Thursday, January 24, 2008

'The Tweet Scan Can'

Since attending one of Alan Levine's CogDogRoo workshop's last October I've really 'taken' by Twitter, to say the least. Over this last Summer break, I've spent A LOT of time in Twitter, building my Twitter networks, and learning lots and lots and lots.

At first, my husband was a 'little' concerned about my Twitter 'obsession', but he's since come around to the fact that it satisfies some of the things that I really love - 'being with people' and 'learning'.

But sadly to say - my summer holiday is coming to a 'screaming close', and I can't afford the luxury of spending hours and hours 'scouring' missed tweets - in fear that I'm missing all of that wonderfully useful information, as well as building up the understanding of how the 'peeps' in my Twitter network function.

So I've had to find more 'efficient' ways of getting my 'Twitter' fix.

I've tried getting tweets directed to my mobile phone whilst out and about, but I'm yet to receive my mobile phone bill to verify whether I'm charged to receive these international SMSs - especially since I received 75 tweets in one afternoon. I'll update you on this later.

I use Snitter to have all 'live' tweets 'flash' on my screen, whilst working on the Net. I was very 'stoked' yesterday when at my first day back at work (not just working from home) - I was able to download and install Snitter - probably very much against 'company policy' but I very valuable tool for keeping my social networks alive (and my Twitter addition satisfied :)).

I've started to feed the cool blog sites fellow Twitterers write and recommend - using Google Reader - and this is working
really well. I can read the blog postings at my leisure - instead of trying to 'squeeze' them all in whilst 'going over' my missed tweets.

And now I've discovered a 'shortcut' to making sure I don't miss any tweets Twittered especially to me @theother66. As I described in 'TweetScan is Twitter-sweet' I'm now using TweetScan to 'aggregate' any tweets with 'theother66' into my Google Reader. This means I'll also receive tweets from anyone - not just those I'm following!! So when I arose this morning, I was able to see who'd been tweeting me whilst I was playing with Mr Sandman:



By working out these less time consuming ways of using Twitter I've actually made time available to write this blog, all before breakfast and the kids waking up (big smiles all round).

Also read Sue Waters' "Getting More out of Twitter" post!

3 comments:

Kate Olson said...

Thanks for this post, I'm dying to be able to use twitter more productively, I'm going to check out Tweetscan right now............

Roger Stack said...

Love your thinking and experiments with twitter... You've given me several ideas to help me oversee and cream the best of the tweets from all our computing students into a single 'computing' tweet. I could do the same for other learning areas... particularly if I can get students involved in the 'reading and creaming' process.

Sue Waters said...

I use TweetScan all the times and like you have discovered people who are following me but whom I'm not following.

Concerned that we have so much to blame Alan for :). Great to see that he had such a fantastic impact on us all.