shawn farner [dot com]

A conversation between a few parties on Twitter revolved around this question; is there a right way to use Twitter?

In my opinion, no.

I’m starting to refer to Twitter as a “swiss army knife” of sorts.  It is one service but can serve many different purposes.  For instance, it can be used as it was by Barack Obama (@barackobama) and Hillary Clinton (@hillaryclinton) - to send small updates out to fans and supporters.  It can be used to ask a question and poll for results, much as Darren Rowse (@problogger) does.  It can be used as a friendly way to chit chat with those you find interesting.  It can be used as a to-do list (tweet your task - you can make your updates private if you’d like).  There are many third-party web applications out there (Remember the Milk and FoodFeed, for example) making use of Twitter for other things besides communication between people.

Some believe that Twitter is starting to become IM.  I was part of a rapid-fire tweet explosion yesterday where a bunch of users from Central PA were all tweeting and replying to each other at breakneck speeds.  It required constant refreshes of the Twitter home page to stay on the ball.  While it resembled IM in a way, the open nature of the conversations (out in public for everyone to see) set it apart from services like AIM or Yahoo! Messenger.  Many conversations were going on at one time and anyone was free to jump in wherever they wished - even those we didn’t know were there.  It made for a fun time and a lot of new connections were made.  This reveals yet another use for Twitter that often goes overlooked - networking.

It all comes down to personal preference.  I don’t think anyone should dictate to someone else how to “correctly” use Twitter.  Watch the public timeline - you’ll see it being used in a variety of ways.  Truth is, there is no right way to do it.  You can’t tweet too little.  You can’t tweet too much.  You don’t have to use it just for conversation.  Twitter is a web app/communications tool that doesn’t really have rules, and I, for one, like it that way.

How do you use Twitter?