How do I use Twitter?

I saw a post this week about why Twitter did a re-design and it had a lot to do with drawing in new users and making it more useful. It got me thinking about how I use Twitter and the ways that I explain it to non-users that ask me about it. Pretty frequently I hear the “I don’t get it” response when I mention that I use it a lot.

First, I rarely use the Twitter website. Ever since they removed their ‘retweet with comment’ feature I virtually never log in on the actual site. It’s not that I use that feature ALL the time, but I LIKED that option more than probably anything else they had going for them. So Twitter, if you’re listening, for the love of all that’s holy or if you’re planning to monetize your site, BRING IT BACK.

For that reason I use a client on my phone (I rarely check Twitter from a computer, in no small part because there was no way to do it from my last job but mostly because having it on my phone is really handy. Ha! Pun!). I’ve been using TweetDeck for probably a year and while I liked it, there were a couple of annoyance factors. The biggest one is viewing favorite tweets. I tend to favorite tweets that have links so that I can read them later on a computer or just generally use as a ‘read later’ option. Tweetdeck made it hard to get at the favorite tweets.

This week I switched to Tweetcaster, which has a pretty nifty and modern-looking UI. It also has a column for favorite tweets, lets you choose which services you want to use for url shortening and twitter photos and – best of all – when you click a link you can open it or READ LATER. Love it.

All of this brings me around to how I actually USE twitter. Twitter is part of how I keep track of what’s going on in the world during the day. The Denver Post is my news tweeter of choice, but I’ve got a couple of other newsfolk on there. It’s also my brain break- I’ve got NPR music, a bunch of authors and comedians, bloggers and real life and internet friends. Television Without Pity takes care of my tv snark tweets and a couple of my favorite podcasters are on there not just for jokes but because they also tell me when their new stuff is up.

Personally, I tweet about a bunch of random shit. Books I’m reading or have read, TV shows I’m watching, music I’m listening to at any given moment, movies or, frankly, any damn thing that crosses my mind. Reading my twitter stream at any point will give you a pretty good idea of who I am, so I think – at least the way I do it = it really is microblogging. I’ve gotten great book, music and film recommendations on there. I’ve had really entertaining meme interactions. I’ve also had good conversations about a variety of subjects and gotten great restaurant tips.

Twitter is like the planet’s stream of consciousness and for that reason alone, I think it’s cool.