The thing about Twitter is this… It’s excellent for getting information out there immediately. It’s horrible for finding that information in the future.

As an example, I live in Manhattan, NYC. A crane fell over about a mile from my house and smashed some buildings and killed a few people, and I found out about it because someone that lives nowhere near here twittered about it. ASSUMING I would have had a television on and tuned to channels that report the news instead of cable movie stations, I would have heard about it way later.

Similarly, a bridge collapsed in like Wisconsin or something like that. I knew about it before it hit CNN for the same reason. Someone local to the issue twittered about it and their followers got the information immediately.

You also have to know how to USE Twitter. You have to know when to DM and when to @reply someone, and why.

Twitter is an excellent one-to-many tool for getting information to people. I wrote more about it in June, 2007 in “Twitter Has ‘Ruined’ My Life” if you’re interested.

We use our blog as a means to share with friends & family who’re spread all over the country. But I also use it as a braindump sometimes – a place where to stick info that I’d want to refer back to at some point. My computer might go belly up (again) but the cloud is always out there…

That’s another good point. If what you have to say can’t be properly expressed or explained in 140 characters, you have to put it somewhere else. You could still microblog on Tumblr, but I still think people look for more in-depth material outside of microblogging sites.

On top of that, If I Google “billcammack twitter” I don’t get anything useful at all. It lists my actual twitter “home page”, which takes you to the CURRENT state of my account.

Sure, you could try to use twitter search, except you’d have to know exactly the words you’re looking for. I just did a search on “billcammack joost” and got ZERO results, when I know damned well that I’ve posted about Joost in the past on twitter.

And you can still “for now” your “for later” posts by posting links from twitter to your blog posts.

Done Deal. :D