I continue to have an on and off relationship with Twitter. It’s been fun to talk with other developers and reach people directly, but a huge part of the network is sorting through the signal-to-noise echo chamber. It doesn’t make sense to sit on Twitter all day trying to respond to everything; work needs to be done too!
Then there’s my reading. I read a lot. And I run into all kinds of cool stuff I want to share, and Twitter is the most natural place to share it, but of course that always ends up with Saturdays where I dump four dozen links in the span of a few hours… I hate it when other people do that, so rather than spamming everyone who follows me I’ve pretty much stopped sharing.
Until now.
Buffer to Spread Around the Outbursts
I found an app called Buffer (bufferapp.com) that sits in front of your twitter account and collects your tweets into a “buffer”, then sends them out on a schedule. So you can have a backlog of messages filter out slowly over a day instead of shoving them all out at once.
So my workflow with Twitter now is to monitor it (using Growl, of course) and have conversations where I can. I’ve met some incredible people using Twitter and made more than a few fun connections, and hope to keep building that over time. Whenever I read something interesting I’ll drop it into Buffer, and anyone who is interested can see those links without getting spammed all at once. I think it’s win-win.
Present in More Time Zones
At first night times were lonely when I came out west, since 9pm for me is midnight for friends back home, it got pretty quiet fast. I’ve since made more friends on the west coast, but I came away with a fresh appreciation of how easy it is to get disconnected from our core tribes because of time zones.
Since I started using Buffer I’ve noticed more activity from my contacts in Europe and Australia. Of course I’m asleep when Buffer sends out one of my stored tweets at 3am, but sometimes it’s sparked conversations I’m able to pick up when I wake up in the morning. Although there is a high latency in those communications, I feel more connected than ever to some old friends who I might not have otherwise interacted with so frequently.
In the End, Connections Matter Most
The strongest takeaway theme that seems to be cropping up again and again lately has been the difference between technology and communication. It’s very easy, especially coming from a technical background, to fall in love with a design, a language, a piece of software. The magic comes from the conversations that get enabled by these advances. There’s no reason to put up a web site or build an application if it doesn’t solve some problem – if we build something for the sake of doing it, are we building something that will last?
