Not too very long ago, I began using twitter.  At the time, I didn’t think that I would be using it much and that it wouldn’t hold much value for me.

I anticipate having issues with keeping updated with it.  I don’t use SMS much, so updates via cell are pretty much out.  I may have it open in a tab from time to time, but my fault there would be that I have a horrible memory for things like opening that tab to begin with.

A couple of things have happened that have mostly proven that wrong.  I still don’t use SMS much and I still don’t update much by cell.  For the most part, that is because I hate having to use the phone pad to type messages.  It takes me way too long and ends up annoying me.  But Twitter has also made me wish I had a blackberry or similar on several occasions over the last few weeks.

I must say though, that I have found myself using twitter much more than I expected. I’m up over 100 twits (twitters?) now. I added a little plugin called twitterfox to my firefox install and that has made it much easier to keep updated and use the service.  I’m aware that there are some desktop applications available to use twitter with, but about 80% of the time that I’ll be using twitter, I’ll be at work, so I don’t want to install any extraneous programs.  I may give a few of them a try at home however.  Twitterfox does right well with it and makes it fairly easy to keep updated as long as firefox is open, which it usually is.

Twitter is somewhat addictive.  It’s way more conversational than a blog or any other website.  It’s the closest thing to a IM client that there is currently available.  The nice thing is that you can “follow” several conversations at once without a separate window open for each and also, without the clutter that having all those conversations would be in one place.  They are still in one “stream” but, with the @ reply function, it makes it much easier to find the twits that are aimed at you and those that belong to a different conversation.

I also see the potential for using twitter (in fact it’s suggested by many of the pros) to grow your blog audience.  Twitter is a much more personal conversation than the blog because of it’s IM properties.  Because of that, readers and other bloggers can grow a relationship much quicker and also have that relationship be much stronger through the interation that they get on Twitter.

So far, I’m impressed with Twitter and will be looking for some more ways to make it even more useful to me and you.

If you’d like to have a conversation with me, you can follow me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/thatedeguy