is all about working incredibly efficiently that is the secret to
getting so much done on the Net. I didn’t have to look for those sites
to add to this posting – they were all in my Google Notebook – which
stores in categorised way – snippets that I pick up from the web.
There are many other places that I could have found those links
because of the way I use social bookmarks.
Hey I love this stuff – it is awesome – and far from taking up more time it has saved me hours of digging in search engines.
I have just thought about it – I can’t remember the last thing I looked up on Google. I use all the other great things on Google – like Google Notebook and Google Docs for sharing data on-line. But no – not the search side.
I would love to see you twittering – and if you get into it I think you
will enjoy it. It can actually save you time if you go about it right.
You wait till I tell you about Tumblr and Friend Feed!
Another time!
