mStoner Joins the Twitterati

I first heard about Twitter in 2007 when I attended a conference at Stanford. I was one of a very few people in a clearly well-connected crowd of early adopters who hadn’t had extensive experience with the service. And most had quickly grown tired of a massive assault of tweets and had reduced their use considerably or signed off altogether. Hmm, I thought: do I really need to experience this? Do I really need more interruptions in my life? Isn’t the volume of email (not to mention IMs and RSS feeds) I already receive enough to keep up with? And am I not generally interested in more information and more context—the sort of information that doesn’t fit well into 140 characters, the maximum length of a tweet?

I am also skeptical about adopting the latest latest latest of anything. Tracking what’s happening is important. Experimenting is vital. But jumping into unproven technologies and environments is difficult when there are so many other priorities in my life.

I pretty much hadn’t changed my until last fall. It wasn’t just one conversation, but a series of encounters. Karine Joly (@karinejoly) shared her experiences with Twitter when we spoke at the AMA conference in November and urged me to pay closer attention. I did (thanks, Karine!).

When I claimed @mStonerblog, Todd Sanders (@tsand) sent me a greeting. And I’ve learned to pay attention to what Todd’s doing. (Thanks, Todd.)

Finally, if anything convinced me of the value of Twitter, it was watching the conversation unfold during Facebookgate right before Christmas. One of my New Year’s resolutions was to get serious about Twitter in 2009. And I am, starting now. (Thanks, Brad, and lots of other folks!)

At this point, I don’t expect to be sharing too much information about the snow here in Vermont (we had more than a foot yesterday, if you’re interested) or what I made for dinner last night. I will be twittering the kind of information we share here on mStonerblog, though—and sharing stuff that never makes it to the blog because I don’t have time to write a long post about it.

Twitter in Advancement

I’d be totally remiss if I didn’t post about the terrific white paper on Twitter from Alumni Futures. Written by Andy Shaindlin and Liz Allen, “Activating Alumni Networks with Twitter” is a well-written, cogent presentation about how and when to use Twitter in communicating with alumni. It’s well worth reading—and implementing some of the ideas on a trial basis, at least, since the cost of entry is minimal. You can, if you wish, follow Alumni Futures (@alumnifutures) on Twitter as well as on the web.