The title of this post is the question I asked myself many times.. before I used it myself that is.

For the first months of Twitter being talked about I deliberately kept away from it thinking that ‘micro-blogging’ was a complete waste of time. Who the hell would want to know if I’m going for a coffee or what page I’m interested in at the moment?.. turns out, quite a lot of people do actually.

I’ve been using Twitter through an application called Tweedeck for a couple of months now and I’ve really grown used to it taking up almost all of my second monitor space. I’ve discovered many reasons to use Twitter and I thought I’d share my thoughts on twitter here;

It’s not an IM

I hate IM programs, msn, yahoo, gtalk and all the rest because they just suck time away from you while you wait for someone to respond. I’m a fast typist so it’s painful to wait 3 minutes watching the “soandso is typing..” only to get a “yeah, I know!” in the message window.

They’re distracting too, I hate having a “tiddly-dum” noise happening all the bleedin time while I’m trying to watch something. Even though I’m committed to the tv at the time, a “tiddly-dum” will cause me to come to the computer to see what it was. 9 times out of 10 it could have waited but like brown on finger, it had to be investigated.

I’ve switched off all my IM stuff now and my productivity has massively increased! That’s why I like twitter, it’s like a thought catcher. It allows you to put up in less than 140 characters what’s on your mind without needing an immediate response.

If someone asks me a question via Twitter, it doesn’t make a flashing button on the taskbar appear demanding immediate attention. Instead, I can see it when the tweetdeck window gets the focus on my many many windows open.

You can download tweetdeck here, I really recommend using it. This is what my screen with twitter window looks like.

I use 3 columns. One for replies, one for the whole tweet stream and one for direct messages.

It can change the world (in 48 hours)

I donated some money to an organisation that wants to build a new classroom for a school in Tanzania. It was set up by http://tweetsgiving.org during the thanksgiving run up in America. The whole point was to raise 10,000 dollars in 48 hours by using twitter to promote it.

It was an amazing idea and executed wonderfully, people were retweeting messages about it all through the 2 days and before the time was up, 10 grand was raised just from the kindness of tweeters.

It’s not full of spam (yet)

I have seen very little spamming going on with it which is such a change for a 2.0 web thingy. Usually the first thing any popular company does is switch on the money making adverts or get bombarded with cialis (ab)users.

There are a couple of advertising options open to twitter users but not by twitter itself. Magpie is one of them, I used it myself recently to promote some ebay listings using keywords like ipod and ebay. It generated a lot of click thrus and coincidence or not, I sold out of everything I advertised. Just before Christmas too! woohoo

It’s organic networking

I really like this part of it, it’s not like other places where you have to join someone and jump through some hoops to be part of their group. You can just click their follow link and get their tweets in your stream of all tweets. If you think they self promote too much, just unfollow and they’re gone!

You get to see what people are like a lot easier than by reading their blog, just 140 characters forces the person to not over-edit or revise their text.

From this you can see who you want to deal with and not be bowled over by a slick sales page or well crafted and heavily edited authority article. Straight to the brain is the game. I love it.

You find out what’s happening straight away

Just seeing a stream of tweets going by you can quickly pick up a repeated phrase, when the Mumbai attacks happened I knew about it before Sky news that was on in the background!

Shopper gets trampled on Black Friday sales in Walmart? I heard it on twitter first.

It really is a way to get a pulse on the world and especially useful if you’re a prolific blogger who’s hungry for news to post. If you’re early on breaking news or big things to happen then you’re on to a stumbleupon golden egg page.

If you need to know something, like, right now

This is fast becoming one of my favourite things about twitter. The ability to throw a question out there and have it answered within a few minutes or see it get retweeted (re-broadcasting the question to ones own network of followers) is just amazing.

My partner wanted to know how to attach a zipper to a home made woolen cardigan. I had no idea but I thought someone out there in the twitterverse (you’ll get used to these twitterisms) might know or at least, know someone who would know.

One of my followers saw the question and broadcasted it to her own network, within a couple of minutes I had a message with a link to a picture of exactly what to do. That’s the first time my pc has got some praise from ‘her indoors’

You can use the wp-twitip-id plugin!

Ok shameless self promotion here but you can take advantage of the wp-twitip-id plugin which allows you to add a twitter username field to your comment form on your wordpress blog and display a “follow me” link or image next to the comment authors name.

Another reason for people to leave good comments on your site!

You can download wp-twitip-id plugin here

It’s got a really cool api

API or Applications Programming Interface is how so many cool widgets and gadgets get made by the geeky. It’s a way for developers to interact with the twitter server and pull loads of interesting information about the twitterverse.

There will be more and more applications coming out for twitter in the near future, there are already some incredible 2.0 web applications that give a sneak peak of what the internet of the ’10s will be.

Follow me on twitter if you haven’t already and get up to the second updates on my plugins and offers

Follow Me@commentluv