I joined twitter one and a half years ago, after having a hand written RSS feed for years. And gosh, I did not have the slightest idea to what kind of journey I was embarking! While my handwritten feed was limited to published papers, I soon learned to love the social aspect of twitter. At a sudden, folks would react to my news posts, like when Kent Beck contacted me regarding the code maps of JUnit. However, I have to admit that since the user explosion in 2009, twitter has become much less personal.
One of the success factors of twitter is that everyone can (and has to) find its personal usage model.
Here is how I use twitter for me and my research:
One of my motivations is to "maximize the value of your keystrokes". For example, whenever I recommend a paper to a friend in private, I repeat this on twitter, etc. I first read of this on Jeff Atwood's blog, but I guess the idea goes back to Jon Udell.
Often however, we cannot maximize our keystrokes because research 1.0 does not allow us to do so (or at least we fear that we cannot do so). In these cases I try to find solutions like publishing the wordle cloud of a paper under submission, which I have seen first being done on Tom Zimmermann's blog.
A nice use case of twitter is to follow the hashtag of a conference. Alas most sci conference do not have good coverage (or none at all). There is e.g. not much point in tweeting from a talk without mentioning the speaker! In my experience technology and software conference get better coverage than research conference, but things started to change (see eg the recent MODELS/GPCE conference, or the GTTSE sommer school).
Of course, I also follow other researchers as well as practitioners (hey, the whole C2 crowd again united in one place!) Alas, since twitter broke replies, its much harder to stumble upon new folks.
Creating twitter accounts for your research projects. Both of my current projects (jexample and codemap) have their own twitter account. I did this after reading about the awesome success of the mars phoenix account by one NASA engineer, but stopped to blog in first person as if being the project after some time.
In the beginning the project accounts were limited to updates and communication with users, but over time I started to post anything related to the project's topic that I'd stumple upon (maximize the value of your keystrokes, again). One of the downsides that I see with splitting off these two accounts is that folks that visit my main account will not learn about my major fields of research, which I try to relax with occasional retweets.
Some folks in our lab use the feed of their research project to post all SVN commit message. I am unsure about this practice, putting unfiltered streams from other sources on twitter does not seem to live up the full potential of this platform.
Recently I created a twitter account for a lecture that I coach as teaching assistant. I cannot yet tell where this leads, the lecture starts in February. However, I have used a blog in the last years and I assume it will lead me in a similar direction, ie posting links to additional reading material as well as useful tools and Eclipse plugins.
Lukas uses twitter as well in the current software engineering lecture. However, his use is very specific to that lecture since the students are building a twitter client, and thus not suitable for other lectures.
I also created an account for our upcoming ICSE workshop on software search engines (suite2010), but again I cannot yet tell where this will lead. We will certainly find better use than just posting deadlines...
Over time, my whole research group joined twitter as well, including Oscar. Most of them joined after I told them about maximizing keystrokes and how awesome following a conference is. (In the meantime, I even stopped being the most active twitterer in the group.) We found that the recent twitter list feature is a great way to present your research group on twitter. We created a new account for the group including lists for staff, alumni, students, projects, etc.
See you on twitter :)
