tweety

I started following twitter a few weeks ago (yeah, even Oprah jumped in before I did). It was actually the Kogi bbq truck that finally pushed me into it, and over the last few weeks I got off to a slow start, just kind of checkin in to see whether it was something I wanted to bother with. But in the last couple days have made a conscious effort to be more active on it, and I have to admit that doing so has made a big difference in my perception of it. The biggest lesson: ignore the question "what are you doing?" and instead answer "what has your attention?". Its still a learning process, but by following more users and putting out more myself, I realize why its often referred to as a conversation. If you don't put much into the conversation, you don't get much back. Its obvious why facebook made its last format change in an effort to be more twitter-like, and thus my tweets often duplicate something I'm sharing on facebook, but where you are sharing with people you already know on facebook (since you don't 'friend' strangers), you are sharing with strangers on Twitter. If nothing else, I've already found it valuable, just on those couple days, in the amount of 'stuff' (especially, for me, design-related content) I've found through other users, as well as strangers with similar interests and in similar fields that it has brought me in contact with. I do look forward to when something like Google Wave can combine all these things into one, but for now, I'm still growing and learning my way around it. If you're on there, let me know (@jonberrydesign) and help me broaden the conversation.