Fantasy Dreamer's Ramblings

This post is cross-posted at the Geek Girls Network Blog also.

I’ve seen a lot of articles and blog posts on how people should use Twitter but most of them are geared towards those trying to market themselves towards monetary means and how to get as many followers as you possible get. I would like to talk about how and why I use Twitter because it has nothing to do with those two common goals.

When I first heard of Twitter is was about year ago but I didn’t jump on the band wagon at the time. It wasn’t until September 2008, that I started using Twitter for work because they wanted the web development group to test our toes in the Twitter waters before the marketing folks did. They wanted us to share the in and outs of what we found. To be honest, I didn’t really like it, I thought it was boring. This was because I wasn’t really using it like I should and I was following the wrong people. On top of that, my boss and the marketing department was following me on Twitter, so this made me worried about saying something I shouldn’t and/or be a bad reflection on the company, etc. Then in January of this year, I had an epiphany. It occurred to me to create another account for myself that didn’t have anything to do with work. Now, the fun begins.

At first, I just followed authors of the books that I enjoyed and then a few followed me back. This made me over joyed, for obvious reasons. Then I started following the book bloggers and this is where I find out that quite a few of them are actually in the technical field like me. So this dominoes over to me hooking up with technical people of like interests in my field. That’s how I discovered the founder of the Geek Girls Network blog @geekgirls.

My Twitter following and who I follow is a mixture of a lot of different interests. Because of this I am now really enjoying Twitter now, where I am finding and sharing with people with my many interests. As you can see I’m not on Twitter for monetary means nor am I there for as many followers as I can get.

Some people I’ve noticed are on Twitter to meet people plus get as many followers as they can. I’m cool with that and have no problem following these people as long as they tweet things I’m interested in. Here is my list of the traits of Twitters who I will not follow on Twitter:

• All tweets have to do with getting more followers. I don’t want my Twitter feed full of people begging for followers and not have anything of value to say besides getting more followers.


• The avatar is a picture of a couple; their hair and clothing are perfect and smiling at me. I’ve seen a lot these lately. They creep me out, reminds me of the Stepford Wives. Too perfect. I know this has no fidelity besides my own bias.


• No bio. Speaks for itself.


• For the most part, using the default Twitter avatar equals no follow. The exceptions, I can tell they are sight impaired or they are someone I know.


• The person’s tweets are about earning an extraordinaire about of money in a short time or telling me how I buy a laptop next to nothing.


• No tweets at all.


• Their tweets don't have anything to do with what I like to see in my Twitter feed.

Who will I follow? Plain and simple, those with tweets of value to me or can just make me laugh.

• TweetDeck: I group people into groups by interest, create searches, has a ton of functionality built-in to it. The groups function is the only reason I use this not just the Twitter's Web Interface. By grouping I can see tweets in their area of interests.


• Firefox with Twitter's Web Interface, Greasemonkey and Troys Twitter Script: Same functionality as TweetDeck with the exception of groups. I found Troys Twitter Script through @g33kgurrl.


• Twitterfeed: To publish blog posts from my blog.


• last.fm: To post songs of interest to Twitter.


• Google Reader + Twitter: This is a Greasemonkey script that will put a Twitter link at the bottom of the post you are reading. If I decide what I'm reading is worth sharing, I can tweet it from my reader.
  

The how and why I use Twitter will continue to evolve over time. Twitter has also made this geek girl more socialable. If you want to follow me or just check out my tweets, look me up @FantasyDreamer. So, my question to you is how and why do you use Twitter? If you are not using Twitter, why not?