The fact that I miss a lot of the conversation doesn’t bother me, in real life I’m also not in constant contact with all of my friends. But when I am online, I like the fact that I can see a bit of what the people I know are doing, reading, finding out etc.

Many of the articles I read or websites I check out, I got from someone’s tweet, rather than a blog post. Personal news also travels faster over twitter.

I also discovered that twitter in combination with a phone makes it more useful. I occasionally read tweets on my phone, and I can post updates through text. I track a few keywords that are sent as sms, so if people talk about certain things, or people address me directly, I’m notified. (unfortunately, this hardly ever works, after a few days twitter just stops sending sms’s until I completely remove and re-add my number).

I’m following about 100 people and I’ve discovered that this gives a good signal to noise ratio.

What I like:

– it’s less noisy then irc, yet has the
same feeling of ‘connectedness’ to
your friends.
– it’s ok to miss out on tweets,
similar to how it’s ok to not hear
people when you’re not around, but
still it’s fun to hear them when
you are.
– it’s more efficient than reading
blogs (for news and interesting
links)
– the relevancy of links is higher
than blogs, since I’m only getting
things from people I actively
follow.

What I don’t like:

– The fact that sms notifications
break all the time.
– that there’s no filter to ignore
certain statements. (e.g. if several
of my friends are at #someevent,
and I’m not, their updates might not
interest me at that point.