I think I have procrastinated long enough in trying out the whole Twitter phenomenon, so I’m giving it a try. It’s been all over the news lately, apparently receiving $48 million worth of free publicity in the last month. So far, here are my impressions

  • It's super easy to use, and really easy to get set up with an account. I love the fact that your entire life must be reduced to a 160-character bio.
  • A Twitter client is the way to go. I haven't settled on any one particular client yet, but I can tell that it is a much easier way to use Twitter than through the web interface. So far I've used Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, and Tweetie (Mac only).
  • Spammers are everywhere, so don't automatically following everyone who follows you. My first follower was some "girl" from a dating site of some kind. Check out a person's page before you follow them. It is way to easy to fill up your homepage with a bunch of updates you don't actually care about.
  • Don't obsess over getting people to follow you. All you can do is post about what you are interested in, and hope that others are interested. "If you build it, [they] will come."
  • Something I learned from using Facebook: Don't use Twitter to update your facebook status more than about 2x per day. You'll start to flood people's newsfeeds and that's just annoying. Twitter is supposed to be updated that frequently. Facebook really isn't.

So, I’ve only been on for a few days, but those are my tidbits of wisdom for anyone looking to start along the Twitter path.