There's been lots of musings about Twitter and whether it has any any value. Is it just a social networking site where people post what they are doing and keep in touch with friends, similar to Facebook, or something more?
I used to think it had no value at all, why would you want to "follow people" on twitter. It sounded slightly stalker-ish but with the difference of the cyperspace medium. A place where you could legitimately "stalk" your favourite celebrities, such as Stephen Fry, Lilly Allen, Demi Moore, etc, to name but a few. However I couldn't quite grasp the concept, that I would want to be interested in what Lilly Allen was up to, or know what Stephen Fry ate for breakfast that morning! I feel the same about Facebook status updates, even though I'm a Facebook fan.
So before the advent of Cam23, I decided I should see what Twitter was all about, even if only for my Continued Professional Development, and possibly to say ok, been there, looked and didn't buy the T-Shirt, as it were. After attending the University Libraries course on Twitter, I thought maybe I should give it a go, even though I thought I would de-activate my account within a month. Trying to use Twitter, I found "tweeting" quite hard at first, as I still couldn't grasp its "reason to be". The language and posting was very confusing in the first instant, ie. "tweet", "re-tweet", the mystifying "tweeple", "following", and the incessant use of # and @ symbols. I have to say, I still find it confusing but perseverance seems to be paying off.
So what makes people use twitter? Stephen Fry is quoted as saying, "It's not called social change or heavy debate, it's called twitter. I mean the clue is in the name." Which leads me to believe he uses it for social networking. This community aspect is obviously important to alot of people, for example, Demi Moore said, “...Don’t know how this community of positivity was created but I’m grateful to have found you and thrilled to be a part of this."
For me, it's this "community" idea that makes Twitter very useful and valuable. Its great for intereacting with other people, especially other librarians, information providers, or organisations. For my Continuing Professional Development, its becoming the key place I look for news, strategies, what other librarians are doing, networking, training courses via CILIP lists, asking advice, etc, where as Facebook I use for keeping in touch with friends. The more I personally used Twitter over the last 3 months, the more I find I'm coming around to using it for the library and the possibility of setting up a library Twitter account. I certainly never thought I would say that about Twitter. So watch this space....
Setting up a library account on Twitter would be another method of getting news and information out to the students, and retweeting useful messages from the UL and ebooks@cambridge will save me time, emailing them. I did wonder about the need for having both Twitter and Facebook accounts in a library setting, and was reminded about what I said in my first blog post, that if people work in different ways and use different media, then we need to move with the times and be proactive at getting our information out to our users in the medium they find most accessibile. In that case, all I need to do in future is find out how to link the library Facebook page and Twitter account together and bingo! just wait for them to be used.
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