cubicle17

I’m a relatively new Twitter user; I follow a few people, and they follow me. Everyone knows a little bit about everyone. That’s what I love about Twitter, but that’s not all Twitter is good for.

Pretty quickly after I started tweeting, I began to notice places where Twitter could be truly useful.  Around the office, for example, Twitter could be used to notify people when builds complete, when test runs are successful or when there’s some kind of minor office announcement.  Currently, these notifications all happen through e-mail, and the “noise” is almost more than I can stand. Put to good use in an office environment, Twitter would provide a simple, lightweight and fast way to get this word out. Plus, these notifications wouldn’t be in my inbox, which isn’t where they belong anyway.

Yesterday, while driving home, I thought of another great use for Twitter: local traffic updates. I can use Twitter from my iPhone, so having these kinds of simple traffic updates on my commute home would be perfect. After I get in my car, a new tweet tells me there’s an accident near my usual exit?  Excellent, I’ll just take an earlier exit.

I could go on for days: what if restaurants used Twitter to announce daily specials? what if supermarkets used it to announce sales? what if airports used it to announce flight delays? I love that Twitter lets me keep up with friends and people I barely know, but there is a huge potential for Twitter beyond just answering the “what am I doing?” question; now I’m waiting for someone to leverage it.