I currently use twitter for personal messages — where I am, what I am eating, etc. I admit, it is half for me and half for my friends.
I know of a person who uses it exclusively for technical updates instead: “can now update templates in X without validation errors”, “figured out a way to use CURL to do Y”, “switched to RC2 for Z”. When I think about it, this is extremely useful. Here is a real life example: Louis can’t figure out why he can’t properly configure the SMTP daemon on centos*. Imagine if he could search the tweets/feeds of his friends for keywords like email, SMTP, or centos and see if anyone he knows or his friends’ know has dealt with this issue or a related field like SMTP on *nix. While a little Googling should come before harassment, when you’re really stuck, it’d be nice to have an option between Google and a post to a random forum.
I know some tech people despise trendy things like twitter, but maybe the jaded could be convinced to use a tech twitter clone when it is repackaged as something to:
- inform your resume. You have 300 140-char msgs about all the little stuff you wrestled with that you forgot about.
- help you find friendly, trusted advice when you are stuck
- show everyone how l33t you are because you work with so many different tools/apps/frameworks/languages
- help employers recruit full-time or ‘holy crap, this is broken’ consultants
I’m sure it’s already out there somewhere.
*If you’ve done this successfully, please ping me!