About the title: I wanted to write a post & call it "10 trusted ways to Twitter Ninjadom" but that would have been linkbait! *wink wink* There are already dime-a-dozen posts about Twitter but still I couldn't resist this! Hope somebody finds some value out of this... :D Twitter for me is blog, IM, SMS, social bookmarking & news ticker -- all rolled into one. I don't think this was the way it was envisioned to be but guess nobody is complaining! From dabbler to devout fanboy: I heard about Twitter for the first time in early 2007 & signed up. To answer the question - "What are you doing?", frequently, seemed too narcissist a thing to do for me (it helped that hardly any of my friends were on Twitter at that time!) Later I read that it was growing rapidly but was still having uptime issues with blogs like Techcrunch frequently questioning its architecture. Meanwhile, I had signed up for FriendFeed & was there lurking. I found a lot of cool stuff with some very involved & intelligent discussion going on on various topics but found it difficult to jump in and participate. Late 2008 & Twitter was growing, the architecture issues seemed to be sorted out & Mumbai 26/11 happened. That was when I really got hooked to the medium & I have abandoned FriendFeed for some time now! Another casualty is the Google Reader shared items. I find more value in sharing stuff with my followers in Twitter than my Google friends (FriendFeed can pull my Google Reader shared items & post to Twitter but I prefer direct posting). Twitter seems to provide me a way to:

• meet interesting people sharing similar ideas
• ask the occasional question
• have a timeline for what i have been doing over time
• share interesting & current stuff

C'mon, where else can you casually chat up with SRK? (On his blog maybe, but does he have one? And not everybody has the nerve/time/patience to write a blog these days). The USP is its simplicity -- making the entry barrier very low. Also, unlike RSS, there is no point in trying to keep up. It's much better to drink from the firehose (although I do RSS subscribe to people to who's tweets I don't wanna miss) The Ways I've seen people using it (other than answering - what they are doing?):

• Public IM - People chat with others tweeps almost as if they are on IM. The followers get to spy on these tweets & in the process, could also stumble upon somebody interesting to follow.
• Marketing tool - People like Guy Kawasaki & Leo Babauta use Twitter (from what I've seen lately) to publicize their webpage/blog by posting links, asking for suggestions etc.
• PR handler - Large corporates are using Twitter as a PR tool & as a way to capture the pulse of the Twitterati. e.g. Infosys
• Breaking news source - Twitter is the place where breaking news is first appearing with first person accounts, Twitpics taking the cake
• Means to share cool, useful stuff - The followers get to see all the interesting stuff that the tweeter dug up while surfing the Net

Other interesting aspects:

1. Retweeting - I like retweeting since it's an easy way to reshare a tweet which I think might be useful to my followers. It also gives credit to the original poster & gives me a chance to interact with that person.
2. To reciprocate a 'follow' or not - Some people use tools like Socialtoo to autofollow their followers. This could be one way of not losing followers but I don't do it. There is an interesting discussion here about this & I like what the author says. My 'follow' decision is usually based on whether the Tweeter is -
   1. Thought leader
   2. Celebrity
   3. IRL friend sharing interesting life tidbits
   4. having shared interests
   5. belonging to the same city (thus providing a local aspect to tweets)
   6. a news breaker
   7. plane damn interesting :)

Other than all this, the tweeter should have a good SNR ratio & there should be enough bandwidth in my Twitter stream to effectively listen! No point in superficially listening to somebody! As an added bonus:

• What is Twitter being used for
• Twitter tools

I guess that's about what I wanted to say about that! Twitter: Finally where less is more!