Twitter, where is the value?

I’ve been using twitter for about 6 months with varying degrees of “using”. Sometimes it’s a passive view where I see what other people are doing and not really broadcasting what I am doing, other times it’s lot’s of little wonderful nuggets out of my life that make it on there, and the occasional time, it’s a full on conversation with another person.

I’ve been asked by several people what twitter is and what is the value? I admit, we do live in a world that is riddled with information in all different forms. Twitter is just another one of those streams. But back to the value, it’s not an easy question to answer and it’s not a one answer fits all type of deal either. Twitter is effectively what you make of it. It’s not for everyone for sure but those who use it, do love it. The key thing though is that like myself everyone uses twitter in there own particular way. Twitter not a form of communication it’s a venue for communication and with that comes a vast amount of noise that you are responsible for cutting through.

Twitter is the perfect example of a network of trust. You don’t immediately start following hundreds or thousands of people, you begin with a few people that you trust. In my case some of the earliest people that I started following were tech blogger’s who’s blogs I’d followed. A couple of examples would be Robert Scoble and Scott Hanselman. Now these aren’t people I would necessarily trust in real life but in the digital world I tend to value and agree with a lot. What started happening is that I would see them replying to things people had asked them then I would go and look at that other persons twitter stream and I might follow that person or I might not, but that’s how your network builds out and it’s an interesting real world example of a natural built in human condition.

But again, back to value. It’s going to be up to you here to make it valuable for yourself. It’s easy to get sucked into the negativity of twitter but it can be something that is a positive experience. If it’s important to you, you can make the twitter experience work but you just have to give it a fair chance and at least a bit of your attention.