First of all, I need a good recipe for crow. When I wrote this, I was clearly, um, not completely correct. Twitter is good for things. In fact, the interwebs are et up with great uses for Twitter. But here are a few I really like:
1. Engaging interesting people. When I have some time, I like to peruse our newest followers, pick out a particularly interesting one, and engage them about what they are up to. Like, last week, I (we) had a really fun conversation with a musician from Hawaii, about concept albums, choral music, loop boxes, and time travel. If the chemistry is there, you can have a really quippy conversation, in 140-word bites, that can also be pretty insightful. We're talking truly small talk.
2. Shoutouts. People like to be noticed for good things they do, say, and stand for. A Twitter shout-out is a pretty effortless way to praise someone in public. A little hint I got from one of the pile of articles, full of mostly-obvious-but-occasionally-useful bits and pieces is this: a personal tweet beginning with @ will only go to the person you are tweeting and to your common followers. But if you start that same tweet with something else, a period for example, it will go to ALL of their followers. So, if you want to say something nice about somebody, and you want all their friends and family to hear it, precede the @ with a dot. And if you don't want to say something nice about somebody, come sit by me (see video at the top of the post).
3. Screaming into space. Discovered something very interesting. Unlike other social platforms, you can just say something provocative, just to get it off your chest. Once it's out there, it may or may not get a reaction. Once in a while, your barbaric yelp resonates with some hidden psychograpic in the tweetisphere, and it gets favorited...even retweeted. That's really cool.
Now, these are not particularly strategic uses for Twitter. There is a lot written on that. But every single one of these is great for feeling good, making friends, making friends feel good. And, as Sean Penn says in We're No Angels, "...that ain't so bad."
Now, go tweet. Be happy. Make somebody feel good. Make somebody's day. Be a human.
