Twitter in more than 140 characters #cam23

Initial thoughts...

I've been trying to give Twitter a chance, but the love affair has been slow to get off the ground. I've made an initial post, chosen a few people to follow and this morning I am trying to review it all. I added Twitter to my iGoogle page to begin with which was really useful because it showed me th

at I can actually isolate all the replies to my post. I have subsequently realised that I can do the same on the full version but is called @UlverstonBoy (my Twitter name), not 'replies', which isn't quite so obvious but I now see the logic!

Verdict...

I've been using Twitter for a little while now, but have failed to really get into it. What can I say? I don't like the overall look - for a concept which sells itself on its pure simplicity, I don't find it all that simple to use. I have ended up following several tweeters, but it seems to only ever be a few who actually write anything giving the distinct feel of an inbox which has overload

on junk. I find the word limit of 140 characters ends up producing statements which are never as useful as they could be and which are hard to read because they are predominantly made up of urls, people's bizarre Twitter identities and other random letters, especially when something is a 'retweet'. So the overall experience is not very pleasing. I also find that the sheer volume of Twitter conversations going on, is a little too much to follow - unless I were to spend 24 hours out of my day monitoring them. I admit that I've found some posts useful in terms of directing me to articles and interesting discussions, but there must be so many more which I have missed (due to a lack of time) giving an overall unbalanced feel to my use.

Still, I can't help thinking that there must be more to it than I have been able to discover in a short space of time. Can so many twitterers really be wrong? I am glad that I have dipped my toe in the water, but not exactly dying to come back, throw my clothes off and dive in (at the moment). In terms of libraries, I do see the value of being involved, because clearly people out there are involved and are deriving a lot of information from it. I think on the whole library tweets need to be focused, 'less' being definitely better than 'more' - for fear of swamping people with too much trivia.