“Shut up about Twitter.”

Twitter is the service at the head of the microblogging movement. We’ve heard it all before. Twitter is over-hyped. It smacks too much of the-king-is-dead-long-live-the-king.

And there are days when I concur.

There’s an awful lot of rubbish to wade through – especially if you’re new to the service and haven’t yet defined the way you want to use it. As Dr. Brian Vartabedian at BetterHealth wrote this week:

You likely won’t have any idea about how to use Twitter when you first jump in. And that’s okay. You can’t understand it’s power until you reach a sweet spot of followers and cultivate relationships that have some history and meaning (in Twitter terms, of course). Ultimately you do want to think about connecting with those who will put you where you want to be – whether it’s just raising your profile as an author or specifically drawing patients for lapband surgery, or whatever.

What you have to realize is…

There’s no “right” way to use Twitter.

Actually, I was kind of horrified by the opinion at ReadWriteWeb recently that Twitter’s founders are compromising the progress of the service by not using it in the same manner as its power-users, and I thought that CEO Evan Williams’ reply was spot-on:

As you know, there are lots of different ways to use Twitter. ….I believe people will generally get more value out of Twitter by dropping the symmetrical relationship expectation and simply curating (WHAT A GREAT WORD TO USE!) their following list based on the information and people they want to tune in to.

Seriously.

Follow who you want. Read what you want. Tweet your heart out (with netiquette, of course) and respect the right of others to do so as well.

I mean, I used to think that Twitter was about reading every single tweet in my stream. In that spirit, I set my Chirpr (a Vista sidebar widget) to make the “canary” sound with every new update, and let’s just say that my technology-hating roommate must have thought I was raising birds in my room! (BTW. I just downloaded Tweetdeck and am lovin’ it.)

Then I had to decide that I already have Facebook to keep random tabs on what my friends and acquaintances are up to, but Twitter, in contrast, could be a great link to people and organizations I’m interested in professionally.

The latter is now how Twitter is useful for me (which is of course key) and I’ve also figured out where it fits into my daily routine without annoying the heck out of me. You just have to try it and see. But most people I know in real life are still skeptical, so I thought I would provide a few examples from my Twitter experience so far.

Quick examples (not limited to Med 2.0):

  • Apple WWDC. Fed up with RSS, I hadn’t touched by feeds labeled “tech” in weeks. I had no idea that Apple WWDC (Worldwide Developer’s Conference) began on June 8th. But a routine hashtag search for #googlewave alerted me to excited fanboys/girls of both, and subsequently to a live video stream of the event! Sweet!
  • A live surgery! I found out from the ChristianaCare Twitter account that they’ll be live-webcasting and -tweeting a knee-replacement surgery on June 30th. Will certainly be tuning in.
  • Gmail downtime. When my Gmail account went down, a search for #gfail was the fastest way to see if anyone else was experiencing the same problem without bothering my friends.
  • Hart House events. Hart House is the University of Toronto’s student life center/athletics facility. It maintains a great feed of events, including a free pancake breakfast in celebration of Bike Month.
  • BAHAHAHA! (As in, this is pithy entertainment!)
    “katy perry is the greatest waste of a great rack ever.”

So anyway, I’d love to hear about how other ordinary students use Twitter, especially if you’re in Toronto. Comment away.

Related posts:

  1. Featured Post: Twitter + Group Medical Visits = ?
  2. LibraryThing Early Reviewers + Collections
  3. Bant: A Stylish Diabetes iPhone App from Toronto’s University Health Network
  4. We’re All Still Jenny from the Block: An Exhortation to Local Hospitals

Tags: , , , , , ,