RT @betchaboy: Twitter is Messy #eLearning

So. Chris Betcher thinks ‘Twitter is Messy‘. Hell, I think we’d all agree with that. The main pieces of advice are well worth following, if you have not done so already. Here is my interpretation of Chris’ advice;

• Don’t judge Twitter until you’ve spent some time with it. Try to understand what it is by what it is doing. Work out your purpose, find others with a similar purpose, and follow them. The rest, as they say, will be history.

I am on Twitter to find and learn from other people who a similar (professional) interest in eLearning, mLearning, Web 2,0, Blogging, etc. A by product of those I’ve found and have started following is that a few of them are following me back, and a few have found me on their own merit. So, a big ‘Thank You’ to everyone.

• Be careful who you follow, and who follows you.Those who are genuine put enough in their profile (160 characters) to let you know what their interests are; those who leave it blank are often ‘fake’ accounts and are often automated to either re-tweet your content or just harvest information. Look at their profile, their most recent tweets, see if it looks both genuine and interesting. If so, follow. If not, ignore!

I often block people from following me; I have no need for pills or marketing or property entrepreneurs, I certainly don’t want to be associated with them. Use the follow and block tools wisely.

• You Tweet to everyone; not just your current followers, but their followers, and all future ones too. Twitter is reported to be bigger than anything else has ever been (eventually) and whatever you have tweeted about your dinner-date from hell last week will still be around a long time after you’ve forgotten about it.

I saw a tweet from someone I’m following a few weeks ago. She was interviewing someone for a job by telephone. She was looking at his website, which he’d set up to display his twitter profile and recent tweets … he’d just tweeted that the interview was going really well but he didn’t want to work for them anyway, he thought them too small and ‘provincial’. Good move, son.

Finally, get yourself a client like TweetDeck or Seesmic– desktop applications that help manage your twitter profile, post, retweet, search, groups, etc. Once you’ve starting following more than 10-20 people it can start to get very complicated and time consuming to keep up to date.

“… remember that Twitter is about ‘small pieces loosely joined’, which is really how the world works in real life … the more connections you make, the more likelihood you have of these ‘small pieces loosely joined’ actually leading you into things that you never knew you wanted and that you never, ever could have predicted. That’s what Twitter does.”

Why, some have asked, is the title for this blog post  – “RT @betchaboy: Twitter is Messy #eLearning” – so wierd looking? Easy, my blog posts to Twitter as a new blog entry, and it puts the tweet as the title of the blog post. It all makes sense in Twitter, try it. So;

RT @betchaboy = retweet Chris in Twitter (@betchaboy)
#eLearning = hashtag for all things eLearning