A little over two weeks ago, I succumbed and decided to see exactly what the deal with twitter was. It just didn’t seem like a wonderful tool – SMS for the web? Really? But, in the spirit of inquiry, I thought I’d give it ago. Now, a bit over two weeks later, I can say “I’m glad”.
The reason I started was that I wanted to be able to follow a few friends/colleagues/acquaintances of mine who were having interesting, if somewhat disjointed, conversations on twitter. That has proven to be interesting, but what’s really blowing me away is how companies are using twitter to provide customer service. The smarter companies and organisations are out there doing searches for keywords, and joining into conversations with relevant information. Case in point: only a few minutes ago, I was having an idle back-and-forth about WebKit, and I happened to mention that I wished there was firebug for safari. Next batch of tweets come in, and I’ve got a response from a guy who works on Safari and WebKit (presumably at Apple, though he didn’t say and his bio doesn’t confirm or deny) prompting me to look at the Web Inspector – it had been overhauled a lot in the latest major Safari update, and now looks to be a serious contender. Because of this guy’s advice, I’m going to spend the next week or so trying Safari instead of FireFox for my web development – enough time to get over the learning curve and seriously assess it.
In the two weeks I’ve been on Twitter, this sort of thing has happened three times. That’s three more interactions with companies who make products I use in a two week period than I normally have in a year. Amazing. Plus – so far: no spam.
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Software is too expensive to build cheaply.... 