Twitter

Well, another new experience to report on. I have looked at a few Twitter feeds before, but have always found them quite difficult to follow, what with all the snippets of conversations and # tags etc. I must admit, having now begun to tweet myself for the first time, I'm still finding it a bit confusing - every tweet posted by others offers an opportunity to branch out somewhere else, following link after link until you are miles from where you began! It feels like I've wandered into a labyrinth! I realise that this is what the internet is like generally, but Twitter just feels even more tentacled and fragmented. I suppose I'll get the hang of it eventually. Here are my baby steps into this world. Not much to say for myself yet really, but it's early days.
So, having set up my account and linked the feed to this blog, I then looked for feeds to follow. I began by adding sensible book or library related Twitter feeds like Guardian Books and  CILIP info , only to loose focus a bit and meander into adding feeds like Zombie Apocalypse! This latter is partly because I came across a mention of the brilliant Library of the Living Dead guide on Annie's blog and partly because I've got a bit of a weakness for zombie related material. I wish our next library guide could feature zombies!
Having looked at some of the examples of libraries using Twitter, I can see that it does offer a brilliant and concise means of communicating with users, and of providing them with up to the minute information. I can also see that maintaining a truly responsive and useful feed could take up an awful lot of time.
As extras, I tried out Bit.ly which is a great little tool, and I've signed up for Twitterfeed so that even if I don't get around to tweeting very much, my feed will at least be populated by updates to my blog.