You also have sites like woot.com who announce when a new product is posted to their site and when that product is sold out. During a woot-off it’s especially useful.

Of course this assumes that Twitters servers are relatively stable. If you’ve used Twitter for any period of time, you know this is the furthest from the truth. When you get thousands of people Twittering about the Steve Jobs keynote at WWDC, Twitter dies. Hard. After the keynote is over and the smoke has cleared, Twitter will resurrect.

Then there’s the case of the missing replies but that’s just being picky. Oh the joys of Twitter!

Then there’s another breed of Twitter users that I simply cannot stand. The type who post completely irrelevant information that no one on the Internet — save perhaps stalkers — care to know. Posts like “eating lunch”, “going to bed”, “good morning!”, “i can’t find my hair brush”, etc. Now I’m not condemning them. They can use Twitter however they feel. They’re just the type of people I have no interest in following and I remove them rather quickly.

There are some people I really enjoy following like John Resig (jresig) who almost always posts relevant content that I care to read. Joshua Allen (fireland) is so screwed up and off-the-wall but his writing is hilarious — sometimes offensively funny, but still funny.

I think asking the users the question “What are you doing?” leads to irrelevant content. No one really cares what you’re doing unless you’re working on regenerative medicine to regrow human limbs or you just discovered life on another planet.

If I keep my content focused on what I think people actually care to hear, I think it’s a more productive use of the Twitter service.

Good luck in your Twitter endeavor!

Both of your skepticisms are totally reasonable, but both are issues of critical mass, right? Tools like facebook or even the blogosphere wouldn’t be useful or interesting if no one used them either, and internet time is fast, but not instantaneous. I hope you won’t give up Twitter or declare it useless just because you are one of the first in your area/group of friends.

My suspicion was confirmed that new users aren’t prompted for their location–instead it’s buried in Settings. So easy to change and yet so hard to make people do (even though geography is actually one of the more important aspects of Twitter). Only about half of my librarian friends have entered a location and those are the LIBRARIANS. It is well known among archivists that user-generated metadata is a huge uphill battle, but facebook doesn’t seem to have a problem–how can Twitter encourage its users to make it more useful for themselves? Anyway, I don’t know what kinds of users you are looking for, but I suspect there are more, and maybe lots more, in your area that just haven’t bothered to enter their location. I hope you find them!

Yesterday, for example, I basically live-blogged a local Bill Clinton event for our paper’s Web site and managed to get off some Twitter updates throughout the night… My managing editor, who followed me to Wired Journalists and Twitter, even gave me some kudos and mentioned my work for our site AND Twitter in our daily memo as examples of the type of coverage we should be looking to provide. I bet half the newsroom, including my immediate editor who wasn’t watching Twitter, were scratching their heads about it.

Re: Improving your real-life friendships. Use the facebook twitter app to push your status updates to facebook. I never update my status on facebook anymore, yet everyone from my siblings back home to my college professors to my friends thousands of miles away knows what I’m up to and what type of day I’m having because they can read my twitter updates there. This has also caused several of them to create their own twitter account to do the same.

I didn’t go looking for locals, but several locals found me. It helps that we have a major research university here with tech-savvy people. But one of my followers, and one whom I interact with on Twitter pretty frequently — including across the gym during the Clinton event — is a city council member, whom I had never met until after we were following each others tweets.

To start, try searching for your key areas/topics at http://twitdir.com/index.php?search=Hershey%2C+PA or for updates near you at http://www.twitterlocal.net/

Here’s the best list/resource for journalism on Twitter I’ve seen yet: http://www.newmediabytes.com/2008/01/18/best-twitter-tools-resources-and-clients-guide/

GOOD LUCK!

It is weird. I have real life friends, internet friends, and a few that bridge the gap. I guess it is because the Social/New Media scene in our area is so dead, the social embrace you are looking for doesn’t actually happen.

Twitter does have many useful purposes, and I hope you enjoy them. I update my family and friends every time I post. For instance, I was n the hospital a few weeks ago awaiting the birth of my second son. I twittered from the hallway before I went in to the OR (Caesarian). My friends in Boston saw the tweets and it brightened their day. Boston is a town that really embraces Social media. I was there in October for Podcamp Boston 2. Twitter was such a useful tool that whole weekend. People would tweet about different sessions going on or where a gathering for food was going. It’s a great way to stay in touch that I totally embrace. I didn’t quite get it until I really was using it for a while.

Good luck with your twitter experiment. Hopefully soon the midstate will embrace new technology like this.