Why I Love/Hate Twitter

original photo via CC Champan - Flickr

Damn it twitter! Such a great tool but sometimes fails miserably when you need it. Much of the advanced functionality (i.e. tracking) seems to never work. Tracking allows you to receive messages based on keywords you are “tracking,” very similar to Google news alerts. This is very useful for many obvious reasons, but unfortunately does not exist anymore?

The reason I decided to do some re-configuring of my twitter settings today was because I was missing @replies (@replies are messages sent in response to one of your messages). The only way you can monitor @replies is in the replies tab in twitter. I don’t check this everyday or even every week because it’s just not on my radar screen. To solve this problem, I wanted to get email alerts or sms of the replies so I could track them better, but….not available yet. Darn! RSS is also a problem because it requires a reader that can authenticate feeds - what? do they even exist? So how did I get around this? I took 10 seconds and signed up at twittermail. Twittermail will send you an email of any @replies you recieve, so simple.

I am now following more people (sorry for the spam blast to your inboxes today)  for one reason, I want the ability to mine my network for keywords in the future. I can turn the device updates on or off based on news I want immediately, vs. stuff I can troll later. Which means I can follow as meany people as I want and filter the real-time “noise” easily.  This alone is a reason everyone should be on twitter. The bells and whistles are coming…it will only get better. Until then though I still have love/hate relationship ;).

BTW you can follow me here http://twitter.com/gtuvell

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