Addicted to Twitter

Twitter is addictive, full stop. And if you don't believe me just try it for yourself. I have been a twit for two weeks now and I find myself logging in everyday amazed at all my new followers. For sure it took some work to get a bit of a following at first. I had to follow just about everyone I could find including anyone with the unfortunate coincidence of having the same surname as me, but eventually it gained momentum and I now boast a remarkable 700+ followers.

My team leader, who shall remain anonymous, was doing this twitter thing over a year ago and honestly I did not see the point. But perhaps that is exactly why you too should try it. I am amazed at the window in to the mind that twitter provides. You might think that 140 character messages cannot contain anything useful but once you've done it for a while you'll see the shortened url links and succinct writing does carry value. That's not to mention hearing all about what Smale's all around the world are up to. It's a unique perspective in to the minds of people all around the world.

There are a number of tools that utilise the API to help you manage your tweets, your followers and flush those who refuse to follow you back - like the 'stars'. My favourite is Buzzom.com which allows you to search for people in a particular field, their tweets or their bio, then follow them in the hopes they'll follow you back. I was amazed to see some of my favourite IM stars in my followers list when I logged in yesterday. My friend Uma Gupta tells me that he had a couple of hundred new followers when he decided to follow Oprah. I don't follow Oprah yet, as much as I like her I'm still trying to be a bit different you know.