The latest shiny new toy in the social networking area seems to be twitter. If you haven’t heard of twitter, think of it as really small blog posts (140 char limit) and the ability to follow other people’s ‘tweets’.
I’ve spent the last couple of months participating in twitter. I will post some updates myself but mostly I listen/read what other people are saying. At first look, there is a lot of junk on twitter. I really don’t care that people are going to sleep or are waking up. However, what I do find very interesting is listening to what people are saying about topics that are of interest to me; things like ‘eclipse’ or ‘equinox’.
The irony, is that I don’t actually use twitter to listen, I use a search service called summize. Summize makes twitter useful for me. I can listen to what people are saying about eclipse. It has a translate option, so I can even listen to what people are saying in Japanese or German. I find this pretty cool.
So what are people saying about Eclipse? Well today some people are saying nice things about Eclipse and SVN support, someone is struggling with GMF, another person seems to be learning RCP, and other are just having problems. In general, I am just listening but I also make contacts with new people, like jeervin, who just proposed the Eclipse Monkey project.
The other way to find stuff is to follow people. Finding people to follow is not that obvious but the twubble service allows you to see who other people, that you know, are following. It is a good way to get going.
Finally, twitter is very unreliable. It goes down a lot and people like to tweet about twitter being unreliable. However, if you are into scalability stuff, twitter is looking for system engineers.
I guess you can consider me a twitter convert. It is another channel to connect with your community. It will be interesting to see how it evolves over the next 12 months. btw, if you are on twitter, don’t forget to follow me.
