Interest Gophers…24/7!
One of my favorite aspects of twitter is that you can search on topics of interest and review the pages of tweeters who land in your search. With a quick glance, you can get a pretty basic understanding of what interests and style a tweeter has. Once you get a gaggle of tweeters who then tweet on topics of interest to you, each time you log in, it’s likely you’ll have a steady stream of “mindcastings” that will nudge your interest. Hooray for personalized interest gophers!
Take a penny, leave a penny…
“What you put in is what you get out.” While there are certainly tweeters out there who provide a wealth of consistently updated, interesting ideas and opportunities for collaboration, they can’t carry us all. Twitter will only be as interesting as what we put in (collectively). So when you take a penny, leave a penny. If you come across an interesting article or want to give props to a tweeter with a great idea, go for it. It will most likely be appreciated…
A Living Resource
Before joining twitter, I considered my fascination with social media to be relatively unique (quite unbelievable, when I think about it now!). I have always had a love for marketing, human behavior, and collaboration via technology. Performing google searches on topics of interest such as “social psychology” however, resulted in pretty dull hits (textbooks, Wikipedia searches, classroom syllabi). Now, when I search on “social psychology,” for example, I get book recommendations, links to class lectures on iTunes, and peeps wanting to discuss the topic. How cool is that?