Uses of Twitter by users who are not twits

Richard Beddard emailed this post to us as a comment, but it is such a good example of people using the Twitter system in interesting new ways that it deserves to be a post in its own right:

I'd noticed you blogging about Twitter and as I'm not going to blog on Twitter and have given up doing battle with your comments system I thought I'd send you my Twitter experience!

We must apologise about the comments system.....every so often Serendipity seems to take umbrage at a particular IP address/computer/whatever and refuse to let it comment past the captchas....however switching off these exposes us to a welter of viagra posts in minutes - Spam 2.0

Anyway, re Twitter:

For years I've been a sporadic journal writer.
Then I came across Twitter.
The premise of Twitter is ridiculous. It's like a realtime blog. You're supposed to type or SMS everything you are doing and thinking.

I signed up last Monday, but couldn't get the SMS to work.

So I gave up on it and 'twittered' into a Word document instead. (Actually A Google Documents and Spreadsheets document)

Now I 'twitter' all the time! And it's been very productive in terms of writing a journal.
The trick is to have the document open the whole time while you are working
And jot things down on a pad if you haven't got your laptop running - but transcribe them as soon as possible before it goes stale. And of course it is completely private.

The real benefit is that you are writing up ideas as they are fresh, which helps in the development of them. It becomes a crucial part of life and not just a record (how many people re-read their journals anyway).

As we wrote some time ago (here) we felt that the original Twitter idea (a River of Drivel) was a waste of time and space - but as a Unified Messaging system put to other uses it was very interesting proposition.