doug wick

If you were living in the early 1900′s and someone handed you one of the first telephones, I’d bet you stare blankly at that person and say “now how would I use this?”

You’d be so used to communicating by letter, telegraph, or simply in person that you wouldn’t really know how to get any value out of a phone. That is, until you called someone. Then you might realize that there are tremendous opportunities for getting value out of a phone.

I often describe Twitter in the same way. Earlier I blogged about Why It Matters, and I still think bringing the publish:subscribe model to human communication systems will be revolutionary in its own right – whether that communication happens at twitter.com or on some other service.

But for now, people use Twitter in hundreds of different ways and everyone has constructed their own individual value proposition for using it. I use it to track my professional network and my local Austin network. It’s my virtual business card. I think it’s a great way to organize your deep network (the people you don’t know as well and don’t share as much with as your Facebook network).

I’d encourage you to pick up “the phone” and see how you can make Twitter valuable for you.