It's about flocking. And togetherness.

Like many of the Things, I have multiple twitter accounts that I maintain for different purposes.   As with my blogs and delicious, I have both personal and 'professional' accounts, as well as one for the library and one for the Rothermere American Institute.   My personal one I use in a manner somewhere in between Facebook status update and blog - more stream-of-consciousness than both - as well as for sharing links to interesting things.  My 'professional' one is more passive - I use it to follow library/web-related tweeters of interest, and when I tweet myself it tends to be passing things on, retweeting or sharing links.   The VHL and RAI twitter accounts are used much like our Facebook pages, as another place to disseminate news, and our blog feed posts there automatically too via a third party application called twitterfeed.   I also make use of the 'send to twitter' function from delicious to tweet our new saved websites, and keep an eye on the twitter streams of other Oxford libraries in case they post things of interest to retweet (and save me writing the same thing out myself!).   In this way, with our blog and its RSS feed pointing to our website and Facebook page and Twitter, I can write one single news update and have it publish in a variety of locations, all automatically, so that our readers can receive that news in whatever way suits them best.   As Emma said in her 23 Things post about social networking, with no duplication of effort, you get maximum reach via duplication of content.

As a consumer, I find with twitter that it is like the internet at high speed - so much coming in so fast and if you're away from it for any period of time the amount to catch up on is overwhelming.   However I don't view twitter as for anything other than the up-to-the-minute ephemeral things, and don't worry if I miss stuff, unlike my RSS feeds.   Just like RSS feeds though, I've found you need to be selective about who you follow to avoid getting deluged, and as most sites now offer both newsfeeds and twitter feeds you can choose which way you want to keep up with any individual site.   It's also a great way to get a digested overview of what's going on, and in many cases now I first hear of breaking news stories via the twitter chat rather than conventional means - I was looking at pictures of the Sydney dust storm in September via twitter the night before there was any mention of it on the BBC, for example.   This is where hashtags really come into their own, along with the trending topics, and you can get a real sense of community or shared experience if you 'watch' unfolding events on twitter.   I remain rather baffled though as to why Justin Bieber seems to be almost permanently trending...  Anyway, I've subscribed to the #ox23 hashtag in Tweetdeck (which I use to manage my multiple twitter accounts) and am enjoying seeing all the 23ers popping up and in many cases taking their first steps into the twitterverse.