Twitter and me.

We're great mates. We go back a year ago, and our friendship has blossomed as time has gone on.

I was listening to Bill Boorman and the crew from his Ready for Liftoff radio show, and they were talking about Twitter for learning. They were looking at this from a different perspective to me. They were talking about running training courses using Social Media. Honestly that didn't interest me that much, even though I've flirted with the idea of potentially using Second Life to run virtual training events.

However, Twitter and Training go hand in hand for me. I'm talking my training, my own personal development. Who would have thought, my daily dose of training 140 characters at a time.

When I initially joined Twitter, I had no idea what I was going to do with this weirdly named device, which did something called "micro-blogging", I'd only just got my head around Blogging, blogging. What could I possibly do in 140 Characters? I lurked, I followed/connected to Recruiting legends, up and comers, people I knew of and people who just have damn good ideas. They all knew people, who knew people, who knew people etc etc etc. They all tweeted, they all re-tweeted each others messages, which mashed up quotes (which annoy me), statements, quotes, linked to blogs and engaged in debate/discussion.

I was seduced to engage, to add my 2 cents to conversations, and connected with more people. My network grew, let's be honest, my network of followers v followees is not big in global Twitter terms, but it adds value to me.

I've been exposed to more information with Social media than I had for all my years of experience before I caught the wave. Twitter makes it even more accessible.

It's always going, people are tweeting 24/7, so I'm getting information from UK, US, Australia, Asia etc, no matter when I check in.

That said, you can over do it. You can be distracted by the beeping of your tweetdeck, the allure of messages, witty comments or conversations you must be part of. Your day can disappear, from what you are paid to do to, to finding out what else is going on. You must be disciplined about it and only Tweet when the tweeting is good.