I regularly mention Twitter to colleagues and friends. Most of the time, their reaction is “uh? I already do not have time to read blogs, why do you think I should waste time on Twitter as well?”

That reminds me of the time I was trying to tell my acquaintances about blogging or even (a long time ago) about this new thing called “the internet”. No, Twitter is not that useful. It is not going to save world hunger or give you a new job. But still, you should give it a shot. Here is my attempt to organize my thoughts a bit.

In theory, on Twitter, you are supposed to tell about what you are doing right now. For many, it means telling the world about the coffee they are drinking and other trivial things. This is not how I use it.

There are 3 types of people that I follow:

• friends and colleagues: Twitter offers me a way to keep in touch with them even though I don’t meet them in person frequently or even call them. From these people, I enjoy both work-related tweets (“I got XYZ to work, it rocks!”) and mundane ones (“My little one is just one year old!”). Twitter is a low-friction way of talking with them, what Jeffrey Fredrick calls a replacement for a beer. Often, I miss what they say when I was not connected but that does not matter. Twitter is not a chat system. Sometimes, I respond to this type of people, or even DM them (ie. send a direct message). Anyway, as long as I get news occasionnally, I’m happy.
• thought leaders and people I want to hear more: many figures in the domains I’m interested in now have Twitter accounts. Often, I already read their blogs, but that is not enough. Blogs are infrequent matters (less and less frequent as they embrace Twitter), and only well-formed thoughts appear on them. This is all good, but Twitter is where they talk about their day-to-day work. Sometimes, they would post half-formed thoughts (“what would happen if we stopped doing X and started doing Y instead?”). Sometimes, they would tell short things that do not deserve a full-fledged blog post (“Theory X is probably the most interesting thing I heard about this year”) or give links to page (“Check out this article — I recommend it”). Very occasionally, I would respond, or, more commonly, RT (re-tweet) their post so that my own followers are aware of things I find interesting. Like the others, the people I consider thought leaders also tell about their life. That is not so interesting, but unfortunately it is not easy to filter them out. That’s is the biggest drawback.
• competitors: in a way similar to the friends and colleagues, I am interested to learn what they are working on. Obviously, I can only learn about what they are willing to tell. Still, it can be interesting. And over time some of them tend to the “friends & colleagues” category.

Over the months, I have built relationships with some people, learned the opinions of thought leaders on Fit, ask for help in selecting a mobile phone, followed Uncle Bob’s progress on Fitnesse/Slim, publicize various events that I was involved in… and arrange for a Twitter board to be displayed during a conference.

All these things can, in theory, be done via blogs or social networks sites. But the low friction of Twitter makes it so much more easy to use.

My advice is: get your own Twitter account and follow people you know. If you have things to tell that are not roo mundane, by all means, tell them. And do regularly clean up by stopping to follow posters that have a high signal/noise ratio.

Feel free to follow me, if I meet your own criteria for Twitter.

I am a fresh Twitter user, but I thought this was a good idea and I arranged it for the Valtech Days Paris conference, which took place last week. I got approval from the Great Organizer, a spare laptop from the sysadmins, and my colleague Sadek agreed to implement the client.

Here are some implementation details.

Material used:

• an internet connection in the conference, preferably through wifi, as cables take a lot of space
• a spare laptop; make sure that you can affort to waste it, as it might easily get stolen (ours didn’t); also, it needs to be able to run a decent browser with the appropriate plugin and should have a wifi card
• a video projector
• participants that use Twitter (no need to have their Twitter IDs)
• a web client able to display an RSS Feed reasonably cleanly and refresh it frequently — you will probably might need to code this client yourself; in our case, it was implemented in SilverLight (an added bonus) by Sadek in a day or so; another option is to use RSS screen saver, but none I found suited my needs (tried NuParadigm RSS Screensaver -too much space wasted-, rsssaver -can only display one post at a time-, and RSS More -ugly and there is no way to avoid duplicating the post title in the content-)
• to get around a strange behavior, we had to pipe the RSS feed through FeedBurner

An important step is to figure out the proper keywords that people will use during the conference. In the case of Valtech Days, it was “valtechdays” and “valtech days”. If they are not discriminating enough, then you might have to figure one out and tell participants about it. A convention seems to be to use tags preceded by a pound sign, for example “#valtechdays”. However, it is simpler for conference participants if they don’t have to remember the pound sign.
Once you have your keywords, test them with Twitter Search. Then, keep a copy the URL to the RSS feed provided by Twitter. You should end up with something like http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=valtechdays+OR+%22valtech+days%22 (make sure that the URL you get contains %22 in place of the double-quotes).

I am fairly pleased with the result. Posts seemed to take 10-15 mins to be picked up by our client; not great but acceptable. My main concern is that few people actually posted on Twitter at all (with 300 participants, I am personally responsible for more than half the posts during the conference). That said, there was always a couple of people watching the feed — a bit like watching TV. I also noticed that the cameraman, who was there to make a ‘special live report’ on the conference, actually spent quite some time filming the twitter feed ;-)

In my case, I used Twitter to 1) tell about sessions I was following, 2) give interesting information to conference participants, 3) provide additional information on sessions I presented.

Last note: if you cannot get a special client for your feed, you could use Google Reader, as it can at least refresh itself automatically. Of course, this is a very temporary solution, as you probably do not want to stay logged on a machine that can swiftly be stolen.