1.) I'm using TweetDeck which is pretty nice, haven't tried any of the other Twitter tools so far other than Twitpic. I post on two Twitter accounts @ahminotep and @indiawater and TweetDeck allows me to manage both of those, though currently I'm constantly 'crossposting' due to negligence
2.) I've gotten over the initial phobia of following too many people ; now I feel comfortable following interesting accounts I come across. The way to manage this is to try lots of accounts and unfollow or use lists to manage an overflow of information.
3.) I'm finding that its actually not difficult (and its fun) to scan quite rapidly through the 'pending' tweets. The trick that made this work for me is to keep clicking on links that are interesting but *not* follow them right away. Earlier I used to look at each link as I viewed the tweet and found it too disorienting and needing too much context switching. Instead now I go through all the tweets, click-click-click, till I'm up to date and then go and look at all the links that I've opened up (or even just keep them up and look at them later when I want a break). The only difficulty with this is that when one of the links is interesting and you want to retweet, you have no easy way of finding the original tweet.
4.) Its become a little game now to try to see how many mentions and direct messages I can get to happen
5.) Here's my take on some prominent Tweeters and why I follow or don't follow them. Its also interesting to follow well-known people and get some idea of the kind of people they are, but you often find out later that they (or atleast their tweet persona) are not so interesting:
-Kevin Smith, the director @thatkevinsmith : Great guy, really genuine and authentic, raunchy, but huge amount of tweeting, so I had to unfollow and move him to a list instead.
-N.Ram, @nramind : Wider range of interests than I expected him to have (don't ask me why), retweets stuff from prominent foreign newspapers, but I generally don't find his stuff interesting enough to clickthrough. Still following
-Pritish Nandy @pritishnandy: Bursty tweets, often annoying because its like a blog post divided into tweets, lots of analysis of news headlines, intelligent but I don't agree with a lot of his opinions and am not clued into the mumbai stuff he tweets about
-Gautam John @gkjohn, a goldmine of interesting links
-Anand Mahindra, @anandmahindra, just unfollowed :-) , insipid (sorry!)
-Jack Welch @jackwelch, doesn't tweet very often, goes on about sports teams, and I'm beginning to find his opinions pretty annoying, a big difference from the persona that came through in his books which I was a big fan of
-Sivakumar Surampudi, @s_sivakumar, CEO of eChoupal (I think), quite an interesting tweeter especially for a head honcho type, seems to get Twitter
- Genelia D'Souza: @geneliad, seems to tweet quite a lot, does the next generation style grammer that puts me off, I think I'm going to have to unfollow soon
- Brahma Chellaney @chellaney , security analyst and writer for the Hindu, fairly bland
- Chetan Bhagat @chetan_bhagat : Very much like with the books, just a nice down-to-earth kind of guy to follow
- Manjit @chefmanjit : Not exactly famous, but is the chef at one of Bangalore's good restaurants, Herbs and Spice. Just checking him out.
- Shah Rukh Khan, @iamsrk: I just started following him. It looks like its the real guy, not a fake.
- Gates Foundation, @gatesfoundation : Utilitarian news and publicity stuff, worth followingt
I've purposely desisted from following Barkha Dutt, Rajdeep Sardesai and their ilk (though keep bumping into them in retweets), and same with Shashi Tharoor.
====
Update (18/4/2010)
- Vinod Khosla the venture capitalist: @vkhosla : Just started following him
Here are a couple of interesting Twitter related episodes:
- Did live tweeting from our Coromandel colony get-together ; find this much faster in reporting events than trying to do a blog post and uploading photos
- Even without an internet connection , my phone hooks up to a wireless internet access point. This is really convenient and cheap to tweet photos from the phone without having an internet connection on the phone (expensive).
- We have multiple instances at work now of Twitter enabling us to make connections with people we didn't know which has lead to productive results. In one case we met up with an org and tweeted about it and got back negative feedback about the org from someone with relevant links -- very useful.
- N.Ram responded to a crack I made once about Hindu content. Cheap thrills :-)
-- Makemytrip.com corrected the spelling of Visakhapatnam on their site after I tweeted about it.
I'm stuck right now in trying to increase my followers on Twitter .
No comments:
Post a Comment