Jumping on the Twitter Bandwagon

Okay fine, I'll check out Twitter and see what everyone is talking about! Until now I have held out from jumping on the Twitter bandwagon because of the overwhelming amount of information I am already taking in through Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogging and my RSS feeds in Google Reader. However, it is all of these resources that are encouraging me to start using Twitter. The final tipping point is that my Summer school course, "Technologies for Teaching" covers Twitter and it looks like some class activities may take place using Twitter. So, I finally set up an account @joe_deegan.

I am hoping that Twitter provides what Facebook and LinkedIn do not, a running conversation with other professionals in the Training and Development industry. It's easy to get conversations going on Facebook, but I like many other people use Facebook for family and close friends who would be bored to death if I started tweeting about eLearning or corporate training in general. I use LinkedIn for professional networking but it is more difficult to get conversations started on LinkedIn. Most of my use of LinkedIn involves using discussion boards or starting email conversations with connections and very rarely do I receive responses to status updates. From all I hear about Twitter, it sounds like it is much more conducive to starting these "live" ongoing conversations about training and development.

So far, so good! It's a much quicker setup than Facebook or LinkedIn. I was impressed with all of the tweeters it pulled out of my Gmail account for me to start following. I am getting up to speed on Twitterisms with Michelle Martins blog post "Your guide to Job Search, and Personal Branding on Twitter." She has quite a few links to articles that will get me up to speed quick. One thing I am unsure of is whether I should "protect my updates?" I am thinking no so that I can be found in Google searches etc.

I'm excited to see what Twitter brings to the social networking table and I hope I get a lot out of it. If you are tweeting, help me get some conversations started by following me @joe_deegan.