So, trying out twitterfeed, and thinking it appropriate to muse on my first few days of Twitter joy.

At SPA2009 Twitter was used extensively by a small number of delegates: the #spa2009 feed was projected on a wall in the public area, and seeing the reactions of the tweeters to the sessions - before, during and after - proved entertaining, compelling, and finally genuinely useful.

I like what Paul Dyson says about Twitter’s strength and function for him, and at SPA and afterwards the penny finally dropped for me. I’ve always been a fan of IRC at work - even when everyone’s in the same room, having a chatroom open where people can ask questions, announce checkins and builds, point out interesting discoveries and so on has made a lot of sense: you can ignore it if you want, but (depending on the tool) there’s just enough context to be able to keep an eye on what’s going on without losing the flow of what you’re doing (I suspect it’s a combination of a time threshold and having to divert attention away from a current task to actually do something like opening an email, that makes IRC better than anything I’ve found for the “background chatter” of work - this is nothing more than the cocktail party effect).

Particularly now, working independently here and there, I’m finding Twitter great for just that steady, low-attention, get-to-it-when-I’ve-time dripfeed of information, ideas and stimulus. If that’s what I want from it, then I’ll assume (golden rule and all that) that that’s what the people who follow me are also looking for: I thought about what this might mean about what and how I tweet. It’s interesting that a kind of mutual etiquette arises where, by and large, useful tweets outnumber the ephemeral.

Here are my rules-in-progress for what I’ll post, when and how.

1. Keep it relevant - interesting discoveries on the three or four things I know people know I do. Maybe the occasional musical tweet, though it’s likely that I’ll keep musical stuff on my blog (hah - that is, when I get around to writing any musical stuff on my blog)
2. News on my blog posts - all being well, automatic now thanks to twitterfeed
3. Retweets of cool stuff - passing on the goodness
4. Attribution essential - for retweeting, but forwarding (e.g.) Google Reader shared items and links from others’ blogs too

It’s tempting (and I can see people doing this) to tweet one’s every thought, passing feeling or mundane activity. Seriously - I don’t want to know if you’ve just eaten or taken the dogs for a walk (although if you’ve fed me enough useful tweets I’ll generally forgive you), so if your signal-to-noise ratio is low don’t be surprised if I stop following you.

Anyone else have any personal rules they follow when tweeting?