First of all, a thousand apologies to those of you who had this show up in your RSS reader on Saturday in its unedited form.  I am not a great writer to begin with, but when you add in the fact that I accidentally published it rather then saving it as a draft, it was completely unreadable.  Sorry.

This hack is one of those I just don’t get, but am trying it because it seems as if I am the only pseudo-geek not doing it.  The hack is Twitter.  Twitter may not be for you, but the blog world is in a buzz about it so it is worth at least having a functional knowledge about.

Twitter is kind of a cross between blogging and Instant Messaging.  It is where a person can answer the question that I am sure everyone has about us…"what are they doing now?"  You do that by posting a short (limited to 140 characters) message that is picked up by "friends" and RSS readers/IM clients.

I have to say that it seems to feed into the need for everyone to be a celebrity but there are a few things about Twitter that I like or at least can see another person liking.

1.  There is some built in accountability.  If I say on Twitter that I am going to be doing something it helps force me to get it done.

2.  I do think in our profession it is educational for people to know what it is we are doing at a given time.  Most people think we "just work on Sunday."

3.  I suppose it is possible to contact busy people this way, too.  Does anybody know if Bill Hybles is on Twitter?

4.  It could be a nice way to keep track of friends from seminary or some such thing.

5.  If you work with young computer professionals I could see this becoming a helpful contact tool.

If you use Twitter and I just don’t get it, leave a comment and tell the rest of us what I am missing.  If you would like to become my "friend" (I have none!) and see what I had for dinner, my twitter can be found here: http://twitter.com/jeffberg

For some more about Twitter, you can check out these articles.

http://slackermanager.com/2007/03/the-several-habits-of-wildly-successful-twitter-users.html

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/5-ways-to-use-twitter-for-good.html

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB117373145818634482-ZwdoPQ0PqPrcFMDHDZLz_P6osnI_20080315.html

Happy Twittering.