Thursday, November 19, 2009

Just Twittering on ......

I have opened a Twitter account but have protected it. (I assume the process is the important part of the exercise.) I included my blog address and I've published one Tweet. I've set up Mylee and Ellen as people to follow (sorry, ladies but who else ...)
My Twitter name is .. itnitwit of course.
I'm not fussed on micro-blogging - it would appear very time-consuming and the compressed language would be off-putting to older clients. However the flexibility of being able to tweet using a mobile phone as well as a computer is attractive and I gather Twitter provides updates in real time while Facebook only provides alerts to updates. (What a comment on our 'thirty second society' that Twitter has such tremensdous popularity ...)
In the library context ... Twitter is being used and obviously successfully. Professionals use it as an alerting service, e.g. Mylee - a bit like a human RSS feed with the advantages of a professional judgement of relevance and contact with all those serendipitous discoveries in sources no-one else has located to set up a feed from. And libraries use it to communicate with their client base, the aforementioned Sunshine Coast Library Service being a good example. They follow 36 names and have 142 followers and 141 tweets published, so the medium is being used.
Twitter could also be useful for quick contacts between professionals working on the same project at diferent sites. Direct messaging is an efficient approach.
Libraries need to choose just one social networking system. I don't feel I know enough about them to choose between Twitter and Facebook and MySpace and .... And they must accept that any of them carry considerable potential for abuse if only from individuals overly-focussed on checking for their next message

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