I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of months now, and I have to reluctantly admit that Twitter is growing on me (sorry, Tim! :).
I was very skeptical about wanting to update it at first – nobody is interested in the minutiae of my life. There is certainly plenty of gimmick value in it (see Twittervision).
But it has started to show its benefits in a distributed development environment. You can get some updates on what people have been doing while you’ve been off-line (due to the different timezones), and you can drop notes on what you’re working on. It seems to make the working environment feel a bit "more real". And it has paid off a couple of times as I started to work on something I didn’t need to, or tried to locate someone at a conference 🙂
The key is that you get what you expect – anyone dropping these sorts of incessant updates to email or an IRC channel would look pretty foolish – but for Twitter, it’s just what you expect!
I’m still unsure of how it will scale up to a large number of friends. I’ve already had to scale back the communication I get from it (I use Twitterific, and have set it to Growl notifications only – no pop-ups). I only lasted a day getting IM tweets, and I’m pretty sure it’s never going on my phone. The annoyance factor needs to stay down.
What I suspect will happen is that as it gets too much, I’ll need to start ignoring friends that have the worst signal-to-noise ratio. The ones that not only tell you what they are doing, but what they are still doing 🙂
So, still thinking it’s a little silly, but going to keep it up and see how it goes for a while longer.
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Brett Porter 
OK, I’ll admit Twitter is also growing on me, and know that I haven’t turned off the SMS messaging part of it, I program my phone not to make noise, but I get notifications I’ve also subscribed to a lot of people, some people I haven’t met.
What I haven’t figured out is how to segment updates. It would be valuable to be able to define your own twitter topics, and if people could not only subscribe to your feed but to one or more subtopics within the feed.
I’m convinced that a good development team uses twitter. I agree with what you said about timezones. All too often (and especially at the ASF) you don’t realize when people are getting to work. Twitter reminds you that the world is much larger than a few timezones.
Good blog update, especially the Rich Text Editor for comments BTW.
I’ve got the bug too, it’s still not annoying being “wify” basically the only person I follow (that sounded stalkerish)
Now that I’ve been alienated from the IRC channel due to corporate policy I wonder if there would be a “Maven Twitter” of sorts. What about adding it as a Continuum notifier?
Would you mind having a new follower?
Hi Alex – sure add away and I’ll add you back. I’m brettporter. I’ve thought about a Continuum notifier too – might be a bit annoying, but I’d love to see it anyway 🙂