I have just created a twitter account. You can now follow me at: http://twitter.com/#!/dalloliogm
I tried to resist joining Twitter for a long time, but now I need it to participate to a spare-time project of mine. I recognize that twitter can be a very useful tool for a researcher, but I am worried that it can be too intrusive and distract me too much.
Do you have any suggestions for a new twitter user? Which software (on Ubuntu) do you use to check the feeds? Which groups would you recommend to a bioinformatician?
I have just created a twitter account. You can now follow me at: http://twitter.com/#!/dalloliogm
I tried to resist joining Twitter for a long time, but now I need it to participate to a project of mine. I recognize that twitter can be a very useful tool for a researcher, but I am worried that it can be too intrusive and distract me too much.
Do you have any suggestions for a new twitter user? Which software (on Ubuntu) do you use to check the feeds? Which groups would you recommend to a bioinformatician?
Suggestions: try to make every tweet a useful tweet. For me, this means broadcasting some information (a URL) or asking a question. Try to avoid trivial tweets such as “Having lunch!” I mean, who cares?
Software: there are lots of clients, you’ll have to find the one that suits you best. A lot of them are Adobe AIR based, which I personally don’t like much for Ubuntu. I’ve used a bunch of GUI clients from the Ubuntu repository but to be honest, the Twitter website or Seesmic web work well for me; I also use Twittering mode for Emacs. You might want something with filters.
Groups/people: there are a lot of great bioinformatics people on Twitter. Follow them, see who they follow, follow some of those. Twitter is very much about who you follow – then in theory, you see only (or mostly) the interesting stuff. Otherwise it’s just noise.
Thank you very much Neil. I promise I won’t use it for anything personal, like ‘going to the toilet’ or ‘going to sleep’ 🙂
Too bad I am on the vim-dark side of the road. I think that the web interface will be fine for me, for now.
Thank you very much for all the comments 🙂
OMG! It’s like you understand my mind! You seem to know so much about this, just like you wrote the book in it or something. I think that you could do with some pics to drive the message home a bit, besides that, this is great blog. A outstanding read. I’l