Back when my husband was still my fiancé, he told me he didn't see much point in having a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). That Christmas, I bought him one. Once he realized that a PDA was more than just an electronic calendar, suddenly his device was an integral part of him to the extent that it was seldom more than a few feet away from him. In fact, for a while he was an Adobe Community Expert for Mobile and Devices.

Which just goes to show that just because you can't initially imagine how a new technology can be useful to you, that doesn't mean that the technology is not useful. We've often seen articles on why people don't like social media, the basics of how to use Twitter or Facebook, or even how to integrate your RIA into social media. What I haven't seen so much of are accounts of specifically what people are doing with social media and how it benefits them.

The cool thing about having a column called "Developer Diary" is that I feel it lets me share my personal story with you. So for the next few weeks I'm going to tell you what I'm doing with social media and how it is benefitting me. This week, I am going to talk about Twitter.

What Is Twitter

Most people will tell you that Twitter is a microblogging site that lets people express a thought in 140 characters or less. On Twitter, you can follow people you are interested in to receive these thoughts, and people can follow you to receive yours. Hueyen Tue Dao put together a great tutorial on the basics of how to use Twitter.

To me, Twitter is a nourishing informational soup. Sure, a lot of it is broth, but there are plenty of meaty chunks. Disclaimer: I am actually a pescetarian, so my reference to "meaty chunks" is metaphorical. In fact, when I eat soup, I like to sink my teeth into a large hunk of carrot. Large diameter carrots are actually hard to find in South Mississippi. My quest to relocate is another reason I like Twitter, but I'll cover that later in this post.

Twitter Thick and Chunky

The first thing I do in the morning when I sit down in front of the computer is to read through the most recent tweets, clicking the links in them that look the most interesting. I usually don't stop to read these links, but instead keep opening these links until my desktop is littered with a panoply of browser instances, each with a piece of information that 140 characters or less convinced me I might care about.

These links came from people who I decided to follow, for one reason or another, so the chances are that these links contain information I'll find relevant. Let me talk a minute about how I pick the people I follow.

About the soup

A couple of years ago, I went to the eLearning Guild's DevLearn conference. The keynote speaker was a man named Frans Johansson, the author of The Medici Effect. His main point was that most truly innovative ideas come from an intersection between ideas that appear to be completely unrelated. One of my favorite examples from the book is of Eastgate, a shopping center and office block in Harare, Zimbabwe, that stays climate controlled year round without using conventional heating or cooling. Instead, it uses biomimicry principles inspired by African termites.

I have no idea whether I'll ever achieve anything so amazingly innovative, but I try to give myself a good shot by exposing myself to a variety of different ideas. I habitually jump from window to window, sometimes only reading a portion of an article before skipping to the next, only to return on a later pass. This means that I have a bunch of ideas, many of which are only related tangentially, colliding in my mind like quality ingredients in a mouth-watering bowl of Tom Yum (or yum yum, as I call it). This is why I think the posts that come from people on my "ShortStops" list (people whose interests are only tangentially related to mine) are some of the most valuable for me. They provide me with information I would never think to search for–information I don't know might be useful.

By the same token, it can be difficult to stay relevant even in the subjects I take an active interest in–right now that would be things like Flex, Flash, Design, and eLearning. By far, most of the people I follow share an interest in one or more of these subjects. The tweets from these folks help me spot the most important trends in subjects I care about. These people provide the giant chunks of tofu that make the soup so filling.

Getting the most chunky goodness

You can't have good soup without good ingredients, so finding the right people to follow is going to determine whether you'll find the soup worth the time. I find that the best way to find people to follow is to look at the people who follow me. If someone is following me, it's probably because they think that my tweets are likely to be worth whatever time they spend reading them. That means there's a fairly good chance that they have at least one interest in common with me.

Not coincidentally, the things I tweet are all things that I am interested in. If the people who follow me think what I said was interesting, they may well tweet it to their followers, some of whom will also be my followers, but some of whom will not. So my tweets go out not just to my own followers, but to other people who have interests in common with them. Some of these other people may well find my tweets interesting enough that they will follow me, and at that point I have the opportunity to check out if this person could be a valuable source of information.

By the same token, I keep an eye out for posts that have been retweeted that I find especially interesting, because the person who originally tweeted (is a person who tweets a twit?) may be someone who is worth following.

What about the Entrée?

OK, that was a bad pun, even for me. But I'm enjoying my afternoon of Thai food, even if I'm only having it in my imagination. And, honestly, if you try to order Tom Yum as an appetiser at Kim Long's they will pretend not to understand you and bring your two entrées at the same time, since you're obviously such a pig that you can't be satisfied with one perfectly good meal. No, I have never personally tried this, and why do you ask? OK, I have.

But of course, the main reason many people sign up to Twitter in order to gain entrée with people they might not otherwise have access to. I, personally, am not comfortable with calling up or emailing someone I've met only once (or not at all) just to "stay in touch." Twitter provides the opportunity for you to get a sense of someone you'd like to forge a closer relationship without the "risk" of just picking up the phone or emailing them. Instead, you're reading regular updates of exactly what they feel comfortable putting out. This can help you figure out whether they'd be open to a direct contact and maybe even when the best or most appropriate moment is for that contact.

By the same token, you can give your followers a sense of who you are that might not be appropriate in a one-on-one email exchange. It's kind of like when you have a loud discussion of how someone with 50 items should not be in the 20 items or less line when you're in the grocery store. No, you're not directly talking to that person in front of you in line. But they (hopefully) get the message. Tweets about your personal life should probably not make up the bulk of what you say if you're trying to build a professsional network. But they help give your followers a sense of who you are and if you're approachable in the same way smiling at someone in the hall or completely looking through them signals the same thing in an office.

Would you like bread with that?

You're probably wondering if you can make money by being on Twitter. Yes. You can.

I recently signed a contract for a sweet one-month gig for one of the types of work I've been wanting to have on my resumé. I would never have known about this gig if someone I know on Twitter hadn't tweeted that he didn't have time to do it, and was anyone else interested.

I also happen to be in the middle of a quest to find a job somewhere other than Mississippi. I grew up in Mississippi and I like Mississippi. We just got an excellent curry house here. But it's not exactly a hot bed of RIA development right now. So I subscribe to feeds from several recruiters where they tweet their current job openings. Honestly, I haven't found these any more useful than having my resume on dice.com, but you never know, so I still check out likely looking links.

What I have found useful are the tweets of people who are on Twitter who happen to also be recruiters or in some way involved with hiring people. Usually they are a font of knowledge about the hiring process and what their clients are looking for. At the very least, they have something more interesting to say than "Company XYZ is looking for the best Flex dev ever." It's probably not wise of me to say this publicly, but I have had some interviews recently from exactly this sort of contact. It remains to be seen whether or not any of these will lead to an actual job offer, but so far I have found Twitter to be useful in my job hunt.

Trimming the fat

If you're using it like I do, Twitter can take up a considerable amount of time. It's not so much that you're spending a lot of time reading the tweets themselves, but sometimes reading all the interesting pages they link to can take a while. So I don't like to follow anyone who "bloats" my feed and makes it harder for me to see the quality information I want. Yes, I know you can use Twitter clients to sort the people you follow, but I really like the spontaneous quality of the unsorted tweets, so I'm not going to use one right now.

Some people like to use an automated tool such as TwitCleaner to automatically clean up their feed. The problem I have with this is that it focuses on things that I notice easily (tweeting the same thing over and over) or people who aren't tweeting much, and hence aren't bloating my feed. The people I want to remove are the ones who I can't find a good reason to continue following.

So I went through the list of people I follow and put nearly everyone into one of 10 Twitter Lists. This made me validate to myself why I was following each one of these people. It also pointed out to me how important the Profile page was in helping me to make this decision, so I made sure to put some useful information on mine.

Another reason I put together these lists is that I figure if you're reading this you have a higher than average chance of being interested in following the people I follow. Since I've organized them into categories that make sense to me, this may help you identify ones that will be useful to you. So go on, you know you want to. Check out my lists.

Read Part 2: Facebook

Read more from Amy Blankenship.