Ask HN: How do you use Twitter?

[paraschopra]

I have been trying to get what Twitter is about and trying to make effective use it. Currently I use it (via TweetDeck) to be aware of happenings in areas of web analytics, conversion optimization and split testing and indeed find it very helpful to keep on top on industry happenings. I also instantly reply to people, which helps me connect.

Just wondering how HNers make use of Twitter, if at all? Any specific use cases that you find helpful?

[catch404]

Don't use it anymore, but used it for a while to follow some people im interested in as well as a quick jott padd for remembering links or looking back on. For the later I found the sites that pdf your history very useful.

[spokey → catch404]

"Sites that pdf your history"? Can you say more about this, I'm not sure what you mean. Sites that export your browser history to a PDF document?

[catch404 → spokey]

Sorry, I was referring to the twitter exporters :)

[chaosprophet]

Initially, I didn't have any use case for Twitter. But since people seemed to be talking about it, I forced myself to stick to it for about a month. At the end of that month i still hadn't grown to like it so I ditched it. I didn't delete the account though.

Right now, I use Twitter as a means of logging into various services (such as Disqus) and as a search tool. This morning Thunderbird wouldn't connect to Gmail's POP servers. A quick twitter search told me Gmail's POP servers were down. That's pretty much the only use I find for Twitter.

[chanux]

It brings stuff from people I like to hear from.

Anyway "Twitter is what you make out of it".

[joezydeco]

I'm using Twitter as a link recorder. I modified a Python-based bot to scrape links off an IRC channel and publish them on a private twitter feed that only my friends from that channel can see.

[davidw]

1) Seeing what people are saying about my stuff or stuff I care about.

2) Promoting my stuff.