Excellent advice. I’m printing this to keep as a handy reminder & passing it on with your credit to my network! Thanks.

Jennifer

Bottom line, follow the Golden Rule: Treat Tweet others the way you’d like to be treated tweeted.

Thank you, I’ll be here through Monday night.

I had to google to learn it myself.

BTW, just in case, # is the start of a tag, so Twits can use the search box to follow all posts with the same name. this lets you string conversations together into a (semi-)readable thread.

Thank you kindly for the mention!

By the way, I’m a User Experience designer (UX), which is just a fancy way of saying a front-end web designer/developer, but I do know a thing or two about UNIX too

Also, really stupid question….what is the #tcot that everyone uses everywhere on Twitter?

If you want to simply share information, it’s called an RSS feed.

I resemble that comment.

Over 90% of my use of Twitter has been as an aggregated news feed (incoming and outgoing). In this capacity, I tend to prefer linked items from news feeds, opinion articles, and such like. Often I have a duplicate of the site’s RSS feed coming in via Twitter. Sometimes they race: RSS can be faster or slower than the Twitter “feed”.

It can be interesting at times to see other items of interest in the tweets — pictures and conversations and what-not, but it depends on what I’m doing at the time. Sometimes the many conversations can be distracting, though.

I realize that much of the common wisdom is to use Twitter in more of a social fashion. But being true to myself, that’s not really me. For me its place is somewhere between RSS feed, IRC chat, and something like Facebook. I try to play the strengths of each and there may be more or less overlap on the others.

We know Twitter is great for breaking news, but that is kind of in blog/news/RSS territory. Twitter is fun for for “chat”, but sometimes an IRC chat room is more suited. For sharing pictures or “what I’m doing”, sometimes Facebook’s extra features make it a more suitable choice. I like FriendFeed’s “rooms” and “likes” and “comments”, but still don’t use it as widely even for these features.

I find Twitter’s gadgetability (Firefox add-ons, external utilities, etc.) to make it more pliable than some of the above. So while the great convergence of whatever sort continues, and includes Twitter, I still use more than just the one.

There are still other online things, Google Reader, identi.ca, and lots of others. Some augment, some duplicate.

I agree with these 5 I’s. At the moment I just go about things differently. (For now.)