Many of my friends have questioned my use of Twitter, not seeing the point in "knowing what my other friends are doing, what time train they are on and when the y are going to bed". So I thought I'd put my spin on it even if it similar to an already established view.

So although knowing someone is going to bed now is not the best example of a useful twitter it does radiate information you might not else have known. I now may have an idea of what time that person is going to bed and thus I may choose to get my phonecalls to him or her before that time so as not to bug them. However this silly example aside, there are many more useful tweets that may be pushed your way, even if at first glance they are not what they seem.

For example say I get a tweet "X is off to see Les Miserables." At first glance this may not seem very interesting, but come the time I want to see Les Miserables I expect I will have made that connection mentally and I will be contacting to X to see if it's worth an evening of my time. Other information they transmit are location, state of mind, interests, knowledge, that is not obstrusive but sometimes useful.

For instance if a friend I haven't seen in a while tweets that he is in a certain location that is 5 miles away from me, if I'm doing nothing that friend may expect a call from me in a few minutes to see if he's free for a coffee. It's a powerful tool.

In the work environment it's even better. My previous team used an internal product to keep people updated on their statuses and through it I had a greater awareness of that fabled "big picture". Suddenly I got an idea of how often our program director was showing off our product to customers, I got an idea of what work was on the horizon and I got an idea of the problems my team members were facing and a platform to raise problems I was facing. In a big team, if I encountered a problem, despite the vast sea of big heads in my organisation it could be hard to find the right person to raise that problem to in hope of a solution, short of ringing everyone individually and seeing if they knew how to fix the problem. However with status messages I usually found the answers came to me.

So, tweet and get the world to tweet with you. I think your be surprised..