It seems that all of a sudden, the biblioblogosphere is all atwitter about Twitter. For once I feel like I’m ahead of the curve, although not by much. I signed up for Twitter a couple of months ago when it was suggested by a member of the Blogcritics editorial team as a way of keeping track of who is around and working on the pending queue of article submissions. We’ve ended up sticking with email notifications, mostly, and GTalk, but Twitter could probably be just as useful if everyone got on board.
I didn’t quite grasp how cool it could be until yesterday, when I downloaded and installed Twitteroo. It’s like Twitterific, which is a Mac desktop widget, but it works on Windows machines. The program icon sits in the systems tray, and when anyone you are watching updates their Twitter message, the program chirps at you. It will display the last handful of updates from everyone, including your own updates (20 notes from the past 12 hrs currently displayed on mine).
Okay, now I get it. Now I see how this can really be used in collaborative settings where frequent updates shared with a group of people can keep everyone connected with what’s going on. Of course, I’m sure no one really cares that I was baking pies this evening, or that I was sleeping last night, but the potential for Twitter being more than bland navel-gazing is there.
