Twitter: why I drink from the hose, and how.

Lately I have been having a lot of conversations with my friends about Twitter. Many of them already know what micro blogging is, so most of the conversations have tended to revolve around our perceived value of the service, or lack thereof. Perhaps an old and worn topic for some, it got fresh coat of paint when BBC reported earlier this week that a short-study in the US had found that 40% of all tweets were babble.

Since Twitter is so often described as a social network, it does not surprise me that most of friends compare the service to Facebook. In so doing, they choose to opt out of the service without giving it a try. After all, many of them reason, why join yet another social network when Facebook already meets all their needs. That would be like having two radios tuned to the same channel, right?

Not quite, at least not in my case.

Quenching the thirst.

Twitter has become a valuable part of how I gather and sift through news about Africa. The African digerati have taken to the service and are using it to spread the type of news that paints a more nuanced impression than that old caricature of a continent entrenched in poverty. Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than the amount of information being shared about Africa's tech front. Twitter provides a lively stream of information about startups, events, relevant blog posts and encouraging applications of existing technologies.

Most of that news hardly ever makes it into the mainstream media, and when it does, it is usually sidelined by other stories.

Take Maker Faire Africa for example. This free two-day event that celebrated African innovation was held in Accra Ghana this week. Did you read about that when you turned to your regular source of news information on Africa? Sure, BBC World Service covered the event in its Digital Planet program, but it came in second to a discussion on Sexting.

Another announcement via Twitter this week was the release of version 0.1 of Swift, a free open source toolset for situational awareness that can be used to enhance realtime reporting in crisis events, among other possible applications. That was announced about a day ago.

Contrast that information with the predictable coverage from the prominent dailies today. The Independent discusses tribal politics in Uganda. The New Vision reports on an MP's marriage. The Monitor highlights President Museveni's latest directive.

Clearly, politics trumps all other matters as far as the press is concerned. And perhaps it should, but with tools like Twitter I get to have a wider selection of the kind of information that comes my way about Uganda and the rest of Africa, and with it a more wholesome sense of the life and opportunities therein.

Drinking with Care

That said, there are times when using the service feels like drinking from a hose. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information on tap, and to be all over the place with my own tweets. To keep the value I have found in the service, and to make it easier for others to find value in what I share, I have a couple of strategies to regulate the flow of information to and from me.

It's not really about friendship

Facebook does a very good job of keeping me in touch with friends and acquaintances. I do not need Twitter for that, so the nature of the relationship is not really part of my criteria for choosing whether to follow a person or organisation or company. Instead, I focus on whether I am interested in the information they share.

It's easy to separate interests

Twitter will let you have more than one account, so if you have a blog about beekeeping but find yourself going on and on about software development as well, it is possible to present the two separately if you wish to. This is especially useful when there is little overlap between interests.

In my case, I keep my personal Twitter account separate from this blog's account. That way, I don't have to follow up a comment about my passing interest in 18th century British signage with a completely unrelated tweet about getting the most out of low internet bandwidth in Africa. I know that we are all accustomed to some randomness, but on the Internet it can really get confusing and just downright weird.

And, having a unique account for this blog allows me to gather related feeds into one stream. This is especially handy if I want to catch up on only African related news.

Is there overlap between the people I follow on the two accounts? Yes, but not so much that it makes the whole exercise pointless.

Switch off Twitter

When I first got the Tweetie client, I was Twitter all the time, and drowning and my productivity was tanking. There is only so much that I need to know every day. Now I check it once every couple of hours, depending on how busy I am. It also helps that most of the African content comes through very late in the day. Benefits of living in a different time zone.

From Streams to Rivers

As I learn more about Jaiku, Indenti.ca and other microblogging platforms it seems all the more inevitable that someone will figure out a way of fusing them all into one large data stream, if it has not happened already. That will only make it all the more imperative that we all have ways of finding our preferential signals in all that noise.

And yourself?

So that is how I use Twitter. It will certainly evolve as my needs for information change and other ways of sharing news come to the fore. But enough about me. I'm curious about what your take on Twitter and other microbloging platforms. Are you using them? If so, how?