Center for REALTOR® Technology Web Log

While at the Technology Directors conference here in Atlanta, GA I was asked by a few people in short order, what the value is in using twitter. If you don’t know what twitter is, in a feat of amazingly good timing the commoncraft.com team has come out with Twitter in Plain English, which does a great job of explaining the social aspects of the tool.

However, as Keith pointed out in his introductory post, I am a passionate about not only social media, but about lifehacking and Getting Things Done, so I use twitter in a outside-of-the-box way to make my life more productive, and I’ll share some of those ways with you below the jump. The key to all of this for me is that twitter has a hook into Google Chat (gTalk) which allows me to twitter directly from my IM client instead of pulling up a webpage, making it an incredibly easy data entry tool.

One of the neat ways I use my IM-enabled twitter is with Sandy, a free email personal assistant. Sandy has a twitter hook, so you can send information to her by a direct message in twitter to remind yourself to return a phone call or remind you of an appointment, and you can have her remind you via SMS, email, or even twitter by specifying it in your twitter message

For those of you who use GoogleCalendar (gcal), you know that the quickadd feature is quick and easy, but it still requires you to open up a web browser into gCal and enter it in. With twittercal it’s just an IM away: send d gcal meeting with keith tomorrow at 10 am to twitter, and ta-da, it shows up in your gCal. There’s also a similar hook for 30boxes, for you who prefer that tool instead.

Twitter is also extremely useful for posting notices, much like a community bulletin board, but specifically for your personal community - those people who have decided to follow your updates. One useful (and automated!) tool I use is twitterfeed, which checks for new posts to a blog (I use this one), and posts an announcement with a link to the post into my twitter feed, theoretically driving my twitter followers to read my blog post.

You can also do the exact opposite, and use a program like loudtwitter to compile your tweets for the day into one blog post. If you’re like me and find 140 characters to be much less intimidating than A Blog Post, you can keep your blog updated via twitter.

N.B.: don’t use the two above with the same at the same time! You’ll end up with a bizarre compilation post shipped from loudtwitter, as twitterfeed will post your compilation post to twitter as a new post notification.

And that’s not all - there are plenty more ideas on how twitter can be useful as something other than a social community here: http://twitter.pbwiki.com/. Check out how to use twitter as your timesheet reporting application, or how to do event tracking!

You can follow me on twitter here.