TourofTexas

thanks to my twitter friend http://twitter.com/bonelessmonkey for this inspiring blog entry and the back pat.

I started bugging my friends and family to join. No takers. “Why am I doing this? What’s the point? *DING* What’s this on my twitter page? A follower? What the Halle Berry!? Who is following me? And Why? Ooooohhhh, this is how it works. People add you. Oh, I’m getting it.” So I checked out my new followers page. Interesting guy. Added him as a friend. “Oh look. He has websites. Let’s check this out.” Blingo. This is where I started realizing the point and beauty of twitter. I checked out my new friend springnet’s site Searchslides.com and lost yet ANOTHER few hours! I really enjoy this site. It’s a “Tag Based interactive slideshow”.
Basically you enter a search term in the google toolbar and it presents the results in a column on the left but displays the site you choose on the right. It’s not a screenshot either. It’s the site encapsulated in the slide. The beauty is you can see the site and use the site and just click on the next result that interests you. So instead of just seeing a few lines of text that may or may not describe the latest content on the site, or if the site actually has anywhere near what you’re looking for, you can just view the site. It’s much more brilliant than my lame description. Check out the screenshot or just go use it. You’ll be hooked I think. Now, it’s not perfect yet. Occasionally it hangs on a search and returns “sorry no results”. ‘What? Google has nothing on PHP?’ But, I just hit enter again and it comes up.

So, this I think is the beauty of twitter. Actually twitter/twittervision. It’s not really about making friends, there’s that side and it’s nice, but the real value is finding people with valuable information to you and having instant access to that info through their twitters. It is very cool and the potential is tremendous.

BonelessMonkey.org » The Point of Twitter.