OSS Watch team blog

In 2007 Brian Kelly convinced me I should try Twitter, I’d been avoiding it for some time as I simply did not “get it”. I agreed, started following Brian and a bunch of other people and almost immediately got totally wound up by someone tweeting about what was happening in a baseball game they were watching in the states.

I’m a big sports fan, but having about 20 tweets in the space of a couple of hours telling me someone I’d never heard of had hit a home run or caught a ball was not what I wanted. I wanted the “watercooler talk” that Brian had promised me. No problem thought I, I’ll stop following them (which was a shame as this was someone whose opinions and thoughts I value).

Despite having stopped following them Twitter kept sending me their tweets. This, coupled with a number of other bugs made me reject twitter very quickly as the unnecessary distraction I had expected it to be.

However,  Brian has continued to blog about how useful twitter can be - often providing examples of how it has helped him with his work. At the same time many other people I respect have started to tell me how good it is. So, when I attended ApacheCon US recently and an attendee requested to follow me I thought I’d give it another try. After all, conferences is where most people seem to get the most value out of Twitter.

Immediate impressions were poor - the link in the email to accept this new follower told me “I couldn’t use the service in the way requested” (eh? I was following the link they supplied!) I tried to use the search functionality to look them up, but that was “temporarily disabled”.

It felt good to rant for 140 characters or less about how rubbish Twitter was. It felt even better when Josie Fraser instantly took the proverbial out of me for my intolerance (we eventually figured that because I was born in Scotland and and raised in England I have inherited the no-nonsense Scottish attitude rather than a stiff upper lip English one).

Was this some of the water cooler talk I’d been promised or had we just wasted a few minutes of too many peoples time with unimportant waffle?

Then useful things started to emerge from all the noise:

• I discovered TweetDeck which provides a more sensible way of working with twitter
• A conference attendee posted about a great place to get breakfast, I joined them the following morning rather than suffering with the standard hotel fare.
• The conference committee tweeted about the need for a spare laptop for the keynote speaker since theirs had died. One was provided minutes later.
• I tweeted about an interesting talk in the Humanities domain and Matthew Dovey responded expressing an interest in more details at a later date.
• On the trip home I tweeted about being in New Orleans airport and discovered that another conference attendee was in the airport. We met for a drink before boarding our separate planes.
• I learnt that someone I occasionally bump into at events is moving house soon (something to break the ice next time we meet)

Today I saw more benefit. Andy Powell tweeted about his live blogging at an event. I took a look at the programme and realised a session related to a recent blog post of mine about the Open Web Foundation. A quick tweet to indicate this and a couple of hours later Andy asked a question about the topic and followed up via Twitter (was that twitter noise necessary? I’m not sure, I could have asked via comments on Andy’s live blog where they would have been between the two of us).

At the same time Brian Kelly was asking for info that related to the event he was attending - not sure if he got anything useful, but I know he has reported this technique has worked in the past.

So, am I a Twitter convert?

Not yet, but I’m starting to “get it”. My problem is still how do I avoid being distracted by yet another stream of information. Especially since I suspect that the way to get maximum value is to follow a large group of people.

I’m looking for interesting people to follow, but Twitters search is still broken! Feel free to follow me and I’ll then know you are there. I promise to avoid telling you when I’m about to wash my hair