Twitter: a quick why do it.

Twit­ter can be end­less streams of peo­ple telling us they just brushed their teeth. And in those (major­ity) instances, it’s worthless.

How­ever, it is a good infor­ma­tional tool. I’d sug­gest fol­low­ing Michael­Hy­att and jowyang. Michael is the CEO of Thomas Nel­son, and he treats twit­ter with care. Jere­miah Owyang is a research guy for For­rester, and his feed has a lot of use­ful infor­ma­tion, often deal­ing with trends.

It also can be used as a good mar­ket­ing tool. You can “push” mes­sages to your fol­low­ers. Those mes­sages are ephemeral — only appear­ing once — but they should be fast and easy to pro­duce. You never know what may result. A word of cau­tion there, though — if a user’s out­go­ing mes­sages are all push, they will soon be ignored. There needs to be a healthy mix of fea­tur­ing oth­ers’ sites or infor­ma­tion and a bit of personality.

If you have a sig­nif­i­cant list of fol­low­ers (which I do not), Twit­ter can be used as a free instant polling mechanism.

Twit­ter search is a great tool for find­ing way more up-to-date results for almost any­thing, com­pared to what Google can yield.

Finally, you do not have to fol­low those who fol­low you. Fur­ther, if you are fol­low­ing some­one who writes end­less dri­vel, you can just un-follow and be done with that.

I’d sug­gest you claim your name right away, as it may not be avail­able tomor­row. I see Twit­ter as a grow­ing phe­nom­ena — at least in the short term.