I’ve read so much about Twitter lately that I decided it’s time to give it another shot. Today I logged onto Twitter, had it search for people in my Outlook address book who are members, and fellow HOWie Von Glitschka (illustrator extraordinaire) turned out to be a Twitterer. So I clicked "follow" and he wrote me back and became a follower of mine– kind of exciting!

Then I looked at Von’s list of people he followers, found a lot of other designers and illustrators on there, so I clicked "follow" next to the ones who had tweets that looked interesting. Some of them decided to follow me, so my number of followers went from 1 to 7. I feel so popular! (Von has 620 followers.)

So I decided to try to tweet some questions about how best to use Twitter, and what exactly other designers use it for. Several people wrote me back– they said "think of it as a water cooler" and an "archive for random thoughts that others can read". Von said that he sees it as "viral marketing" and said he recently got a design gig with Adobe through Twitter.

Cartoonist George Coghill (whom I found through Von’s followed list) recommended that  I download a desktop application to use Twitter, because doing it from the website is a bit of a pain. So I found a very nice free desktop app called Twhirl and loaded it up. I also added the BeTWittered gadget to my iGoogle home page (see above for screencapture). Here’s what Twhirl looks like:

You can read, reply, and manage everything through Twhirl. It sits on your desktop, and pops up a small notification at the bottom of the screen whenever a new tweet comes in. (I’m betting you could turn that off.)

Twhirl also lets you change long URLs into short ones using Snurl so that when you add a link to your tweet, it doesn’t eat up a lot of your limited space. (It also lets you use a couple of other services, but Snurl makes the shortest links.)

One very cool thing I discovered in Twhirl is that you can search for tweets about specific subjects. I searched for information on InDesign and it found a bunch of tweets on the subject. I then decided to follow some of those people who were tweeting about InDesign (the layout program I spend most of my day using):

I’m going to try to use twitter for the rest of this month and see how it goes. Already I’m kind of seeing the appeal: you can converse with other people in your field, and read interactions between them. Scanning down the list of tweets gives you a little snapshot of what other people like you are working on. If you want advice, or want to offer advice or ask someone a question, it’s super easy. And the fact that the maximum size limit is 140 characters means that you don’t have to spend much time reading or writing. It’s kind of fun to have that restriction, actually– it forces you to get right to the point.

I’ve even added my Twitter feed on this blog, just to give you a glimpse of the sorts of things I’m working on or writing about.

So… if you happen to be interested enough after this post to try Twitter for yourself, follow me and I’ll follow you!