Twitter, Tweetdeck, and other bird-like activities (but not twiddling)

Twitter
Six months ago, I thought Twitter was stupid and essentially a constant status update. While it IS somewhat the latter, I have gotten over my initial aversion to it and realized what it is good for. For instance, I am using it as a tool to expand my PLN and keep in touch with college of ed. peers.

Over the weekend, I monitored #educon. Watching a popular hashtag is a great way to jump into twitter. I saw and practiced many aspects of twitter such as retweeting great ideas and quotes. I also realized how twitter can be used to share resources. Links to blogs, articles, etc. were being tweeted constantly. At one point, I became overwhelmed by the number of tabs I had open due to the links I had clicked in others’ tweets. I finally had an epiphany that “Hey! I can bookmark these in my Delicious account!”

Another neat thing about twitter at this point in my life is that my age and experience are not on the forefront. When I was conversing with other #educon tweeters, I was seen simply as another adult interested in education, unless, of course, someone looked into my profile. As someone who is still in that awkward stage of life between childhood and adulthood, I can attest to the importance of being seen and treated as a fellow member of the adult and professional community. It is almost embarrassing for me to admit how excited I was when educators whom I had never met started replying to and retweeting my tweets. Due to my insecurity about my experience and age, I was hesitant to ask questions for fear of sounding ignorant or being annoying, but so far it seems others are eager to answer questions and share info. and resources.

Twitter seems to also be good for keeping updated on news events. It’s how I learned about the Egyptian protesting. I even followed a Twerson who tweeted updates every 30 seconds.

The downside of twitter is that you really need to be logged in and paying attention to reap the benefits. This means it could become another feature in this life that sounds great at first, but could take over your life if you let it. I like it while I’m logged in, but in the end, I prefer things that I can check and reply on my own time such as email.

Tweetdeck
I think I expected twitter to let me know when I log in what tweets I have missed, but as I said before, you really have to be constantly logged into twitter to reap the benefits. So, I wanted to see if tweetdeck would help keep my tweets organized.

One feature of tweetdeck is that the notifications are in the form of pop up windows in the corner of my screen with a corresponding sound (of a bird tweet? who knows) which are both beneficial and annoying. Being driven mad by the constant chirping, I quickly figured out how to turn the sound off. While I chose to keep the pop up notifications running, I still have mixed feelings between the pop ups being helpful and distracting. I like the fact that they are small and in the corner. So, I can easily ignore or glance at them and continue working on something else. On the other hand, so many of the tweets were not relevant to me such as people talking about where they’re eating dinner or meeting up with someone else. I felt like I was wasting my time even just glancing at them especially when I would try to go back to working on homework and couldn’t remember what I was doing. Yet, I couldn’t bring myself to log out. I thought, “What if I miss something life shatteringly important?!”

I think there were too many tweets per second by #educon for TweetDeck (or myself!) to keep up with in practical way. I would go back to full screen for tweetdeck and realize that it wasn’t notifying me for ALL the new tweets. This made me nervous because as I said before, “What if I miss something life shatteringly important?!” Eventually I figured out that the little numbers at the bottom of the pop up show if there are multiple new tweets and if there are you can use the arrow buttons to see them. So, all is well.

You can also use tweetdeck to keep updated with your facebook and myspace accounts as well as other accounts, but I, personally, did not like this. It’s my personal preference that I want to check facebook when I’m ready for facebook and I do not want constant updates from facebook. This is probably because my view of fb and twitter are different. I think of facebook more like an email account that I check on my own time when I’m ready as opposed to Twitter which I see as a necessity to be in constant contact to get anything from it. Although, I DO think it’s pretty cool that you can update both twitter and facebook (and probably myspace as well) with the same post at the same time.

Seesmic
Then, I tried Seesmic which has the same purpose as Tweetdeck. At first, I thought Seesmic was not as easy to figure out but that was probably just my bias from using Tweetdeck first. After I got over that, I was pretty impressed by how modern looking Seesmic looked (it was probably just the spinning settings window that got me). Seesmic basically does everything Tweetdeck does as far as I can tell. I was all ready to switch to using Seesmic permanently instead of Tweetdeck when I realized that Seesmic doesn’t have a refresh button that I know of and it definitely needed one because the tweets for #educon were stagnant for about 5 minutes. I knew that couldn’t be right. The only way I could figure out how to get it jump started was to delete the column and make a new one. Not wanting to blame Seesmic, I thought it might be due to a poor internet connection. However, Tweetdeck was doing just fine. In conclusion, I decided to use Tweetdeck.