vanderwal.net

Early this past summer I started playing with Twitter (then donning the moniker "twttr"). It drove me absolutely bonkers. I could not sort out how to stop my handful of friends from dumping their, "I had a gorgonzola cheese sandwich" into my SMS. I would be in a meeting or giving a presentation and my phone would vibrate with this micro-blogging nothingness of life status updates.

Since then I stopped pushing anything, but direct responses, to SMS or e-mail. This really made Twitter much better. But, then I was not peeking at it. In the past month or two I have had it running as a regular tab in my browser and it is much better, it does not scream for my attention, but acts more like me looking across a bar to see what my friends are doing. It is now a nice social space with quiet chatter.

Last week when I was in San Francisco I was using Twitter and Dodgeball, but found my friends in SF mostly using Dodgeball at night and I was mostly not in proximity (I only have one person in my DC network on Dodgeball). The Dodgeball demands to connect with Google account pushed me over from logging in, which is the last thing I want.

Twitter in SF worked wonderfully. I could state a meeting was shifted and announce I was going to get coffee and would find another person that wanted to join up to do the same. I found others doing the same and I would join them. I could also partake in cross continent chatter with friends.

This week I moved Twitter out to its own narrow (it needs to be even narrower - is there a Greasemonkey script to make it narrow) window. I keep it on my large monitor to my right, which is my social space (calendar, skype, YIM, AIM/iChat, and now Twitter). These are my social glancing applications and Twitter is a really nice compliment to the pack of Local InfoCloud tools, now that I have it set to match my expectations and desire for interruptions (or desire for minimal interruptions).