Twitter, Tumblr, and social blogging
I have recently decided to start trying Twitter again. The problem that I had with it was I failed to really see how it would be of much use to me as I already have chat, social blogging, and social networks tracking my every move. I am going to try it some more though to see if I get used to it or start to like it and see more utility than I had seen before in it. First, I need to start following people... I suppose that once I'm on it and using it frequently enough, I will be able to crowdsource questions and that could be useful. Anyways, there are some interesting things that people are doing with twitter, the following list is what I've seen so far:
Huffington Post's Twitter Feed - Great during the presidential debates...
Twitter's Wallstreet Feed - Kinda focused on the recession right now...
Twitter for Busines! - I found this on someone's tweet I followed.
Anyways, there could potentially be some cool stuff on twitter, not just the noise I thought was on there when I scoffed at it a few years ago. I'll try it and see how it goes.
In related thoughts, there's a snippet-style social blogging application, tumblr. I have an old coworker who has been using that site for the past year or so and it looks like a nice and lazy way to make the blogging equivalent of tweets.
All of these simple ways of putting tiny bits of data on the web seems at a glance to be very pointless. I mean who cares about a short thought or a tidbit of information placed onto a random blog. But, when you start to mine the data and look at it at a larger scoped level, there could definitely be potential to have lots of useful information that is exposed through the process. Again, I'll be patient as I try tweeting and tumbling to see whether it's useful for me.