It is interesting to watch Twitter take off. Over the past few months, I have seen increasing adoption of Twitter. Here are a couple of trends worth mentioning.
eZines on Twitter
I think this is a great idea. I follow several ezines (the latest being IDG Connect). I found some of them through Twitter Search and others through links in their email alerts. Here are some advantages:
- You learn about new articles and webcasts as soon as they are ready (right now many ezines still do a batch mode bursts of Tweets but hopefully that will change).
- There is finer granulartiy of information. Since each article link is a separate Tweet, you can individually reply to or Retweet, announcing it to your own group of followers.
- You can also selectively bookmark (favorite) individual articles
- If you are interested enough in that area, you can even start a group or a Friend Feed room
Even though I used to receive the same information in an email form, when it comes as several Tweets, I am able to do more with it with more convenience.
Twitter Packs
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed one of my friends Tweet about Semantic Web Pack. Since it is one my areas of interest I followed the link to see what it was. To my pleasant surprise I found these:
- A Twitter pack is a collection of individuals/bots, Tweeting about a certain topic. It is like a BOF (bird of feathers) group that I normally participate in conferences.
- This was in fact a pbwiki application where you can simply follow all the people in a pack (or selectively follow a few)
- There were several useful and interesting packs
It gave me one click access to my special interest group. Even though I could have done the same (with some difficulty) using Twitter Search, this was so much easier.
Trending Topics
One of the easy ways of following hot news is to subscribe to bots that track Trends. It is a nice way to follow conversations and growing interest in certain topics on Twitter. Two trending bots I follow are Trending and Real Time Trends.