Twitter! What is it Good for!?

Even though twitter has been around what seems like forever in Internet time, I sometimes find myself explaining why it is useful to non-twitter users. I have a couple twitter accounts that I use for different reasons.

• A personal twitter account (see if you can use your librarian super powers to find it). I joined twitter when I saw many of my online friends join it too! I use this account to tweet about non-library pursuits. This is a way for me to stay in touch with some of my friends, as well as follow along with tweets about my hobbies. A few years ago some of my friends and I launched a satirical twitter account that got a book deal, so I feel like my 15 minutes of Internet Fame also were due to twitter. 
• A professional twitter account - I was a bit hesitant about setting up a more professional twitter account as part of my job with MWDL, but I ended up finding it really useful. I use this account to take notes on some of the conferences I've been to in the form of live tweeting, which would probably be fairly obnoxious if I did it on my personal account where my followers aren't used to getting that type of information from me. I've followed many people who work in digital libraries and digital preservation on my professional twitter account, so I've found it to be really useful as a system to alert me to articles published in the subject areas I'm interested in as well as some of the more informal conversations about library issues that pop up frequently on twitter. I also like to follow the twitter accounts from digital libraries that are similar to MWDL, as well as MWDL partners. I went from worrying that having two regular twitter accounts would be too much, to being happy that I use both accounts for different purposes. 

One other reason why I like twitter is that it isn't Facebook! I think I only have the attention span to be fully engaged in one social media platform at a time, and I much prefer twitter over Facebook, just because I enjoy the short form of the updates, easily being able to retweet things I find interesting, and it is much easier to track conversations through twitter like this one about OrphanWorks or LAMfutures. 

Do you follow MWDL on twitter?