Blog Journeys of a Lifelong Learner

Twitter is a popular microblogging platform at the moment.

Many users (or potential users) of the service are confused as to how to use it.

Twitter is presented as a means for answering the question "what are you doing?" but is really primarily a tool for real-time communication and search.

The most effective users of Twitter are doing these things:

• Posting regularly.
• Posting meaningful comments.
• Linking to other web resources.
• Participating in conversations pertaining to topics of personal interest.
• Using a client (such as TweetDeck, HootSuite, or Twitterrific).

The most ineffective (and frustrated) users of Twitter are doing these things:

• Registering without a clear intention for using the service.
• Posting meaningless content.
• Following too few users or too many users.
• Becoming distracted by Twitter when work should be accomplished.
• Treating Twitter as a one-way advertising platform.
• Using the default web interface.

The trends of real-time search and microblogging are likely to remain important for a long time, though individual services such as Twitter could quickly disappear.

The Twitter search provides an opportunity to find out what web users around the world are saying about a particular topic at any point in time.

Twitter may be a fad, but real-time search is growing in importance.

One question remains to be answered: will Twitter ever make money? It is amazing that acquiring excessive venture capital and building a service of millions of free accounts without any planned revenue stream is considered a viable web startup plan.

Chris Pearson (developer of Thesis for Wordpress) recently shared some interesting thoughts on Twitter and the web in general: