If you use it right. Everything I now believe and practice about Twitter can be found in two posts by Chris O’Donnell, here and here. Unlike Chris (I think) I don’t keep my commonpreyr id open on twitter. That way I can be a little bit more personal than on my blog and tumblr. But it is simply great for keeping up with friends. I use Facebook now as a database for getting a contact with every obscure relationship I’ve had. But Twitter is for friends and it works well that way. Using it for PR or keeping up with celebs is just painful.
Both those links go to the same post, just fyi.
I have a mixture of A-listers and friends and random people on mine. The random people mostly come from comment conversations on various film or gaming blogs, so I guess they’re not totally random. The A-listers, yes, they promote their blogs, but I’m not sure why that’s totally a bad thing. I often get the notification that there’s a new post on Twitter before it hits my feedreader, so I get a jump on it. Plus, following people like Michael Arrington gets you extra tech news and conversations that are going on outside of his blog. Sure, it might not be groundbreaking stuff, but it’s interesting to see the background as he uses Twitter to research and factcheck his stories before he posts them on TechCrunch.
It’s more fun to follow Arrington/Calacanis/Scoble, etc. on Friendfeed, though. Then you get stuff from their other networks as well. Found a number of fun videos from Calacanis. But that’s really only good if you have a lot of time, so I wouldn’t recommend it to you right now. 😉
I guess what I think is that Twitter has more uses than are immediately apparent and of course you should use it the way that makes you happy but that doesn’t mean the other uses are bad. Apparently I’ve sworn off punctuation in this paragraph.
Also, you need to add comments to your Tumblr. 🙁
Comments on tumblr will happen. I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
It really depends on how you use it. And people use Twitter in different ways, that’s part of its charm.
I tend to shy away from Chris’ advice, though it’s probably good for a newbie. There are certain rare A-listers (a good example is Adam Rugel (@Adam in the Twitterverse) who NEVER promote their blogs and tweet rarely, and when they do, it’s funny enough to be worth it.
Facebook has so much app noise now (even with Beacon disabled) that it isn’t worth it for me even as a database. I agree with Jandy– use FriendFeed for that.
Twitter is the new IRC.
FriendFeed is the new Facebook.