#LostonTwitter

Forgetting about trying to find a useful hash tag to follow I went on tonight to try and find some useful searches to get good information.  I tried a few like #edtech and #education as logical searches.  #education was too broad, with results showing everything from things about alcohol education, to kindergarten trips, to even teacher’s strikes.  #edtech showed more useful results but not anywhere near as often of updates from the tweeters.  Trying to figure out what a better idea of what is out there I tried to search for some of my favorite current entertainment activities.  I searched for #halo and I got maybe 1 in 50 legit tweets while the rest were all spam for “Get a Free Xbox by following this link and re-tweeting”.  Pages and pages of worthless posts.  I then tried to search for #Smallville as it was on TV.  I saw a lot of personal tweets about people counting down till show time and making their comments about the show.  But I still felt more like I was eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, not some thing that I wouldn’t take part in or could sort out.  It was like all the birds on the phone line talking at the same time and you are trying to sort out each voice.

I’m not certain how best to use this tool.  I tend to follow, or at least read, more business style tweets then I do personal ones.  Whether it’s a quick announcement from Harmonix about what tracks are coming out for Rockband next week, to what products Wizards of the Coast is releasing and getting lots of reviews on, it is stuff that I want to know about.  Most important though it does one thing that I really, REALLY, like that email doesn’t, I have to open the tweet thread to see what is happening, not having it dumped into my inbox.  And unfollowing something I deem is spamming me is easy and removes ALL the crap I didn’t want to see.