I found a great little tool that lets me organize and use twitter in a better way -- it's called tweetdeck -- and I can post directly from the app (that I downloaded onto my hard drive) so I can just twitter from my desktop, and it shows me in colums my posts, the posts of people I follow, and direct messages from people that I follow. So it lets me use twitter as a kind of "chat" tool as well, either privatly, by direct messaging (DMing) or publicly by replying. I can also "re-tweet (RT) useful information that comes in via twitter from people I follow, such as trip insurance or self-publishing tools or a cool new motorcycle coming out soon. Tweetdeck also lets you search on a topic. If you search "motorcycle travel" you'll see my tweets come up a lot. Also, if you tweet on self-publishing, I will come up occasionally, since I am an author who believes in taking matters into her own hands. Using search is a good way to find people who know a lot about the topic you're interested in. A lot of journalists use twitter search when they're researching articles, to find interview subjects and experts.
Twitter can also be used to chat. A browser-based tool called tweetchat lets you set up chat rooms for twitter users. You just sign in with your twitter username and password and start chatting. I set up a chat room for motorcycle travel, where I can set up a day and time for everyone to gather and chat about whatever's on their mind -- related to motorcycle travel, that is.
I follow just under 100 people on twitter. They tweet mostly on motorcycle travel and self-publishing. If people start tweeting about, well, everything--like they're going to lunch now or getting coffee or they're hating having to use spreadsheets, I immediately unfollow them. I only follow twits who consistently give me useful information and links to more details on the web. Obviously I use twitter for my work and not my personal life. I really don't want to wade through the emotional state of everyone I follow. I have enough random emotional states of my own during the day. Trust me, you don't want me to share!
So there, that's my mega-blog on the micro-blog tool twitter. I do try to keep it to motorcycle travel related topics though remember that I do tweet on self-publishing sometimes. I also plan to tweet from my upcoming trip to Europe and Morocco. So if you want to follow my micro-blogs between my mega-blogs and the stories I publish on my dispatches page, then follow me on twitter!
