

Ask HN: Effective use of Twitter? - tjr

I may be clinging too much to the past, but I have yet to find any particular interest in reading Twitter feeds, and have yet to think of a good way to use one myself.<p>Any folks here have examples, either your own or someone you know, of effective use of Twitter?...  Either for increasing sales/clients/business, or for literary purposes, or whatever?
======
kakooljay
Check out Twitter API: Up and Running:
<http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596154622>

Chapter 1 has a great section called "Creative Uses of Twitter" (& a history
of Twitter). Examples range from breaking news & games like Artwiculate to
organizing protests & flash mobs. Also, Twitter is adding geotagging
[[http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/aug/21/twitter-
goog...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2009/aug/21/twitter-google)], so
you'll soon be able to get feeds for, say, restaurant deals in your area...

------
Travis
My startup has used twitter really effectively the past few months to do a few
things. 1) Drive traffic to our blog, 2) drive people with a need for our
service, to our service

Of course, we're a b2b targeted at engineers / sales guys, so we have a strong
early adopter / seeker basis for our guys. But yeah, we've driven a worthwhile
number of users to our site through judicious (and not even obsessive!) use of
twitter. Even had to write a twitter bookmarklet to manage how we broadcast
everything.

------
chaosprophet
Effective use of twitter??? Keep it blocked. At the least when you're working
on something.

------
seasoup
the best use of twitter I ever made was when i was listening to pandora and it
stopped playing. I tried a few things, figured out it wasn't my network so i
thought that maybe pandora was down. i went on twitter and searched
#pandora... sure enough, 4 posts in the last few minutes that pandora was
down. I added my tweet saying the same thing.

Later, my wife was stuck in a huge traffic jam, i went on twitter and searched
for her location and the word 'accident' and sure enough, up came a link to a
web page detailing why there was such congestion and how far it went.

twitter is good for finding out about something that is happening RIGHT now.

------
yan
effective use of twitter: <http://twitter.com/shitmydadsays>

edit: i'm serious.

~~~
tjr
Not quite my style of reading, but great concept! Thanks!

------
kakooljay
8 great uses:
[http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9118441/8_ways_Twitte...](http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9118441/8_ways_Twitter_will_change_your_life?taxonomyId=11&pageNumber=2)

------
tjr
See also: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881307>

