So I’ve been on Twitter for a few weeks now, and I finally feel like I’m able to synthesize my thoughts about the service.

As far as my usage goes, I’m kind of using it like an interactive RSS feed.  To me, RSS feeds have always felt a bit like television; the content is coming at you, but you have no way to respond.  Whereas with Twitter, not only are you able to interact with news sources and makers, but you can also communicate with people who share an interest in similar subjects and topics.  Right now, I have Twitterrific up and running on my computer, which allows me to pull down tweets and respond with relative ease.

I particularly like how Twitter let’s me keep track of interesting articles from my favorite sources (New York Times, Wired, Ars Technica, etc.).  Now this type of article aggregation can be accomplished with RSS feeds, sure.  But with Twitter, I can re-share articles and information I find particularly interesting with my followers or specific people, something that RSS wasn’t designed to do.

The other experience that convinced me of Twitter’s usefulness takes the form of the following anecdote.  A few days ago, I was trying to play a Wii game, when an error message popped up.  This normally wouldn’t be a problem, but unfortunately my Wii is from Japan, and the error message came up in Japanese.  I couldn’t find anyone to translate, so as a last ditch effort, I took a picture of the error message and threw it up on Twitter. I ended up hash tagging “Japanese” in my tweet so it was searchable for anyone also looking for tweets regarding Japanese.  Within 15 minutes, someone fluent in Japanese responded to me with a translation of the error screen, and I was able to resolve the problem.

Overall, my Twitter experience has been great.  My only real complaint about the service are the number of spam followers you end up getting.  I made the mistake of posting my Twitter URL here, which gave me a deluge of spam followers until I removed it.  And until I decide to get a smart phone, I can’t really make use of Twitter’s on the go features.  These things aside, I’m looking forward to using Twitter, and seeing how it develops.

Even if you’re not into updating daily, I’d still recommend signing up for Twitter for the reasons listed above.  And if you do so, make sure to follow me, and I’ll do my best to sling interesting content your way.