The ICT Optimist

I have been “officially” on twitter as theICTOptimist for a while now but over the past few months I, after installing a decent client (Twirl), I have started to actually use it and find some value. The funny thing is that I still don’t see a lot of value in posting my minute by minute thoughts or activities on it but have found that as a follower of a number of organizations and people, its has great value for me. A few early experienced that make it real for me:

• I did not physically attend voicecon a few weeks ago but in addition to the voicecon web site and various online news stories, following a few folks who where there using twitter really filled in the blanks. Specifically abnerg (Abner Germanow, an analyst who I have known on and off for a decade), kenkamp (Ken Camp, a digital media consultant who I don’t think I have ever met), DaveMichels (dave Michels, an “telecoms and VOIP enthusiast” who I also don’t think I have ever met), and the official Voicecon twitter feed, all filled in the blanks on what was really going on. While I probably could have gathered a lot of what was twittered over time, the complement to the real time video or news was great and made for a more complete experience.
• I added the twitter feeds from a few of my favorite blogs and news sites. Specifically GigaOM and theRegister. What I found was that not only do I get the updates in real time but for the first time I am following some of the commentary. I traditionally did not bother to look at the comments of these or many sites as they require additional clicks and for the most part are a waste of effort given some of the silly comments that people make. When comments flow via twitter, the zero effort part of viewing them means I am much more likely to see them and occasionally the commentary is interesting.
• My colleague April Dunford, attended a conference on social media in Toronto called MESH. I didn’t really know about it until last week and by then could not attend. By following her twitter feeds I got a good level of insight into that event  and since I trust here opinions when she tweeted that a session was interesting or some element connected to the event worth looking at I could click on the link and see what was going on.
• I have added the BBC to twitter now and while they generate a lot of posts, the ability to scan them as they happen makes reading news a lot simpler and real time.

All the above examples show that there seems to be value in Twitter, not as the primary medium but as a complement to information streams, sources or events. That may be it’s real value as opposed to trying to find unique stand alone value of the tool.

On the down side, a few things seem to be happening with twitter that are not positive. At MESH, there was an observation that when they allowed the audience (mostly a bunch of serious social media folks) to use twitter to submit questions, the in person interaction was seriously degraded. The speaker got a question over twitter and unlike when someone in the audience asks the question and you can see and judge their reaction (did they get it or do you need to elaborate), the speaker might as well have been responding to a email from the other side of the world. Face to face interaction is always a better medium than other options and using twitter to interact when you are ten feet from the other party creates a sub-par experience over what could have happened. A second negative is that using twitter is like learning to use  a UNIX machine. Everything is abbreviated and since the messages are 140 characters long some crazy twitter specific language is present that has a pretty steep learning curve. Once you figure it out its OK, but there is no way twitter vernacular is going main stream.

The punch line is that as a twitter skeptic, I am now much more favorable to using it as one of many tools and I have enough data to show that even if you don’t want to post your minute by minute activity, the act of following events, topics and even some people is pretty useful in filling the gaps of information. I would not recommend following me yet (but feel free to if you want) but if you have not tried it out, download twirl or some decent client (the web version stinks) and pick a few topics or people and just casually watch. You will find that you learn something and get a more enhanced feeling of the event because of the added twitter elements and the effort is pretty minimal.

Whats particularly interesting is that if a esoteric interface like twitter can be useful by providing personal feeds on topics, what will come next using a similar model with better interfaces, richer experience and similar simplicity. That could be very exciting.