Twitter - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

3 days.

32 tweets.

Following 36.

14 followers.

I'm not exactly setting twitter on fire, but I've learnt a lot so far...

The Good

• It's fun!
• It's instant!
• You can "follow" celebrities!
• It's a wonderful source of information.

Expanding on that last point a bit, I want to share with you a couple of wonderful sources of information that I have found via twitter.

resourceshelf is a US website that collects all sorts of information of interest to information professionals, educators and journalists. They tweet links to each new resource that they list. I follow them, which means that I receive all their tweets. When something catches my eye, I click on the link to read more. If something is really interesting or useful, I "retweet", which means that I repeat the tweet to all my followers (who may not follow resourceshelf themselves). See how the information is passed on from twit to twit?

LISNews is also US based, and provides links to new posts about libraries and information science.

Getting away from the whole libraries/teachers/books theme, I also follow techreview, who tweet links to articles about the latest technology innovations. Recent posts include Glaucoma Test in a Contact Lens and Robotic Planes Chase After Climate Data.

Obviously, I have not even begun to plumb the depths of the information available to me via twitter.

The Bad

Unfortunately, I just can't seem to help myself from tweeting ridiculously boring details of my daily life! It's just so addictive, and I must admit I have been guilty of the following tweets:

• OMG just finished helping Alana with her homework!
• Devilled Sausages simmering in the Crock Pot for dinner tonight :)
• Yay! The Vampire Diaries is back on GO! tonight :)

Sorry, sorry, sorry!

The Ugly

There seems to be a whole slew of people that use their twitter account simply to generate as much traffic as possible to their website (for the purpose of making money). They tweet multiple times about a new product/great deal. Ugghh, who could stand to follow them and get repeat tweets about making money and winning things all day? Not me.

Now excuse me while I tweet a link to this post :)

PS. What are your experiences with twitter?