Twitter

I still find it hard to see any possible use for Twitter in a work situation. At yesterday's presentation I learned that it can be used to keep in touch with year abroad students, which is an interesting idea I hadn't thought about.

While searching for any interesting people to follow on twitter, however, I came across another use: replacing rss for more transient announcements. The University has a twitter stream which has frequent updates with news and events, eg lectures. Some newspapers do the same with news snippets. So I guess I might be using it to receive, rather than send out stuff myself. Though it is quite fun to post things yourself occasionally. For example, every day I post how many links I have in my current chain (see Don't break the chain!). Just the right degree of public pressure to force me to keep it up.

And who knows, perhaps some other opportunities for using it will turn up in the future. All we can do is try and learn and wait.

RSS or Email?

One possible use of news feeds is information dissemination within the university (or any other institution). At the moment a lot of emails are being sent out, many of which are not that relevant (though I think this has improved over the past few years). Such emails clog up your inbox, and might distract from really important mails that get lost in the deluge of information.

RSS feeds, on the other hand, can be split into different channels according to topics. If I want to get information about research seminars in computer science (I don't get this now, because I'm not affiliated to the department), I simply subscribe to that respective feed. However, I would probably opt out of some research seminars in my own department or school which I then don't have to hear about. By being more selective, I can reduce my exposure to irrelevant information, and save much time while still getting more relevant information than before: by choosing feeds that I'm not in the email-target audience for. A win-win situation.

So what's stopping us? Habit. Lack of knowledge of alternatives. So let's hope many people will go on courses to learn about RSS feeds etc. I don't know what I'd do without Google Reader!