Twitter (#12)

I set up a twitter account and found about a dozen people to follow intially. I'm going to winnow down that number eventually. For example, I"ll see what the differences are between info from the New Canaan Advertiser and the New Canaan Patch. It was harder to find people via Search than I had expected; too much name overlap - plus, the search engine kept 'wandering off'. It's useful to see who the people you follow are following.

BBC reported a short-term study on twitter content done by Pear Analytics, noting that "40.5% could be classified as pointless babble, 37.5% as conversational and 8.7% as having pass-along value. Self promotion and spam stood at 5.85% and 3.75% respectively.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8204842.stm

Articles on effective and successful tweeting abound.
Mary Ellen Bates (http://www.batesinfo.com/may-2009-infotip.html) talks about Twitalyzer, a tool for measuring how collaborative and interactive a twitterer is, based on five factors:
Influence; Signal-to-noise ratio (rough calculation of how often you pass along useful information, such as a URL); Generosity (propensity to "re-tweet" others' tweets); Velocity (volume and frequency) and Clout (number of times that another twitterer has mentioned you by Twitter-name). Other analytical tools include Twitoaster.com. There is a whole science developing here.

Then there are the lists of twitter resources by category - e.g. tools for writers and researchers http://onlinecollegedegree.org/2009/04/27/50-useful-twitter-tools-for-writers-and-researchers/. Looks interesting for finding users and tweets by topic or locale; tracking hot trends on twitter and setting up alerts. You can also use twitter for polling, with Twtpoll or StrawPoll. The possibilities seem endless - talk about information overload!