Saving Time with Twitter

Sunday, August 23rd, 2009 Blog by Orange County Design

Hate the Twitter?  Never gonna tweet?  No worries.  It’s understandable.  It’s hard enough to keep up with email, Facebook, and your RSS reader.  Not to mention actual snail mail, faxes and god forbid an actual phone call!  Where could Twitter possibly fit?   The answer is it fits into time you’d spend looking through search engines because the other side of Twitter is Twitter Search and anyone can tap in and take the pulse of the literally millions of Twitter users.  It’s known as a social search and it has a few advantages over traditional search engines such as:

• · Relatively real time content creation
• · Opinions are less likely to be marketing messages (although this changing somewhat)
• · Better for trend watching

I find myself using it when looking for recommendations off the beaten path.   Instead of relying on movie reviews I can get a quick sense of a movie from a  Twitter Search .  Hollywood isn’t so happy about this by the way.  Apparently it’s helping movie goers weed out the flops faster. That could save you time misspent on the wrong movie at the theater or about $14!

It’s also a great way to ask the universe for help although you’ll need an account for that.

One final tip for Twitter use in Orange County.  The hash tag “#” for Orange County, California is #tworco. A search for #tworco will reveal users here in our own backyard.  And you may just find yourself getting pulled in to the “community” that is Orange County on Twitter.

You can find me on Twitter at @briangerry if you have an account and twitter.com/briangerry if not.