Thing 12: Twitter

I have to admit, I'm a bit perplexed about Twitter. I set up an account last week during a class on social networking. I follow 16 people and have seven followers.

I think the reason it's not clicking for me is that I follow most of these people on Facebook and most of them have set up to show their tweets on FB. For that reason, it appears to add no value for me, so I rarely remember to check it.

I'll play around with it to see if I can find people or groups to follow who are new to me, and I'll see if I can figure out a simple way to check Twitter regularly so that I don't have to remember to check it. Can it be added to Google Reader, for example?

Since I wrote this more than a week ago, I've started following some of my favorite public radio shows and added a few colleagues. I have found myself much more interested in checking Twitter regularly since doing that. I'm still waiting for it to grab, though, so that I look forward to checking it throughout the day.

I didn't discover an easy way to follow Twitter using Google Reader, but I added a Twitter gadget to my iGoogle page. It turned out to be too confusing, so I removed it and just put a link in my Google Bookmarks gadget, which sits prominently at the top of my iGoogle page.

At the moment, I'm committed to giving Twitter a try. I'll keep looking for content that's relevant to me and thinking of ways to make it a regular part of my day.